Data Handling Quotes & Sayings

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity. — Noam Chomsky

Note that master-follower databases are not distributed: every machine has a full copy of the dataset. Master-follower replication is great for scaling up the processing power available for handling read requests, but does nothing to accommodate arbitrarily large datasets. Master-follower replication also provides some resilience against machine failure: in particular, failure of a machine will not result in data loss, since other machines have a full copy of the same dataset. — Mat Brown

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today. — J. C. R. Licklider

Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact ... but it needs light from heaven above to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student is accustomed to seeing. — Arthur Koestler

That so far the material has been dealt with in a rather subjective way provokes the question whether a means can be found of handling it objectively. [...] This chapter considers the applicability of the statistical tests employed by Wilson and the general problem whether the Linear B data are suited to statistical analysis. — Jennifer K. McArthur