Data That Quotes & Sayings

The authors, academics from Northeastern University, Harvard University, and the University of Houston, concluded that Google Flu Trends had wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States for more than two years. The article, "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis," concluded that the errors were, at least in part, due to the decisions made by GFT engineers about what to include in their models - mistakes the academics dubbed "algorithmic dynamics" and "big data hubris. — Clayton M Christensen

The USA Freedom Act does not propose that we abandon any and all efforts to analyze telephone data, what we're talking about here is a program that currently contemplates the collection of all data just as a routine matter and the aggregation of all that data in one database. That causes concerns for a lot of people ... There's a lot of potential for abuse. — Mike Lee

For his part, Mendeleev scanned Lecoq de Boisbaudran's data on gallium and told the experimentalist, with no justification, that he must have measured something wrong, because the density and weight of gallium differed from Mendeleev's predictions. This betrays a flabbergasting amount of gall, but as science philosopher-historian Eric Scerri put it, Mendeleev always "was willing to bend nature to fit his grand philosophical scheme." The only difference between Mendeleev and crackpottery is that Mendeleev was right: Lecoq de Boisbaudran soon retracted his data and published results that corroborated Mendeleev's predictions. — Sam Kean

Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change. — Judith Curry

There's a whole company called Palantir that does nothing but derive and create algorithms riches to search through big data. We're not using their capabilities. For heaven's sake, some of this is just ineptitude. — Carly Fiorina

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us. — Douglas Rushkoff

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data. — John Tukey

We saw that our customers required help beyond the data sets they had and that they could benefit from a wider opinion. So we built SurveyMonkey Audience, and we've now got 4 million users who signed up to take surveys. Our clients can choose the demographic they want to hear from, and we can provide that sample. — Dave Goldberg

The Quantified Self movement argues that the self is nothing but mathematical patterns. These patterns are so complex that the human mind has no chance of understanding them. So if you wish to obey the old adage and know thyself, you should not waste your time on philosophy, meditation or psychoanalysis, but rather you should systematically collect biometric data and allow algorithms to analyse them for you and tell you who your are and what you should do. — Yuval Noah Harari

Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets. — Francis Crick

As we have seen in the data, resentment against the West comes from what Muslims perceive as the West's hatred and denigration of Islam; the Western belief that Arabs and Muslims are inferior,; and their fear of Western intervention, domination, or occupation. (p. 141) — John L. Esposito

Reaction is just that - an action you have taken before. When you "re-act," what you do is assess the incoming data, search your memory bank for the same or nearly the same experience, and act the way you did before. This is all the work of the mind, not of your soul. — Neale Donald Walsch

The JFK assassination itself has been dissected to pieces by obsessed
researchers like me. Suffice to say that a few days of intense study of the
available record will convince any honest person, beyond any reasonable
doubt, that Lee Harvey Oswald was not responsible for the crime. The coverup
was so clear and obvious in nature, and so shabbily constructed, that the
conclusion is inescapable that the conspirators who killed him wanted the
kind of controversy that soon exploded, shortly after the first wave of private
citizens began to look at the data. — Donald Jeffries

It's clear that North took some original steps in that direction, but Hall probably had the most complete approach and should get the most credit. But for Hall, unfortunately, the data are all impressionistic - what people said. None of his machinery survived. His patents were all lost in the Patent Office fire. — Charles R. Morris

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats. — Don DeLillo

Daily life is an ongoing adaptation process of imprinting our memory's storage center with useful data and the ceaseless expurgation of undesirable facts, exfoliation of destructive thoughts, and weeding out annoying emotional quirks that seemingly sprout out of thin air. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Data matters. It's the very essence of what we care about. Personal data is not equivalent to a real person - it's much better. It takes no space, costs almost nothing to maintain, lasts forever, and is far easier to replicate and transport. Data is worth more than its weight in gold - certainly so, since data weighs nothing; it has no mass. Data about a person is not as valuable as the person, but since the data is so much cheaper to manage, it's a far better investment. Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, points out that a user's data can be purchased for about half a cent, but the average user's value to the Internet advertising ecosystem is estimated at $1,200 per year. Data's value - its power, its meaning - is the very thing that also makes it sensitive. The more data, the more power. The more powerful the data, the more sensitive. So the tension we're feeling is unavoidable. — Eric Siegel

Methods like this act as "factories" in that they take raw materials (such as row data, for example, or
configuration information) and use them to produce objects. The term factory is applied to code
designed to generate object instances. — Matt Zandstra

Rule 1. Original data should be presented in a way that will preserve the evidence in the original data for all the predictions assumed to be useful. — Walter A. Shewhart

It's time to wake up to the fact that you're just another avatar in someone else's MMO. Worse: From where they stand, all-powerful Big Data analysts that they are, you look an awful lot like a bot. — Raph Koster

When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing. — John Battelle

More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world
a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward ...
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.
And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good. — Barack Obama

One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing
being a data bank
and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book. — Peter Greenaway

Companies that actually survive and flourish are going to change their business model from production to aggregating the networks and the network services and solutions. If you're a construction company or an IT company or a logistics company or an information data operation, to the extent that you can find ways to help build the commons, you can get some commercial value in that. — Jeremy Rifkin

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. — Stephen Jay Gould

What's needed now are software technologies that interconnect computing systems, people and data to produce more rapid answers to the questions of science, and to help researchers use computation in the most effective manner. — Bob Muglia

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans. — Ralph Nader

Ninety percent of all the data in the world has been produced in the last two years. Six thousand YouTube videos are posted a minute - and that figure was computed in 2011; by now there's probably not a number high enough to convey how overwhelming it all is. Here's another cocktail party statistic: The amount of information we generate every two days is equal to the amount produced from the beginning of civilization until 2003. That factoid comes from Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google, so you can partly blame him for all your mental clutter. — Patty Marx

Part of what we're trying to do is lay out what really happened. For example, I've been trying to get across that the intelligence leadership did not just keep the country in the dark. They actively misled the country on key issues. When you have someone who heads the NSA saying we don't hold data at all on US citizens, that's one of the most misleading statements I believe that's ever been made about surveillance policy. And I think that now we're starting to get that message across. — Ron Wyden

While the official productivity data look impressive, alternative measures that are equally reasonable show a much more subdued picture. — Jan Hatzius

In the United States there's an optimistic expectation that most people will remain faithful to their partner, but actual data show great numbers of people will not. — Aziz Ansari

scaremongers - who unquestioningly champion anecdotal data, while meticulously examining every large, carefully conducted study on the same subject for any small chink that would permit them to dismiss it entirely. — Ben Goldacre

The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it - that's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades. — O'Reilly Radar Team

Object-oriented languages use the paradigm of classes. In simplest terms, a class includes both data and the functions to operate on that data. You can create an instance of a class, also called an object, which will have all the data members and functionality of its class. Because of this, you can think of a class as being like a template, with each object being a specific instance of a particular type of class. For example, suppose you have a very simple class called Person, which has three fields (a data member is called a field in Java) and one method (a function is called a method in Java). The following code illustrates creating a simple class. For example, the first thing inside the beginning brace ({) is a constructor, a special kind of method that creates an instance of a class and sets its fields with their initial values. — Suresh Basandra

Big Data isn't magic, and it doesn't tell the feds who's a terrorist and who's not. But it doesn't have to be magic to generate long lists of people who are in some ways red-flagged, elevated-risk, "people of interest." Most of the people on those lists will have nothing to do with terrorism. How confident are you that you're not one of them? — Jordan Ellenberg

I believe that it's fine if [the] university wants to regulate, for example, bandwidth access, but they should treat the students data as private data. — Annalee Newitz

Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings - anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness - is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit. — Daniel Goleman

TCP works very hard to get the data delivered in order without errors and does retransmissions and recoveries and all that kind of stuff which is exactly what you want in a file transfer because so you don't want any errors in your file. — Jon Postel

It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that. — Don DeLillo

We believe we're moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin' Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. — Scott McNealy

The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model. — Terence McKenna

In an automobile, if you think about the navigation system - of all the cars in the world, four out of five cars in the world if they have a navigation system have something from Nokia inside that car - the data, the platform, something. So we play a very strong role there. — Stephen Elop

My dream is to map every archaeological site in the world because, if we can do that, then we have this massive global data base that all sorts of global heritage organizations and heritage organizations within countries can use, and they can use that information to protect what's there. — Sarah Parcak

More often than not, at the end of the day (or a month, or a year), you realize that your initial idea was wrong, and you have to try something else. These are the moments of frustration and despair. You feel that you have wasted an enormous amount of time, with nothing to show for it. This is hard to stomach. But you can never give up. You go back to the drawing board, you analyze more data, you learn from your previous mistakes, you try to come up with a better idea. And every once in a while, suddenly, your idea starts to work. It's as if you had spent a fruitless day surfing, when you finally catch a wave: you try to hold on to it and ride it for as long as possible. At moments like this, you have to free your imagination and let the wave take you as far as it can. Even if the idea sounds totally crazy at first. — Edward Frenkel

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself - not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. — Michael J. Behe

My analyses and conclusions differ diametrically from those of the Southern Research Institute/National Cancer Institute report wherein it is concluded that amygdalin 'does not possess activity in the Lewis lung carcinoma system.'. My analysis of the data is that it is overwhelmingly positive. — Dean Burk

History that is presented only as ink-embalmed data is as a flower pressed in a book. Although the dry petals still hold all the elements of the original flower, they cannot show us how it looked blooming in the field. The color and fragrance - the true reality - or the flowers are gone. — Rex Alan Smith

That's what they tell you noise is, random energy, chaotic energy . . . It's the stuff that's not data, that's not information, that's not REAL. A thing that's what it's NOT and not what it IS. Noise is chaos. But chaos is continuity. . . . There are stories in the noise. — James W. Blinn

Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self. — Nicholas Delbanco

The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-datum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives. — J.L. Austin

Please be careful of becoming so immersed and engrossed in pixels, texting, ear buds, Twittering, online social networking, and potentially addictive uses of media and the Internet that you fail to recognize the importance of your physical body and miss the richness of person-to-person communication. Beware of the digital displays and data in many forms of computer-mediated interaction that can displace the full range of physical capacity and experience. — David A. Bednar

This years keynote session is a clear reminder that wireless data technology is expanding its reach beyond that of an alternative to wireline telephony. We have gathered an exclusive group of business leaders to share how wireless is being integrated into their companys business strategies and what it means for their bottom lines. The presence of these telecom, media and entertainment giants on our center stage is a great indicator of the impact wireless data has made on countless industries, — Steve Largent

Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation- e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data. — Jerry Fodor

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213) — Julia Angwin

NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the past two decades; slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics. Students know more and can do more in these two basic skills subjects now than they could twenty or forty years ago... So the next time you hear someone say that the system is "broken," that American students aren't as well educated as they used to be, that our schools are failing, tell that person the facts. — Diane Ravitch

As late as 2007, Facebook was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. An advertising space seemed to be the obvious answer, but how that would tap into the massive value of the personal data uploaded to the company every day remained a puzzle. — Kurt Eichenwald

His doubts recall Benford's Law, a theory about the frequency with which digits will appear in data. One implication of this law is that datasets with lots of zeroes at the end often turn out to be fraudulent. — Simon Kuper

In Shara's estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it: who belongs to which group, and why; where are they now, and how are we sure, and do we have someone else in the region; and now that we have cataloged those groups, what threat level should they be categorized under; and so on, and so on, and so on. — Robert Jackson Bennett

System uptime, data protection, and identity theft are weighty issues. It takes real ingenuity to out-think the fraudsters who are trying to steal identities and hack into enterprise systems. The 12 smart companies that debuted security solutions today at DEMO have designed serious, and seriously clever, innovations. — Chris Shipley

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically. — Kenneth Prewitt

It is clear from all these data that the interests of teenagers are not focused around studies, and that scholastic achievement is at most of minor importance in giving status or prestige to an adolescent in the eyes of other adolescents. — James S. Coleman

Ageing is very exciting. But if I didn't work on ageing, I'd want to work on the brain. There are really cool techniques you can use now. And bioinformatics. The methods you can use for comparing large data sets - that's so powerful. — Cynthia Kenyon

The Numerati too, are grappling with towering complexity. They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior. The audacity of their mission is almost maddening. They're going to figure out who we're likely to vote for, who we want to work with, perhaps even who we're best suited to love, all from the statistical patterns of data? It's the height of presumption, and it leads to humbling disappointments. Like the trees growing in the forests of Minnesota, we confound those who try to categorize us, and we do it most of the time without even trying. Life is complex. — Stephen Baker

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information. — Peter Drucker

Remember that EVERY single data/information you receive, arrives to you with some header containing the source of that data/information. That source whence you took the data/information resembles the AUTHORITY for you of that data/information you now possess.
So, whenever this happens to you, know that: IT IS NOW THE TIME TO PLAY WITH SOME CARDS SINCE THE GAME HAS JUST BEGUN! — Ibrahim Ibrahim

There's a strand of the data viz world that argues that everything could be a bar chart. That's possibly true but also possibly a world without joy. — Amanda Cox

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding. — Edward Tufte

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought. — China Mieville

My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent. — Rene Magritte

There is a shirt company that is making sensors that go into your clothing. They will watch how you sit, run or ski and give data on that information. — Robert Scoble

The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know. — Jerry Fodor

In contrast to what many people in Britain and the United States believe, the true figures on growth (as best one can judge from official national accounts data) show that Britain and the United States have not grown any more rapidly since 1980 than Germany, France, Japan, Denmark, or Sweden. In other words, the reduction of top marginal income tax rates and the rise of top incomes do not seem to have stimulated productivity (contrary to the predictions of supply-side theory) or at any rate did not stimulate productivity enough to be statistically detectable at the macro level. — Thomas Piketty

The PURPOSE of the DATA INTEGRITY BOARD review meeting is NOT for the purpose of reviewing the INTEGRITY of the paperwork because that has already been decided, it is for the PURPOSE of determining the CHARACTER & STANDING of THE MAN/WOMAN who brought the perfect paperwork and was intending to use the perfect paperwork for COMMERCIAL settlement and closure. So they have to find out if the STATUS and CHARACTER of the party who is going to use the paperwork was going to be ALLOWED to use it. — Jack Smith

I would say that hardware is the bone of the head, the skull. The semiconductor is the brain within the head. The software is the wisdom and data is the knowledge. — Masayoshi Son

By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage. — Jonathan Sarfati

The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you're rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it. — Daniel Gilbert

I read so much data. There's so much information that comes my way. And there's got to be a way for me to delegate more. — Terry J. Lundgren

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. — Daniel Suarez

It's only because the data force us into corners that we are inspired to create the highly counterintuitive structures that form the basis for modern physics. — Sean Carroll

Beyond our perceptional distortions, there is a problem with logic itself. How can someone have no clue yet be able to hold a set of perfectly sound and coherent viewpoints that match the observations and abide by every single possible rule of logic? Consider that two people can hold incompatible beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfect and sound? Certainly not. One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We just kind of relied on written scouting reports through the eighties and even the early nineties. I've really been amazed by some of the data that's out there, especially with regards to tendencies of hitters, and certainly tendencies of pitchers as well. I would have loved to have gotten that data when I played. — David Cone

Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day - hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age. — Daniel Goleman

Brazil fell into recession in the first half of the year, according to official data which showed the economy shrinking by 0.6% in the second quarter and 0.2% in the first. The main reason was another big drop in investment. The government had said that it expects GDP to grow by 1.8% this year, but that now seems unlikely. — Anonymous

Using data gathered in 2011, the CDC study estimated that across all age groups, 19.3 percent of American women "have been raped in their lifetimes" and that 1.6 percent of American women - nearly two and a half million individuals - "reported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey. — Jon Krakauer

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities. — Werner Heisenberg

They need policies and visions that speak to their own interests and circumstances and not to be reduced to data points in some abstract political competition. — Ken Robinson

But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall; you don't have to collect data on that. — Clayton Christensen

Cancer is really a slew of rare diseases. Lung cancer has 700 sub-types, breast cancer has 30,000 mutations which means that every cancer in its own right is a rare disease. Sharing data globally in this context is really important from a life-threatening perspective. — Patrick Soon-Shiong

The fundamental confusion that makes income bracket data and individual income data seem mutually contradictory is the implicit assumption that people in particular income brackets at a given time are an enduring "class" at that level. If that were true, then trends over time in comparisons between income brackets would be the same as trends over time between individuals. Because that is not the case, the two sets of statistics lead not only to different conclusions but even opposite conclusions. — Thomas Sowell

On June 20, 2016, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which tracks forced displacement worldwide based on data from governments, partner agencies, and UNHCR's own reporting, issued a report stating that a total of 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, compared with 59.5 million just twelve months earlier. — Thomas L. Friedman

But *why* do clean torture and democracy appear to go hand in hand? This is an important puzzle (though by no means the only one suggested by the data). My explanation for this pattern generally is this: Public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful coercion to use and combine clean torture techniques to evade detection, and, to the extent that public monitoring is not only greater in democracies, but that public monitoring of human rights is a core value in modern democracies, it is the case that where we find democracies torturing today we will also be more likely to find stealthy torture. — Darius M. Rejali

If Senator Rubio were doing his job and in Congress more, he might know that the program [phone records of a potential terrorist cause] continues. It's been ongoing for the last six months. So the Paris tragedy, this tragedy happened while we were still doing bulk collection, all bulk collection. Also in France, they have a program a thousand-fold more invasive, collecting all of the data of all of the French. — Rand Paul

The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information, — Eric Schmidt

I think that the default for collecting any kind of personal data should be opt-in consent. — Al Franken

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years. — Ben Bernanke

I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be. — Rivka Galchen

The argument from design stands or falls on whether it can be demonstrated that some aspect of the universe such as its origin or biological life could not have come about naturally. The burden of proof is ... on the supernaturalist to demonstrate that something from outside nature must be introduced to explain the data. — Victor J. Stenger

Perhaps the best way to welcome women into churches is not to saddle them upon entry with an array of "shoulds" to add to their lists of commitments. Instead, women need to find a place of support that recognizes the value of their many hats and empowers them to live well into those roles. And right now, the data suggest women are not finding such a place at church. — Barna Group

In the first study, Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts - but only when the employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent. — Susan Cain