Data Quotes - Page 4

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores.

An engineer can look at the data, but he needs a translator from the cockpit - the driver - to understand it completely. For example, only the driver can tell you why he abruptly takes his foot off the gas pedal at a certain point. The data doesn't necessarily tell the engineer whether the driver made a mistake at that point or the car was acting up. The information the driver provides often helps determine the direction of development.

Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.

With the Internet, the greatest disseminator of bad data and bad information the universe has ever known, it's become impossible to trust any news from any source at all, because it's filtered through this crazy yenta gossip line. It's impossible to know anything.

The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else.

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.

The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.

Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know.

We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art. The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.

Data is like garbage. You'd better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.

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.

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed... To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life... One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.

Once you have confidence in your instincts, you must never allow other people's refusal to believe, or their data to refute, what you instinctively know is true.

While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.

Big Data will spell the death of customer segmentation and force the marketer to understand each customer as an individual within eighteen months, or risk being left in the dust.

Some of the best theorizing comes after collecting data because then you become aware of another reality.

Data can't speak for itself; it's up to you to give it a voice. Try to speak truthfully.

Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation.

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

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.