Data Quotes - Page 10

• The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the US] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is "collect it all."

  Laura Poitras

  Country, Communication, Eye

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• We've already seen shifts happening in some of the big companies - Google, Apple - that now understand how vulnerable their customer data is, and that if it's vulnerable, then their business is, too, and so you see a beefing up of encryption technologies. At the same time, no programs have been dismantled at the governmental level, despite international pressure.

  Laura Poitras

  Technology, Apples, Google

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• 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

  Country, Believe, Dark

  "Stopping the 'Ever-Expanding Surveillance State'". Interview with Aj Vicens, www.motherjones.com. July 31, 2013.

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• We are very confident that the data is showing that carbon capture and sequestration is technologically feasible and it's available. It has been successfully demonstrated and there are full-scale both conventional and unconventional coal projects with CCS that are moving forward. So there is no question that there's continued investment in this technology.

  Gina McCarthy

  Moving, Technology, Coal

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.

  Richard Dawkins

  Unique, Forever, Political

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• We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out picture is clear and accurate. But is it?

  Leonard Mlodinow

  Imagination, Patterns, Input

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• Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

  Nate Silver

  Keys, Patterns, Noise

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• Thus even supposedly unadulterated facts of observation already are interfused with all sorts of conceptual pictures, model concepts, theories or whatever expression you choose. The choice is not whether to remain in the field of data or to theorize; the choice is only between models that are more or less abstract, generalized, near or more remote from direct observation, more or less suitable to represent observed phenomena.

  Ludwig von Bertalanffy

  Expression, Choices, Facts

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• Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the data, then there is no use in collecting any. The ultimate purpose of taking data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action. The step intermediate between the collection of data and the action is prediction.

  W. Edwards Deming

  Taken, Museums, Purpose

  Journal of the American Statistical Association On a Classification of the Problems of Statistical Inference Volume 37, Number 218, June 1942 (p. 173)

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• I had been hearing on-the-ground buzz that white folks were moving to places like Bend, Oregon, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and St. George, Utah. That led me to discover through census data that these towns were already extremely white and they were becoming, in most cases, even whiter. Statistics could only tell me so much; in order to get to the spirit and essence of it, I had to immerse myself.

  Richard Benjamin

  Moving, Oregon, White

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• A very small group of powerful people is deciding what's going to happen with your data, and they're using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It's all about efficiency. And that's the really scary thing about it.

  Daniel Suarez

  Powerful, People, Scary

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Through persistent, effective, and diligent work, a person can accumulate knowledge in the form of facts, data, information, and experience. Intelligence, however, can only be gained through obedience. Thus, knowledge is a prerequisite to and foundation for true spiritual intelligence.

  David A. Bednar

  Spiritual, Foundation, Information

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• Demagoguery beats data in making public policy.

  Dick Armey

  Beats, Policy, Demagoguery

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• Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.

  Kathryn Schulz

  Mistake, Errors, Trying

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• So, what we do as the game accesses the Blu-ray disc, is we take any data that was accessed and we put it on the hard drive. And if then if there is idle time, we go ahead and copy the remaining data to the hard drive. And what that means is after an hour or two, the game is on the hard drive, and you have access, you have dramatically quicker loading And you have the ability to do some truly high-speed streaming.

  Mark Cerny

  Mean, Games, Two

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• Hoffmeier furnishes a sophisticated fresh approach to the Biblical Exodus traditions filled with detailed Egyptological background, and utterly indispensable because of its basis in recent, and in many cases as yet unpublished, archaeological data. This is a virtual encyclopedia of the Exodus.

  Baruch Halpern

  Biblical, Tradition, Sophisticated

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• The stories circulating that Kanye West's laptop has been stolen are completely false. His laptop has never been out of his possession. Hence, the laptop has not been hacked, and there has been no leak of personal data such as unreleased music, photographs, designs, videos or any other personal files. The leak today of the unreleased track 'Awesome' was unrelated and completely coincidental.

  Malik Yusef

  Track, Design, Video

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• To be honest, I don't have data in my brain of how a relationship with a man is supposed to function.

  Drew Barrymore

  Men, Brain, Honest

  "Play Date with Drew". Interview with Carrie Fisher, www.glamour.com. February 28, 2007.

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• There is ...a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives.

  Edward S. Herman

  Country, Military, Gun

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• As soon as science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and it is just here that the 'truth' of the theory lies.

  Albert Einstein

  Lying, Numbers, Fundamentals

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• Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Philosopher, Construction, Given

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.76, University of Chicago Press

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• The man who has successfully solved the problem of his relations with the two worlds of data and symbols is a man who has no beliefs. With regard to the problems of practical life he entertains a series of working hypotheses, which serve his purposes, but are taken no more seriously than any other kind of tool or instrument. In other words, symbols should never be raised to the rank of dogmas, nor should any system be regarded as more than a provisional convenience.

  Aldous Huxley

  Taken, Men, Two

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• University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.

  Bruce Sterling

  Civilization, Skulls, Information

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• Both Newton and Darwin were driven by the data and were forced to recognize that they couldn't explain everything. It may be a characteristic of great scientists to know what to accept and what to leave out.

  Lewis Wolpert

  May, Newton, Scientist

  Lewis Wolpert (1998). “The Unnatural Nature of Science”, p.72, Harvard University Press

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• Data can actually make us more human.

  Aaron Koblin

  Humans

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