Data Quotes - Page 37

• Minds think with ideas, not information No amount of data, bandwidth, or processing power can substitute for inspired thought.

  Clifford Stoll

  Science, Power, Thinking

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• [N]o scientist likes to be criticized. ... But you don't reply to critics: "Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please don't attack it." That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Ideas, Waiting

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• Computer security can simply be protecting your equipment and files from disgruntled employees, spies, and anything that goes bump in the night, but there is much more. Computer security helps ensure that your computers, networks, and peripherals work as expected all the time, and that your data is safe in the event of hard disk crash or a power failure resulting from an electrical storm. Computer security also makes sure no damage is done to your data and that no one is able to read it unless you want them to.

  Bruce Schneier

  Night, Damage Is Done, Spy

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• What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

  Clay Shirky

  Technology, Thinking, Two

  "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags". shirky.com. Spring, 2005.

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• Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world. We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply.

  Sergey Brin

  Technology, People, Challenges

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• What distinguishes the language of science from language as we ordinarily understand the word? ... What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation and their correspondence to sensory data.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Understanding, Language

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.188, Open Road Media

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• [John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature-a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules-out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Science, Simple, Men

  Ascent of Man (1973) ch. 4

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• How then did we come to the "standard model"? And how has it supplanted other theories, like the steady state model? It is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data.

  Steven Weinberg

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Science

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• No generalizing beyond the data, no theory. No theory, no insight. And if no insight, why do research.

  Henry Mintzberg

  Science, Research, Theory

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• We are ... led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by "soft" data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.

  Bertrand Russell

  Taken, Mean, Science

  Bertrand Russell (1914). “Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy”

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• Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.

  Thomas Huxley

  Work, May, Pages

  "Geological Reform". Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Volume 25, 1869.

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• The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it.

  Michael Behe

  Design, Flow, Embrace

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• 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

  Confusion, Design, Understanding

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• Lately we have been getting facts pointing to the "oceanic" nature of the floor of so-called inland seas. Through geological investigations it has been definitely established that in its deepest places, for instance, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, the Earth's crust is devoid of granite stratum. The same may be said quite confidently about the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Could the interpretation of these data be that inland seas were the primary stage of the formation of oceanic basins?

  Vladimir Belousov

  Ocean, Science, Sea

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• While there have been great technological advances in the study of the brain, yielding enormous amounts of data on its physical and psychological characteristics, the old problem of relating mind to brain in a reasonable fashion remains unaccomplished.

  Michael Gazzaniga

  Fashion, Brain, Mind

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• Why don't I talk about Big Data? Because I am focused on intelligent answers and not speeds and feeds. It doesn't matter if it is quick if it's the wrong answer.

  Michael J. Saylor

  Smart, Intelligent, Retail

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• Students using astrophysical textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of plasma concepts, despite the fact that some of them have been known for half a century. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of astrophysicists who have gotten their main knowledge from these textbooks. Earthbound and space telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modern plasma theory.

  Hannes Alfven

  Knowledge, Science, Hands

  "Hannes Alfvén: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents". Book by Anthony L. Peratt, p. 197, 1998.

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• Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion.

  Stephen Stigler

  Science, May, Duress

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• Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.

  Carmen Ortiz

  Dollars, Use, Computer

  "Reddit co-founder accused of stealing 4.8m JSTOR documents from MIT" by Charles Arthur, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2011.

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• Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.

  David Dixon

  Technology, Three, Lost

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• [In research on bacteria metabolism] we have indeed much the same position as an observer trying to gain an idea of the life of a household by careful scrutiny of the persons and material arriving or leaving the house; we keep accurate records of the foods and commodities left at the door and patiently examine the contents of the dust-bin and endeavour to deduce from such data the events occurring within the closed doors.

  Marjory Stephenson

  Science, Doors, Dust

  Marjory Stephenson (1939). “Bacterial metabolism”

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• The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo.

  Andre Michel Lwoff

  Knowledge, Science, Cells

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• Measurement has too often been the leitmotif of many investigations rather than the experimental examination of hypotheses. Mounds of data are collected, which are statistically decorous and methodologically unimpeachable, but conclusions are often trivial and rarely useful in decision making. This results from an overly rigorous control of an insignificant variable and a widespread deficiency in the framing of pertinent questions. Investigators seem to have settled for what is measurable instead of measuring what they would really like to know.

  Edmund Pellegrino

  Knowledge, Science, Pertinent Questions

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• [Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least unil some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

  David Quammen

  Mean, Reality, Views

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• The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.

  Udny Yule

  Science, Opportunity, Issues

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