#data

I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate. ↗

— Dean Kamen

#changed #communicate #consider #data #high-speed

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#conceive #data #life #minutes #months

And never - not in a single case - was the explanation, 'I was pressured to do this.' The explanation was very often, 'The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it.' ↗

— David Kay

#case #conclude #data #explanation #had

I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different. ↗

— Ken Thompson

#data #different #i #instructions #programs

There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data. ↗

— Ken Thompson

#executing #generating #lot #power

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment. ↗

— Alvin Toffler

#distrust #get #intelligence #judgment #own

So ensuring the integrity of the data and integrity and validity of the connection is a very important element in any company's strategy that is moving towards a Web service paradigm. ↗

— John W. Thompson

#company #connection #data #element #ensuring

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. 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

#eyes #perception #reality #age

No data on air propellers was available, but we had always understood that it was not a difficult matter to secure an efficiency of 50% with marine propellers. ↗

— Orville Wright

#always #available #data #difficult #efficiency

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#century #creative #creative works #data #inaccessible