David McCandless Quotes

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

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

Big Data is just that - big. But, it's a term that is largely misunderstood and difficult to explain.

Any enterprise that is serious about experiencing the power of Big Data in real-time should be looking at DataTorrent.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

I collect a lot of data. We all do.

There's something that happens with the collection of a large amount of data when it's dumped into an Excel spreadsheet or put into a pie chart. You run the risk of completely missing what it's about.

I think you can have a ridiculously enormous and complex data set, but if you have the right tools and methodology then it's not a problem.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics - they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life.

The numbers are hard to control.

I'm going to say something rather controversial. Big data, as people understand it today, is just a bigger version of small data. Fundamentally, what we're doing with data has not changed; there's just more of it.

My job is to analyze our data set to understand it and build products on it. I look at raw data, do the math to clean it up, and build systems to make it easy to understand.

Numbers can't speak for themselves, and data sets - no matter their scale - are still objects of human design.

Data is cost. It takes money to create data, store it, clean it, and throw resources at it to learn anything from it.

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations.

It's amazing how much data is out there. The question is how do we put it in a form that's usable?

Big data is indeed a buzzword but it is one that is frankly under-hyped.

Above all else show the data.

Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with

Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.

We chose it because we deal with huge amounts of data. Besides, it sounds really cool.

Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

I think the mark of a good director is that they surround themselves with good people.

One of the reasons people love Joe Biden is he just kind of says what he thinks. He's a guy whose heart is on his sleeve, and that's one of the things people love about him.