Data Filtering Quotes

Being flooded with information doesn't mean we have the right information or that we're in touch with the right people.

Before Google, I spent the summer building a program that would look at what websites you would go to and what websites other people would go to - and built a collaborative filtering program that helped you find related sites to look at.

With YouTube - with the Internet in general - you have information overload. The people who don't necessarily get credit are the curators.

I think we've made the collection haystack so big, no one's ever getting through the haystack to find the needle. What we really need to do is isolate the haystack into a group of suspicious people and spend enormous resources looking at suspicious people, people who we have probable cause.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

The maps are really like a filter. They filter information for you to make better decisions on where you are going and what to do.

Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?

Of Cooking. This is an art of various forms, the object of which is to give ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy. One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select only those which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unhappy if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty which will do for serving up.

Curation comes up when search stops working.

There's a tendency in graphics to allow the trimming of certain parts. But I think that if you're open about your process, your methodology, such as introducing thresholds, introducing filters, techniques people use in research and data management, it's legitimate. It's legitimate to say, "We're only going to show data above this level, or between levels."

I'm interested in sites that help people find information and filter what's available. The Internet is so big that no one can stay on top of everything.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

As soon as you hear a proposition, the creative brain in humans assumes for the moment that it's true, and starts trying to find evidence. It's what computer scientists in the old days used to call 'Fifo:' first in, first out. The first piece of information that gets in has a privileged position, even if it's misinformation.

You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.

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?

There is an explosion of information happening, yet people demand quick access to relevant content that cuts through the clutter.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

Like any decent researcher, I throw away 90% of my research.