Michael Palmer Quotes

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

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

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.

Data is not useful until it becomes information.

Data is the new oil? No: Data is the new soil.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

Data is the next Intel Inside.

Data really powers everything that we do.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

If you have a lot of data and you want to create value from that data, one of the things you might consider is building up an AI team.

Everyone talks about how much data's in the world. Except, actually, 80% of it is pretty blind to computers. I mean, it can store it. But if it's a movie, a poem, a song, it doesn't know what it's actually saying or doing.

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.

As a consultant at McKinsey, I learned the value of data and the ability to shape that information into an answer.

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

The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn't know before.

Data by itself is not useful. Data is only useful if it can be applied for public benefit.

The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data.

Data without generalization is just gossip.

Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data -- i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.

The most important question regarding Big Data at almost any company is: How much are your customers really worth?

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.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

What if instead of seeing a neighborhood that reminds you of the place you grew up in, you see your actual neighborhood? The data exists. The technology exists. It's just a matter of sourcing it and processing it in a compelling fashion.

If you're working with a spreadsheet or a thread of correspondence or a set of data, I'm not sure you're doing your best work if you're doing it on an iPhone.

Data is the new soil, because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.