Archive for the ‘Quotes’ Category
Quote of the Week – Cameron
“It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology: A Casual […]
Quote of the Week – Pashler
“It’s hellishly complicated, this data analysis, and that creates great opportunity for inadvertent mischief.” – Hal Pashler (As seen in Science News)
Quote of the Week – Logothetis
“fMRI is a measure of mass action. You almost have to be a professional moron to think you’re saying something profound about the neural mechanisms. You’re nowhere close to explaining what’s happening, but you have a nice framework, an excellent starting point.” ~ Nikos Logothetis (As seen in Science News)
Quote of the Week – Coggan
“My ignorance of science is such that if anyone mentioned copper nitrate I should think he was talking about policemen’s overtime.” – Frederick Donald Coggan
Quote of the Week – Sagan
“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach […]
Quote of the Week – Curie
“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.” – Marie Curie
Quote of the Week – Gigerenzer
A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology department once asked me “Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity maps]?’ It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are expensive, and you don’t understand them” – Gerd Gigerenzer
Quote of the Week – Feynman
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” – Richard Feynman
Quote of the Week – Tukey
“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.” – John W. Tukey, 1986
Quote of the Week – Fisher
“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, […]