Data is potential information, knowledge, understanding. 

Data reflects nature's glory and the designs of people.  

Data sampled, resampled, jackknifed and bootstrapped to within an inch of its life; validated data and cross-validated data; data past and present; data yet to come. Data observed, imputed, missing; repeated, longitudinal, functional; balanced, blocked, split and plotted; hierarchical, spatial, temporal; sequential, batched and aligned; rounded, truncated, censored; univariate and multivariate; continuous, discrete and mixed; nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio; skewed, kurtotic and bimodal; bounded above, bounded below and unbounded; data in all its inglorious and messy variety. Binary, binomial, Bernoulli; Poisson, negative binomial and overdispersed; count, counted, uncounted and uncountable; designed, recalcitrant and irrelevant.  

Data tables, data definitions, data procedures.  Qualitative and quantitative. Data driven, data driving and driving miss data; data mined, data mining and mining data if you don't mind; data structures and structured data. Directional and spherical; published and unpublished; structural and unstructured; data quality and quality data; test data, tests of data and tested data; edited data, data edit, data edits and data editor; data entry and entry level data analysts; data dependent and dependent data; BIG data and small or no data; all the data, population data, random data and randomized data, randomly sampled, stratified and nested; data life and lifetime data; data splits and banana splits and liddle lamzy divey; raw data and sushi; study data and studies of data, prediction and retrodiction; entered, warehoused, filed, sharpened, fitted; modeling data and data modeling; data models and model data, data with p bigger than n and data with n bigger than p; data going to infinity (and beyond) and data going nowhere (just for show); data collection and collections of data; data symposiums, data workshops and data repositories; class data, data classes, classified data and data classifications.  

What is Data?  

Data is a character on Star Trek.  

The doctors trade horror stories, seemingly unconcerned, each story more bizarre than the last. Push! Labored breathing. Discomfort, sweat, grunts.  A sudden explosion and a gasp. Red and squirming, quick wipedown, tie off and a snip. The midwife hands me a brand new bundle of ... BLOG.  

It's a Blog I cry, looking into its eyes, tears suddenly filling mine. A sequence of blank slates, waiting to be filled with wit, wisdom and wonder; statistics, math and data analysis; humor, jokes and puns; applications, inferences and deductions; reasons, seasons, seasoning and reasoning; uncountable variations and combinations thereof. Blog posts on statistics, statisticians and our profession; on the world; science: our attempt to understand the world; parity, polity, politics, poultry, poetry and policy; medicine, biology and public health; social science, socializing and social commentary; sports, animal husbandry and husband animalry; research: writing, revising, publishing, refereeing, responding and doing it all again. 

Topics, quality, humor and seriousness will vary with my moods and the weather. 

Comments, commentariate, commentators, commemorators and lurkers welcome. 

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little blog, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D.
December, 1843.

Favorite quote: Yes! and the bedpost was his own.

Dennis Lindley has just passed away.  Lindley was a very influential 20th century Bayesian statistician.  He was a passionate advocate for Bayesian statistics, arguing for the use of proper subjective priors and for the specification of utility functions.  Among other accomplishments, he supervised the PhD dissertations of José Bernando and Adrian F.M. Smith.

Wikipedia article on Dennis Lindley
Adrian Smith's interview with Dennis Lindley
Statistics Views interview with Dennis Lindley
Get Stats interview with Dennis Lindley
Math Genealogy Project Dennis Lindley page

Getstats Picture of Dennis Lindley