Sensor data management with probabilistic models
Sander Evers · 2009
If you ask the investigator how he or she can be sure that the numbers will eventually come right [. . .], your question will be rephrased and answered in the following terms: "I am ninety-five per cent sure," or "I am ninety-eight per cent sure."What does it mean to be ninety-five per cent sure?you may ask."It means I will be right in at least nineteen cases out of twenty; or, if not in nineteen out of twenty, then in nineteen thousand out of twenty thousand," the investigator will reply.And which case is the present one, you may ask: the nineteenth or the twentieth, the nineteen-thousandth or the twenty-thousandth?J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year vi