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2017-06-20 22:01 House intervention / intervention en chambre

Chief Statistician of Canada, Governance, Government bills, Statistics, Third reading and adoption

Gouvernance, Statisticien en chef du Canada, Statistiques, Troisième lecture et adoption,

Madam Speaker, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is always appropriate at this hour in this place.

The member will know that I recently learned that the reason Douglas Adams picked 42 as the answer to life, the universe, and everything is that 42 is the ASCII code for an asterisk, which is a wild card, which means it can represent anything one wants it to. However, if that is used in statistics, the end result is a whole lot of bad data.

Making sure that we are using good data for everything we do is critically important lest we end up in the improbability drive and have no idea where we land.

Madame la Présidente, le Guide du voyageur galactique est toujours approprié à cette heure de la journée à la Chambre.

Le député saura que, récemment, j'ai appris que la raison pour laquelle Douglas Adams a choisi le numéro 42 comme réponse à la vie, à l'univers et à tout, c'est que dans le code américain normalisé pour l'échange d'information, ou l'ASCII, 42 est le code de l'astérisque, l'inconnu, ce qui veut dire qu'on peut lui assigner n'importe quelle valeur. Cependant, si on l'utilise en statistique, le résultat est une grande quantité de mauvaises données.

Il est essentiel de nous assurer que nous utilisons toujours des données de qualité pour ne pas que nous nous retrouvions dans le générateur d'improbabilité, sans savoir où nous allons aboutir.

Watch | HansardEcoutez | Hansard

Posted at 13:26 on June 20, 2017

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2017-06-20 21:59 House intervention / intervention en chambre | hansard parlchmbr tv |

2017-06-20 22:02 House intervention / intervention en chambre

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