It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them by observation and by measuring electrical activity in the brain in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy.

I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

A healthy vision of the future is not possible without an accurate knowledge of the past.

In the future instead of striving to be right at a high cost it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.

It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They're usually quite nice comparisons I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of say genetically modified food as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

Rounding to the nearest cent is sufficiently accurate for practical purposes.

Well I think first of all there was a failure to have real clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn't have the capabilities on the ground to give us real-time accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city.