Marc Rogers:

Let's face it -- most of today's so-called "cutting edge" security defenses are either so specific, or so brittle, that they really don't offer much meaningful protection against a sophisticated attacker or group of attackers.

Lee Berger:

Any time a scientist says 'we've got this figured out' they are probably wrong.

Lawrence Krauss:

The "null hypothesis" is most often the default hypothesis in science. We reject the null hypothesis (namely that what we think is significant is simply an accident, or noise) only when we have clear evidence to back it up.

Paul Basken:

Randomized trials now account for about 20 percent of the $30 billion annual budget of the National Institutes of Health. Private drug companies spend more than $30 billion on them. Yet drug trials fail at a rate of about 90 percent. The trials' high failure rate is driven in part by companies' pushing for trials before they've taken the time to test their theories more thoroughly in the lab. That may seem shortsighted, but executives sometimes appear motivated more by the short-term career boost from a trial announcement than by the fear of a negative result many years down the line.

Peter Orszag argued that far too many commonplace medical practices and procedures lack grounding in a scientifically rigorous test of their effectiveness. It's therefore critical to make trial practices more efficient, so that the many questions needing answers in medicine can be thoroughly vetted.

Ignorance is bliss:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

Big Tom: If there is, I don't want to know about it.