Sendhil Mullainathan

The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.

No one would say, 'Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.' We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? 'Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it out there.'

President Obama has a good sense not just of the economic requisites for financial crisis firefighting but also how you build political support for moving forward on reforming the financial system, making sure that the banks are carrying enough capital.

The routers get involved in this and they know that on the path between this router and that router a certain percentage of the bandwidth is reserved to these things and a certain percentage of it is allowed on a first come first served basis.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.