Word: errors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Political polls, in general, should be presented to the public with more warnings than cigarette packs. Besides the standard notice about potential sampling error, surveys can be skewed by ephemeral news flurries. Further, they cannot predict election results; "horse-race" studies merely provide a snapshot of voter sentiment at one instant in a long campaign. But even that modest claim is shaky in the tumult of Campaign '88. The profusion of polls this summer resembles not so much an album of still photographs as a movie of Keystone Kops at their most kinetic. "Hardly an hour goes by without...
...more than a few Washington cynics speculated that the "human error" leak was an attempt to head off criticism of the Aegis system, the defensive backbone of the Navy's 14 carrier battle groups. Critics charge that Aegis, which can monitor hundreds of targets at a time, has never been adequately tested and is better suited to the open ocean than to the crowded gulf. "The Navy has to protect the Aegis," said a congressional staff aide. "If Aegis doesn't work, the carrier groups can't survive...
...investigators' final report debunking Benveniste's research did not imply that there had been fraud. But it did conclude that the experiments were flawed and that no substantial effort had been made to exclude systematic error, including observer bias. Reported Maddox and his team: "We believe the laboratory has fostered and then cherished a delusion about the interpretation of its data." The report expressed dismay that the salaries of two of Benveniste's colleagues had been paid by a French supplier of homeopathic medicines. The Nature investigators admitted, however, that the same firm had paid their hotel bill...
...trial and error, Dukakis also helped discover the other central tenet of the emerging new ideology: the Democrats must again become the apostles of economic growth. To do this, Dukakis had to break free of liberal orthodoxy that automatically regards business as an adversary rather than an ally...
...when his love interest is sequestered from him, his nemeses are without human interest, his potential allies are all idiots, and the only sensible figure on the scene (Reginald Veljohnson) is always a walkie-talkie away. Still, Willis' presence is whiny and self-involved, and it is a ludicrous error to have him stop to confess past insensitivities before effecting his wife's climactic rescue. That is not the dramatically opportune moment to go Moonlighting...