Word: skewness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Actually, such a merger might not be so bad. The airline industry is suffering from overcapacity --too many airline seats chasing too few "good" customers (those paying profitable fares). The government helped skew the industry by propping up failing carriers with taxpayer bail-outs after Sept. 11--including US Airways, in 2003. The result is a still flabby industry dominated by legacy airlines that can't make decent money. Flights today are usually 80% full, but average profits on tickets--what the airlines call yield--are down 24% since 2000, according to AirlineForecasts, an aviation consulting firm. Major airlines have...
...appetite for sadism--at least if it's cleverly conceived. Another Saw quickly followed. So far the franchise has earned more than $250 million worldwide, and Saw III will open in roughly 3,000 U.S. theaters Oct. 27, the biggest release of the films to date. Saw films skew to the under-25 audience and are as popular with girls as with guys. "Good horror movies don't need stars, and they don't need special effects," says Tom Ortenberg, Lionsgate president of theatrical films. "They earn their scares through twists, through intelligent writing and great up-and-coming directors...
...SURVEY found that Yale's Class of 2006 graduated with a median grade point average between 3.6 and 3.7. The paper asked 400 newly minted Elis to anonymously report their GPAs online, and 50% responded. (Props for noting the response rate could skew the results.) The conclusion's right there in the headline: "Poll suggests grade inflation...
...However, the media overlooked that the study's underlying test data was from 1988, meaning this tiny skew toward a teacher's sex was evident among 8th graders almost 20 years ago. We have no idea if it's still true today. Nor could the study's author, Thomas Dee, convincingly explain why this "teacher gender effect" appeared in science class but disappeared in math class...
...Today, movies are an adornment to popular culture, not an essential, indoctrinating part of it. The number of tickets sold annually is about five per person, but the demographic skew is much more severe, with the young accounting for a lopsided percentage of the audience. As for moving pictures of current events, TV and the Internet offer as many as anyone could want, but the newsreel is as dead as Free Dishes Night. Thus movies are now more escapist than the old Hollywood product ever was, more reticent to turn the nation's central anxieties into screen drama...