Word: wizards
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...name for the technique) can be quite potent. Asking a presidential candidate to run a campaign without a focus group is like asking a physician to reach a diagnosis without a stethoscope. Candidates should view a focus group as a simple tool, not a murky crystal ball requiring a wizard to decipher it. Gary Blackton Portland, Oregon, U.S. Klein argued that polling has become "less scientific and more speculative. It means polls should be trusted only to verify broad shifts ... rather than specific point spreads." Even this may be optimistic, since the flaws in polls may be systemic...
Take polling, please. The vast majority of Americans--as many as 90%, pollsters have told me privately--refuse to answer questions when the wizard calls (although the number is marginally better this hot election year). People who use cell phones exclusively, mostly younger voters, are unreachable. The wizards say they can correct for these things, by "weighting" their polls--that is, giving disproportionate weight to members of underrepresented groups like young people. But surely that makes polling less scientific and more speculative. It means polls should be trusted only to verify broad shiftsBush moved ahead in the presidential race after...
...Captain is every bit as much an animated film as Shark Tale. Kerry Conran's script has a plot lifted and sifted from lots of '30s films--The Wizard of Oz, Lost Horizon and a dozen sassy newspaper comedies. But the technique is the star here: Conran's devising of a Deco-meets-delirium universe that he projected onto a blue screen, in front of which the game, clueless stars--Jude Law as the intrepid flyboy, Gwyneth Paltrow as a plucky news gal--recited their lines...
Then there was Ron Reagan—his appearance, or more accurately his name, a huge coup for the convention. Still, Reagan delivered his altogether correct views on stem-cell research in the mellow tones of a genial, almost-vacant Mr. Wizard. It’s not that the speech wasn’t effective or right; it’s that there was something creepily stagey about it throughout...
...Setting the Record Straight Not the Inventor • Our MILESTONE on the death of Hollywood technical wizard Edmund DiGiulio referred to him incorrectly as the inventor of the Steadicam [June 21]. Although DiGiulio developed the Steadicam and popularized its use, it was invented by Garrett Brown...