Turkeys are problematical to raise — susceptible to disease, cold and a host of variables that seem to crop up during their four-month lives.
On the other, she's aware that whatever she achieves is dependent upon remaining fit and healthy – on a whole host of variables.
But in most of the business-to-business market, transactions involve complex purchasing decisions, a host of variables, lots of money and manufactured items bought and sold among a comparatively small but educated audience.
The impact of pornography is also complicated by a host of variables including the type of material being viewed, the amount of exposure and the individual characteristics of the viewer.
And while a host of variables such as gerrymandering and urban packing kept Republican seat losses to a minimum, they lost the national House vote by over a point.
Marketers instead rely on a host of variables, chief among them an event's popularity with television viewers and, as important, an athlete's conduct in and out of the arena.
A recent study by the economics professors Keith Bender and John Heywood found that, when you control for a host of variables, public employees are not actually paid more than their private-sector counterparts.
Since 1996, the national and state parties have been compiling a computerized database that allows officials to identify targeted voters by a host of variables, including demographic and economic data, party affiliation, consumer preferences, religion, education and likelihood to vote.
Visitors to the site can select from a host of variables to create customized maps and tables that can be downloaded, as well as track trends over time.
But there's a problem with these comparisons: They don't compare like to like, or control for the host of variables that separate, say, sub-Saharan Africa from the United States and Europe.
