For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only "off on timing," or are "almost right," derailed by an unforeseeable accident.
Second, particularly when data and theory are tied in this way, models that generate predictions that fail to accurately capture real observations can still be extremely informative.
In such case, it would be the similarity measure, rather than the prediction, that fails at discriminating the correct match.
The Budiansky Fleck model predictions are appropriate for composites that fail by compressive kinking.
They question the validity and robustness of sediment wave migratory predictions based on single geometrical readings that fail to represent the complexity of local hydrodynamics and partial sediment wave modifications.
Those that fail disappear.
What a better place this would be, he often muses, if we could press the reset button and go back to the late 1950s and '60s and realize the predictions of science fiction that failed to materialize: ubiquitous space travel and colonization, robots à la the Jetsons, underwater cities, desalinization, reforestation of deserts and much more.
"Incredibly, implausibly, he is proposing to replace the economic policies that have succeeded beyond anyone's boldest predictions with the very policies that failed miserably eight years ago," Mr. Gore said.
Finally, I would like to point out that Long's detailed treatment of this particular case of data that failed to satisfy predictions illustrates how experimental failures can occasionally lead to interesting discoveries: while trying to explain the incongruent results obtained, the researchers ultimately discovered something new about the function of body wobbling in fish.
To Kuhn, although astrologers had, historically, made predictions that "categorically failed," this in itself does not make it unscientific, nor do the attempts by astrologers to explain away the failure by claiming it was due to the creation of a horoscope being very difficult (through subsuming, after the fact, a more general horoscope that leads to a different prediction).
And it was built despite predictions that it would fail.
