Excellent for touring on a shoestring, Lonely Planet is less reliable when it ventures outside its niche.
Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder?
"We're very excited about a future where drones are used by consumers and businesses for all sorts of purposes, but to get there, drones need to be made extremely reliable and safe," says venture capitalist Chris Dixon, who led the deal for Andreessen Horowitz.
Both have become the reliable base hits of the venture business.
To examine the representativeness of my data sample, I compared it with China's Venture Capital Yearbook, a reliable data source that provides aggregate data.
Being a landlord is more likely to be a profitable venture if you have reliable renters who you can trust.
Weak property rights, poorly enforced contracts and the fear that profits will be siphoned away make it hard to conceive of ventures that might generate a reliable return.
But a complaint: too many exhibitions of African art are still conceived along simplistic, introductory-level lines, coasting on the reliable allure of charismatic objects rather than venturing fresh, stimulating and possibly challenging ideas.
And a contingency fund of £2.7 billion has been added in case the new estimates prove no more reliable than the old ones.Every Olympic venture faces critics, most memorably the "People Ingeniously Subverting the Sydney Olympic Farce" (PISSOF).
Enterprise companies generally offer a more stable batch for venture portfolios, with predictable and reliable growth that eventually carries it to an IPO with varying levels of success.
Although they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a new dating venture suggests that it's more reliable to trust our noses when it comes to finding true love.
