Despite its acknowledged value, the magnetic compass long remained a fragile, troublesome, and unreliable instrument, subject to mysterious disturbances.
In a brief foreword, the authors posit that "price, dictated by those with the wherewithal and willingness to pay it, is an unreliable instrument in determining value".
It is probably more prudent, however, to interpret them as theoretical maximum correlations given such weak samples and unreliable test instruments: "elevated idealized correlations rather than actual correlations" (Sternberg et al., 2001, p. 10).
Vague quantifiers, rather than setting rigid quantitative bounds, seem instead to convey probabilistic information, as if a somewhat unreliable measuring instrument had been applied in formulating the quantified claim, and the recipient of the information needs to take this unreliability into account in updating beliefs.
An unreliable disability instrument may therefore underestimate the size of the benefit obtained from an intervention.
During the development of MDS instruments, unreliable items were progressively eliminated resulting in increasing reliability estimates over time [ 25, 81].
The lack of clear understanding of the association between sitting posture and adolescent musculoskeletal pain, might reflect invalid and/or unreliable posture measurement instruments.
Though Sax promoted his creation as an orchestral instrument, unreliable intonation hindered its integration into the orchestra.
A better reply is surely that not every disturbance in the air is audible by us: that a measuring instrument is unreliable over some range is no argument that it is unreliable over every range.
The instrument was unreliable with a problematic production, particularly when a shipment of 150 units to Japan caused interference with local television reception.
