Getting it wrong is a small matter, but it seems in a subtle way to bear out the provincialism-of-the-big-city syndrome.
Numerous examples can be found in the behavior of investors and analysts in the stock market, where people exhibit irrational behavior just because they overestimate their ability or perceive that the probability of being wrong is very small.
An important principle is that the variance introduced by measuring "the wrong thing" in the multiple-choice is small in comparison with the error variance associated with the open-ended format given its low reliability.
There is nothing wrong with being small or medium-sized if you are a specialist in your field: in terms of income per partner, the world's most successful consulting firm is a medium-sized financial specialist, First Manhattan, which in 1995 had an annual revenue per professional of $760,000, compared with only $493,000 for the next-best-performing firm, McKinsey.
The chances that Mrs. Lundgren's tests results are wrong are "very small," Dr. Wain said.
The benefits are easily realised, the costs are reasonable, and the risks of something going wrong are relatively small.
Still, the risk of something going wrong was very small, and the potential for dramatic progress was very high.
Sniffing out fraud and shorting its perpetrators has been a nice earner for Asia's hedge funds.For home-grown hedge funds the big problem is not being wrong: it is being small.
Specific to the concerns of Thai OSM, we acknowledge that mistakes have been made in Thailand and would like to assure the community that they do not have to be unduly alarmed, as the number of wrong edits made are small and were rectified immediately as soon as we were alerted to them.
One global plan that has gone wrong is the Focus, the small Ford Motor model that is built in the U.S. and Europe.
