"wet bias"

From: Retronaut

"Predictions are hard—especially about the future. It must have taken superhuman will for New York Times FiveThirtyEight blogger and columnist Nate Silver to avoid quoting Yogi Berra in the course of writing his engaging and sophisticated new book, The Signal and the Noise, especially because the line is so directly on point. The essential problem of prediction is that while forecasts are 'about' the future, the data on which they’re based are generally data about the past….

     Good forecasters are meticulous, open-minded, eager for more data, and rigorous in checking their ideas. You want foxes, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, rather than hedgehogs who simply assimilate new information into a strongly held big idea. Ideologues do a poor job of making political forecasts, presumably for reasons of bias. It’s easier to make good predictions when you have large samples of solid data, as in baseball, than when forced to deal with sketchy information or small samples.

     Forecasts may even be deliberately biased: The National Weather Service is pretty good at short-term weather predictions, but local TV newscasts deliberately and systematically overstate the chances of rain. This 'wet bias' occurs because the audience is more upset when they’re caught in an unexpected shower without their umbrella than when predicted rain fails to materialize."
— Matthew Yglesias, Slate
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Heavy Words

The caption of this photo reads:

"September 1942. Linotype operators in composing room of the New York Times newspaper." These machines cast lines of type (Linotype) from molten lead prior to their assembly by compositors into the printing plates that go on the presses. Photo by Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information."
— Shorpy

See and read more (the "comments" section is quite informative) here...

To view a documentary about hot-metal type and typesetting before the mid-seventies, go here...

"There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it." — Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898

From: Eureka Booksellers

"Federal Election Commission records show that the former Godfather's Pizza executive [Herman Cain] paid more than $64,000 of his presidential campaign funds to his motivational speaking company, T.H.E. New Voice Inc., for copies of his own books [...]
Cain says the books are being given away to supporters to acquaint voters with his life story. One of the books in question, Cain's autobiography This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House, was in fourth place on the New York Times bestseller list over the weekend." — Lindsey Boerma, CBS News
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