Failure

Failure is the social concept of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and is usually viewed as the opposite of success.

Finding useful and effective criteria or heuristics to judge the success or failure of a situation may itself be a significant task.

Cultural historian Scott Sandage argues that the concept of failure underwent a metamorphosis in the United States over the course of the 19th century.

Initially, Sandage notes, financial failure, or bankruptcy, was understood as an event in a person's life: an occurrence, not a character trait.

Most of the items listed below had high expectations, significant financial investments, and/or widespread publicity, but fell far short of success.

Due to the subjective nature of "success" and "meeting expectations", there can be disagreement about what constitutes a "major flop".

Wan and Chan note that outcome and process failures are associated with different kinds of detrimental effects to the consumer.

Mount Holyoke assigned letter grades A through E, with E indicating lower than 75% performance and designating failure.

[11] Randolph Clarke, commenting on Smith's work, suggests that "[w]hat makes [a] failure to act an omission is the applicable norm".

This failure to confirm the presence of the aether would later provide support for Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

[13] Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly explains that a great deal can be learned from things going wrong unexpectedly, and that part of science's success comes from keeping blunders "small, manageable, constant, and trackable".