Then, when they delivered a fairly ordinary performance, the press were ready to pounce.

BBC: Steve Harmison takes a wicket

Others allowed hedge funds to make quick in-and-out transactions with fund shares, thus hurting portfolio performance for the ordinary investor.

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Buy-out executives themselves admit that performance will be more ordinary in future, since debt, which powered private-equity firms' profits, won't quickly return to pre-crisis levels.

ECONOMIST: Private equity

If the incentive effects of performance-related pay for ordinary folk are unproven, the effect of stock options is even harder to demonstrate.

ECONOMIST: A survey on pay

Allowing for the quick change means that a big car can get reasonably good fuel mileage in ordinary driving but rev high when more performance is wanted.

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Twenty years ago, Dr Ericsson tried to prove it by training some ordinary laboratory volunteers up to prodigy-level performance in a number-memory task.

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Not quite, the Lumia 900 has its strengths, coming mainly in the form of optics, but it's the overall package and performance that's simply too plain, too ordinary, too dependable to merit the haughty flagship halo it aspires to emanate.

ENGADGET: Nokia Lumia 900 review Mobile

The review included addressing the investment performance of the company and the discount at which the company's ordinary shares traded to their net asset value.

BBC: Alliance Trust defeats shareholder's review bid

But a lesson of the past century is that government can influence the behavior of big corporations, by requiring transparency about their performance and costs, and by enacting rules and limitations to protect the ordinary citizen.

NEWYORKER: Big Med

But what the data do not do is compare hedge fund performance with that of mutual funds--those comparatively boring investment pools for ordinary mortals.

FORBES: Why Hedge Funds?