John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, coined what he called the "Jeane Dixon effect", which refers to the tendency of the mass media to hype or exaggerate a few correct predictions by a psychic, guaranteeing that they will be remembered, while forgetting or ignoring the much more numerous incorrect predictions. Dixon made thousands of predictions (often appearing by the score at regular intervals such as in the New Year's edition of "The National Enquierer"), and just as a broken watch is correct twice a day, Dixon was bound to be correct or approximately correct some of the time.
