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The Sukhoi-led Russian Regional Jet (RRJ) program awaits approval to take off in July this year, but much depends on Boeing, as the U.S. aerospace giant contemplates its role in the project, so far restricted to sharing expertise in marketing and aircraft design with its Russian partners. Boeing plans to make a decision this summer.
Sukhoi began studies on a regional jet in 2000, and attempted a union with U.S. startup Alliance Aircraft, but soon realized it needs a "heavier weight" foreign partner to make the project a success both domestically and internationally. Boeing chairman and CEO Phil Condit first mentioned the joint effort during a visit to Russia in April last year. At last year's Paris Air Show Boeing signed a letter of intent with Sukhoi and Ilyushin, and Sukhoi assumed the lead role in the project in
August. Boeing agreed to share its expertise in aircraft development, maintenance and U.S. certification, and pro-mised help in international marketing and after-sales support. In December the parties completed a joint market study and a business plan that called for launch in the middle of this year.
In early April a joint working group session took place in Seattle involving more than 50 specialists from Sukhoi, Ilyushin, Boeing and Russian investment firm Troika-Dialog. At that time, the first session of the RRJ technical council was held. "We detailed technical specifications, and corrected market prognosis in light of recent data from Boeing sales centers and the response of Russian airlines to our proposal," Andrei Ilyin, general director of Sukhoi's civil aircraft division, told AIN. During this meeting Sukhoi presented the newly appointed chief designer for the project.
Yuri Ivashechkin, who previously headed the Sukhoi Su-25 attack aircraft and Mikoyan MiG-110 twin turboprop programs, said the meeting in Seattle allowed the parties to share their views on the RRJ's shape. It was there they agreed to pursue a family concept, with the 75-seat RRJ-75 coming first, followed by the shortened RRJ-55 and then the extended RRJ-95, all sharing the same wing, avionics, systems and powerplants.
The parties will attend another working group session this month in Moscow to review the project and select engine and avionics suppliers. The RRJ business plan and technical specification should be finalized next month, when the partners plan to decide whether to launch full-scale development of the airplane. Speaking to AIN during the last days of April, Ilyin said that between five and six years would be needed for development, certification and building a production line. "We will not establish a production line unless sufficient orders are secured in the next two years," he said. Three years of full-scale production would allow the project to break even, he estimated.
Ilyin estimates research and development (R&D) on the airframe at $600 million. The powerplant would take an extra $600- to $700 million, to be covered by the engine supplier on risk-sharing terms. Suppliers of avionics and major on-board systems will also be selected from the applicants willing to develop their products with their own money.
So far the RRJ partners have funded development work from their own budgets. In part, the required funding may come from the Russian state budget, provided Sukhoi and Ilyushin win respective governmental tenders. The federal program "Development of Civil Aviation in 2002-2010 and up to 2015" validated by the Russian government last October 15, allocated 1.2 billion rubles ($40 million) for the 50-seat Tu-324 and 1.62 billion rubles ($54 million) for the 102-seat Tupolev Tu-334, but nothing for the RRJ. Yet state funding of 1.46 billion rubles ($48.6 million) is preserved in the 2006 to 2015 timeframe for "a new regional airplane" powered by a "four- to five-ton engine" funded separately by another 2 billion rubles ($66.6 million). The state also funds development of the Unified Integrated Avionics IKBO-2003, set for certification next year for use on the Tu-324, Tu-204 and Beriev Be-200, and a next-generation IKBO-2005. The RRJ can benefit from those allocations.
Finding funds remains a key question, Ilyin agreed, and that is being done "in the Western way," by getting early commitments from airlines and leasing companies, attracting investors and using the capital of the manufacturers. For added appeal to outside investors, a head company managing the project is to be established, in the form of a U.S.-Russian joint venture.
Any connection with Sukhoi's military programs is to be avoided, Ilyin said, noting the creation of Sukhoi Civil Aircraft more than a year ago. At this stage neither of Russia's production factories manufacturing Sukhoi's highly successful combat jets–KnAAPO and IAPO– has helped with the project.
It appears unlikely they will become involved in the RRJ, except as investors. "Both are well supported by military orders and civil programs already under way," explained a Sukhoi spokesman. "And besides, we do not want any military connection."
A deliberate avoidance of KnAAPO and IAPO–with their capital and CAD/CAM capability– could prove problematic. None of Russia's "civil only" factories is financially healthy, and all need considerable investment to establish production of an all-new regional jet. "It is a challenge, but there is no other way," Ilyin said.
Plans call for selecting a suitable factory this year. An RRJ manufacturing site is to be a new facility, equipped with modern programmable machine tools, and set up either within the territory of the selected plant or in the vicinity.
The partners plan to design the entire RRJ using Dassault/IBM Catia software, having chosen the system over the Russian standard, Unigraphics. The bulk of manufacturing work on the airframe will be done by Sukhoi Civil Aircraft engineers. Ilyin said that Sukhoi can also do some design work if necessary. Sukhoi designers have experience with computer-aided design technologies from military programs. It remains unclear whether Ilyushin engineers working in Boeing's Moscow Design Center or Boeing's own specialists will lead the CAD effort.
The RRJ team chose design parameters to meet Russian and CIS airline requirements. Potential customers have asked for 70 to 80 seats with extended range, so that the RRJ can replace the Boeing 737 and Tu-154 on mainline routes in the low season, and reach the middle of Siberia from Moscow.
Sukhoi formed an advisory committee of 13 Russian and three CIS airlines, among them Aeroflot, which signed a letter of intent for 30 aircraft. Fleet forecasts estimate a need for 150 units within the Russian market. The first RRJ, set for delivery in late 2006 or the "first quarter of 2007 at the very latest," would go to a Russian operator.
Maintenance departments would use technologies and procedures similar to those used on the Boeing 737. The Russian privately owned East Line group is investing $40- to $45 million in a Boeing maintenance center at Domodedovo Airport, on the base of the existing ATB Domodedovo maintenance station. The RRJ would undergo maintenance there.
The RRJ is to be competitive with the Embraer 170 and Fairchild Dornier 728 families on the international market. "Our advantage will be an integral one; we are planning to offer customers the same or better performance in every field, including after-sales support and maintenance, and all at a lower sticker price," Ilyin said. Boeing "is talking to its major customers in the U.S.," he added. Forecasts predict a total market for RRJ-like aircraft of 5,000 by 2020. Ilyin said that his plan is to capture at least 10 percent of the market.
The basic RRJ-75, with a mtow of 79,432 lb, will transport 75 economy-class passengers 1,450 nm; alternatively, eight business-class and 60 economy-class seats will be installed. The fuselage cross-section is a single-aisle 2+3-seat (five abreast) layout. In the shortened form–two cuts, each 5.3 ft ahead of and aft of the wing-fuselage connection–it becomes the 72,245-lb RRJ-55, seating 55 passengers. Under consideration is a 95-seat RRJ-95, with two plugs each measuring 5.3 ft, to carry 95 people in a high-density layout or eight business-class and 80 economy-class passengers.
All family members will use common landing gear and wings with area of 753 sq ft and span of 86 ft. Special long-range versions–the RRJ-55LR, 75LR and 95LR, respectively–would carry a mtow of 79,322, 88,052 and 95,901 lb. The RRJ-55LR with a full passenger load would have a range of 2,700 nm.
The RRJ would appear on the market well after competing designs from Bombardier, Embraer, Fairchild Dornier and Tupolev, and thus can be a contender only if it offers notably better performance and cost-effectiveness particularly from the powerplant.
A tender is already in place, with the Pratt & Whitney Canada PW800, Snecma/NPO Saturn SM146, GE CF34-8E and Rolls-Royce BR710 in the bidding. The Ukraine's ZMKB Progress AI22, due for certification next year, may also enter the competition. Engine and airframe production in Russia stands as a requirement to escape from heavy import taxes, and to achieve competitive prices on Russian and international markets.
Snecma has teamed with Russia's largest engine specialist, NPO Saturn, on the SM146, while Pratt & Whitney Canada, with the PW800, has joined with Aviadvigatel, after the latter gave up the early idea to bid with its own PS9. GE's offer of the CF34 and a Rolls-Royce proposition stand behind the leaders "politically," as they have not collaborated with Russian manufacturers. There is no firm requirement that the RRJ engine be produced in Russia, but such an option will be favored.
Snecma began development of the DM21 gas-generator demonstrator in 1999, and it was due to begin tests by the end of last month. It would provide a base for the SM146's hot section, while NPO Saturn develops the rest of the engine.
If selected, the SM146 will enter full-scale development by year-end and vie for certification in December 2005, enabling first RRJ delivery in 2007, said NPO Saturn general director Yuri Lastochkin.


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Auditions Tuesday and Wednesday for WCP's Enchanted April
February 28, 2013
Windsor Community Playhouse auditions for Enchanted April will be held from 7-9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday at WCA, 561 E. Garden Drive, Unit A in Windsor.
According to a news release from WCA, roles available are five women, ranging in age from 20s to 70s, and three men, ranging in age from 20s to 50s.
Experience with upper-class English or Italian dialect would be a plus but is not mandatory. Auditions will include cold readings from the script.
Performance dates are April 26, 27, May 3, 4, 5, 10 and 11.
For more information contact director Kim Destree at email@example.com or call the Windsor Community Playhouse at (970) 674-1790.

subset: commoncrawl


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… 2015 brings the launch of "The Landy Awards" which have been put together by the team over at Search Engine Land. The awards have been created to recognise agencies and in-house marketing teams as well as the key individuals within the digital marketing industry. Each award will be given to the application who has proven to have demonstrated…


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Join Eric Keller for an in-depth discussion in this video Combining final gathering with global illumination, part of Maya: Lighting and Rendering with mental ray.
To improve the quality of your indirect lighting, you can actually use both global illumination and final gathering techniques at the same time within a single scene. This can help deal with some of the quality issues of both types of indirect lighting. So to just show you quickly how you can set this up, I'm in my simple room scene. I'm going to press 5 to switch to Shaded mode. You can see I have my lamp here and my three simple shapes. So, I'll do a quick render here to see what this looks like. The lamp is using an area light. The shape of the area light is set to sphere, so that the area light is casting nice, soft shadows.
You can see this right here. So, the softness of the shadows is created by the area light, and it's also coming through the lampshade just a little bit. So now I want to add some indirect lighting into the room, so that the light coming out of the lamp is bouncing around, and we can start to see the other objects in the room. So, I'll store this really quickly, and I'll start by creating a point light that will emit photons, essentially global illumination. So, I'll switch to the Wireframe view by pressing 4 and pull this over so that it's basically inside my lamp.
I'm going to switch to the Top view and position this right here so it's in the center of the lamp, and I'll go back to the camera1 and tuck it in the lampshade. That's pretty good! So, now that I have my point light, I'll just call this photonCaster, so we know what it's doing, I'll go to the photonCasterShape node in the Attribute editor by clicking on this tab. I'm going to turn on Emit Photons. This is the default setting, so I have my Photon Color, the Intensity, and the Exponent are all default settings.
Notice that I can't get to the number of photons. In order to make this active, for some reason, you have to turn on Global Illumination first. So, I'll go to the Render Settings window, click on the Indirect Lighting tab, and turn on Global Illumination. So, now I have these settings and these settings, and once again, sometimes, if you turn this off and turn it on again, now I have my Global Illumination Photons available. I'm going to boost this up to about 100,000 and create another render. A couple of things that you want to make sure that you don't forget.
I need to set the Intensity to 0, because I don't want this shedding any direct lighting. So that should be 0. So all this light is doing is emitting photons into the scene, no direct lighting. So, let's create another test render. I'm going to store that. It's a little bit blotchy, as you could see, and some of this is somewhat blown out. So, couple things I can do to fix that problem. I'm going to reduce this scale a little bit, bring this down, so it's not making so much brightness in the room. I'm going to improve the Accuracy of the Global Illumination.
I'll set this up to 1500 and do another test render. So, this is what we get. It looks better in terms of its less blotchy, but you could see on the sphere here, we still have some blotchiness in the green color. The quality of the shadow, of course, this can be improved by adjusting the Sampling setting on the area light. I'm going to leave that alone for right now. Just so you know, this doesn't have anything to do with the Indirect Lighting settings; that's all based on the area light sampling. So, I'll save that image, and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on Final Gathering.
So, I'll scroll in the Render Settings window, under the Indirect Lighting tab, down to Final Gathering. I'll turn this on, and I like to increase my Secondary Diffuse Bounces, so that we get more bounces out of our indirect lighting. So, I'm going to set this up to 1, and store this image, and create another render. Now this one will take longer, but we'll see if it actually helps deal with some of the blotchiness on this green sphere. So, now we have our renders complete, and you can see that some of the problems on the sphere have been alleviated just by turning on Final Gathering.
If I store this and compare it with the previous render, you can see, this is what I get. So, there we have fairly blotchy coloring on the sphere, and now some of those problems have gone away. We've improved the image quality. This is with using fairly low Final Gathering settings. So, if I store this image, and just as an experiment, turn off Global Illumination, let's see how it looks with just Final Gathering and no Global Illumination. So, this is the rendering with just Final Gathering settings put on.
You can see I'm getting some strange green glowing down here. So you can see how using them both together at the same time in the scene can help create much more realistic lighting than using just one or the other. They really work well together if you start to combine the strengths of both. So, there's just Global Illumination, here's just Final Gathering, and here is Global Illumination and Final Gathering together.
- Understanding computer-generated lighting
- Creating depth map and ray traced shadows
- Softening and shaping shadows
- Working with global illumination
- Lighting with the caustic settings
- Applying physical and portal shaders
- Adding depth of field with the Bokeh shader
- Splitting a scene into render layers
- Comparing render passes and render layers


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What is Medical Billing and Coding?
Medical billing is submitting and following up claims to Insurance companies for medical treatment. The Medial Biller interacts between the health care provider and Insurance Companies, Government programs or private individuals. The work is detailed and suits individuals who like to be precise.
Because the process is complex it requires considerable care, especially if the bill is not to be refused by an Insurance Company. To do this successfully it is important to understand the numerous medical insurance plans, as well as the laws and regulations connected with them.
This is, in reality, two different jobs. Each medical process bears a code and this stage is called coding. The health care provider makes a diagnosis, decides the medication needed, considers the symptoms or the treatment required, each process has a code. Entering these codes correctly into the paper work is vital if the system is to run smoothly. When this has been done the second stage starts and the Biller checks the work is correct and distributes the bill. This is usually done electronically. It is possible to specialize in either job or do both.
Rates of payment for each code are predetermined between the health care provider and the Insurance Company. Medical Billers are needed in hospitals, large Health Care Facilities, private Medical Clinics and Medical Insurance Companies and they are becoming more common. Because much of this work is done online rather than through paper work, this is a job that can be done from home. Having a medical billing degree will help in further enhancing one's career and in addition will add more credibility.
Legal Matters
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996) ensures certain things, including that the Medical Profession follow regulations to provide services but protect patient's records.
Title 1 ensures protection for someone and their family when they lose a job.
Title 2 is the electronic transmission of financial and administrative dealing including billing, electronic claims and reimbursement advice
What Qualifications do you Need?
In theory none and the level of entry requires lower educational levels than for other medical fields. However, medical Billers are being encouraged to become certified by taking the CMBS exam or the RHIA exam. These can be done online. At the same time the better educated the person is the greater their chance of being employed. It is worth ensuring you train with an accredited medical billing school for the best qualifications and training.
Current Procedural Terminology is the registered trademark of Medical Billing.
The amount of salary received will depend on a number of things. The geographical location you live in, that is areas which are expensive to live in demand higher pay, the type of company you work for, your educational level and the amount of experience in the work you have.
Advancement and therefore pay increases can come from different sources. If you become a supervisor or member of the management team your pay scales will be higher. Specialization in various areas like medical coding and cancer registry can also be useful.
On going education is important to keep up to date with the constant changes in coding and the details of the work. Finding an employer who will pay for this continuous education is a helpful way of staying up to date without it costing you money. There are also many online colleges that offer online medical billing programs.
This is one of the fastest growing careers and there are numerous advancement opportunities so it is a good foundation for other clerical work. Increasingly Medical Billing is being taken over by specialist organizations. They can avoid mismanagement of the accounts, simple errors and can keep track of cash flow more easily than a busy health care provider. There is usually a forty hour week, working from Monday to Friday. Pay can be up to forty dollars an hour. However, individual salaries will be determined by the levels of training and how effectively that person uses their skills. Patience is required because bills can be refused by the Insurance Companies but they can also be resubmitted.
|Ultimate Medical Academy
A Leader in Healthcare Training – UMA is a dynamic career school that has been exclusively focused on training students to succeed in the healthcare industry for over 15 years. We are ABHES accredited. ABHES is the only agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as both an institutional and specialized accreditor focusing on health care education and training.
|Bryant & Stratton College
Bryant & Stratton College has been providing quality education since 1854. That's over 150 years of experience. Learning, growth, and success aren't just words at Bryant & Stratton — they're the foundations of our college. They're at the heart of what we do every day, for every one of our students, from enrollment to graduation and beyond. Our first-rate faculty supports our students by providing the kind of personalized attention they deserve. The curriculum is grounded in the belief that every student is unique — that's what makes a Bryant & Stratton education so special.
|Everest College
At Everest College, you will gain the career training and critical skills needed to start a rewarding career. You are assured of a valuable education that responds to the needs of industry. Everest College continually evaluates and updates educational programs in such fields as Medical Assisting, Medical Billing and Computerized Office Applications. Our instructors have the ability to motivate and develop your talents to their greatest potential, and get you ready for today's business world.
|Kaplan College
Looking to gain a competitive edge in your career? Kaplan College offers a learning experience that is anything but typical. Our faculty and staff are not just academics—they're seasoned professionals who can give you the real-world knowledge you need to succeed. And we offer a flexible and accelerated schedule designed to meet the needs of your busy life.
|View a complete list of colleges that offer Medical Billing Degrees Online


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"Nurses, doctors, and other professionals are hugely important to any real improvements to chronic care, but they aren't always around. Technology can help fill the gaps, possibly in a way that may even help an individual feel more like an empowered person, less like a helpless patient. There's growing momentum around the idea that the consumer electronics of the future must not only entertain us when we're on the couch but also help us get off the couch, and not only keep us connected with each other but also with ourselves and our bodies.
There's a world of opportunity for the connected home to better support people who are managing chronic disease. While there's a lot of diversity in the conditions that fall under the heading of "chronic," from cancer to depression, and there are clearly no one-size-fits-all solutions, there are some common things a home-care ecosystem should provide."


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There's a lot of distance between Cedar City and the Salt Lake Valley, so this is a chance for us to come up and get to know the players —Ed Lamb, SUU head football coach
SOUTH JORDAN — For many student-athletes, June has been spent traveling from one football camp to another. Some have attended as many as a dozen camps in that time. What made this week's camp a little different was that the Southern Utah University Thunderbirds football staff held it at the campus of Bingham High School.
This is the second year that SUU head coach Ed Lamb and the Thunderbirds' coaching staff have traveled three-plus hours from Cedar City to host a one-day, limited contact camp. Just over 160 student-athletes attended the camp, almost double the attendance from last year.
"There's a lot of distance between Cedar City and the Salt Lake Valley, so this is a chance for us to come up and get to know the players," Lamb said.
This last spring, the Thunderbirds received letters of intent from multiple players from northern Utah's 2014 class. Notables include Tanner Redding (WR, Bountiful), Max Anae (LB/DL, Orem), Guillermo Fierro (OL, Pine View, St. George), and Sione Lapuaho (DL, Hunter).
The Thunderbirds coaching staff is expecting great things again this year when it comes to recruiting efforts. "We're looking for length, strength and positive attitude. And we can't expect that the guys making plays out here aren't already being recruited by other schools," Lamb said.
When it comes to attracting players to Cedar City, they look for players who have "development potential, positive attitudes and solid GPAs. We won't overlook guys who make plays regardless of their size and speed. Playmakers are hard to come by," Lamb said.
The Thunderbirds are coming off one of the most challenging seasons in recent history, so finding solid recruits is a priority for SUU football. Holding the camp at Bingham High School has proved to be a success, with players attending from all over the Rocky Mountains, including Idaho, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.
When it comes to size and speed, these players cover the entire range. So SUU got what it was looking for this year.
Players who attended the camp include Tyler Himes (RB, Davis), Tevita Tauteoli (OL, Hunter), Colton Miller (WR/DB, Pine View, St. George), Hunter Red (TE, Queen Creek, Arizona), Cole Clemens (OL, Bingham), Damon Dance (TE, Snake River, Blackfoot, Idaho), Bradley Quick (DL/OL, Bountiful), Asueru Semeatu (WR/FS, Cyprus), Justin Miller (QB, Lone Peak), Jason Money (QB, Spanish Fork), Tanner Thompson (QB, Hillcrest), Josh McMillan (TE, Herriman), Alan Caudillo (OLB, Rigby, Idaho), Dillon Bennett (DE, Herriman), Mason Ewing (DE, Layton), Brock Larsen (DL, Bountiful), Adrian Rodriguez (OL, Spanish Fork), Alassane Niang (WR/DB, Highland), and Dominieke Jones (CB, Bingham).
All the student-athletes experienced a camp filled with high energy and rapid-fire drills with particular focus on position fundamentals. Coaches stressed the importance of excellent citizenship, maintaining a focus on academics and working hard toward their goals. "While there is a good recruiting benefit for SUU, these camps work best when it's about helping the guys learn the fundamentals of football and teaching hard work on and off the field," Lamb said.
Utah high schools kick off the fall season of football in just over eight weeks.
Bill Quick, an Idaho native, studied communications, history and business at the University of Utah. He is the Sr. Director of Marketplace Operations at Deseret Digital Media and Deseret Connect Contributor. Email him at email@example.com


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"Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon was released for the Wii on July 8, 2008 with a MSRP of $39.99. The game was developed by h.a.n.d. and published by Square Enix, and it received an ESRB rating of "Everyone 10+" with "Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes" listed as content for gamers and parents to be aware of.
How many hours have U.S. Wii owners spent retrieving memories in Chocobo's Dungeon? Brew yourself some coffee, and let's take a look!", writes CoffeeWithGames.


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The Max AP 10 ft. x 20 ft. Screen Enclosure kit turns your existing 10 ft. x 20 ft. canopy into an Instant Screen House. Anywhere. Anytime. Expand the use of your canopy with our ready-to-go Screen House Kit. The perfect canopy accessory for camping, picnic areas, backyard, events and much more.
- Enclosure kit only - canopy frame and cover sold separately
- Complete screen house enclosure kit includes: 10 ft. x 20 ft. mesh fabric screen, bungee fasteners, easy step by step instructions
- Fits 1-3/8 in. and 2 in. frame
- Constructed of quality, durable, poly screen material tightly woven to keep the insects out and the airflow coming in
- Sturdy zippered screen allows for easy access and can be moved to any position on the canopy
- Heavy-duty tiebacks at all corners allow for quick installation and take down
- Quick and easy set-up as it attaches to canopy frame in minutes with bungee fasteners
- Fits all 10 ft. x 20 ft. Max AP and super max canopy frames


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TDP MP Nandamuri Hari Krishna met the party chief Chandra Babu Naidu on Monday.
Speaking to the media later, he said he met Naidu as he was touring his father late NTR's native district. He said it was improper on the part of the Congress MP Lagadapati Rajagopal to stall Naidu's yatra on the Samaikya Andhra issue. He asserted that no force could disrupt Naidu's yatra. He said the 'Vastunna Meekosam' pada yatra of Naidu was progressing with the overwhelming support of the people. TDP MLA Motkupalli Narasimhulu said if Naidu's yatra was obstructed, TDP workers would themselves teach a lesson.


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When Michigan fired offensive coordinator Al Borges last week, there was at least one high profile recruit who seemed a bit stunned via social media.
That would be five-star 2015 running back Damien Harris, currently a Michigan commitment.
Harris, however, won't have to wait long to meet the new man in charge of Michigan's offense.
247sports.com's Steve Lorenz reported Monday that new offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier's first official recruiting trip as a Michigan coach will be to visit Harris, a Berea, Ky. native.
Nussmeier is known for his work with quarterbacks, but he's also had great success with running backs during his time as an offensive coordinator.
Chris Polk rushed for more than 4,000 yards in three years with Nussmeier at Washington (2009-2011). Eddie Lacy and T.J. Yeldon ran for a combined 2,430 yard at Alabama in 2012, while Yeldon, Kenyan Drake and Derrick Henry combined to rush for 2,311 yards in 2013.
Shortly after Michigan fired Borges from his post as offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach last Wednesday, Harris took to Twitter to share his thoughts on the news.
"Man..... I can't believe this about Coach Borges," Harris tweeted last Wednesday.
From there, ESPN.com's Tom VanHaaren got in contact with Harris' mother, who explained how the family felt a sense of "shock" when it heard about Borges' firing at Michigan, and they were taking time to let everything "sink in."
With the decommitment of five-star wide receiver George Campbell from Michigan's 2015 class, Harris -- ESPN's No. 1-ranked running back in '15 -- is the Wolverines' highest-rated verbal in that group.
Of course, Harris still has more than a year to go before he's allowed to sign a Letter of Intent.
And, apparently, Nussmeier's not wasting any time making sure Harris knows how much he's still wanted in Ann Arbor.
-- Download the Michigan football on MLive app for iPhone and Android
-- Download the Michigan basketball on MLive app for iPhone and Android
-- Follow Nick Baumgardner on Twitter
-- Like MLive's Michigan Wolverines Facebook


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Magic in charge! Make no mistake, big guy Magic Slim (Morris Holt) and his gang of three are the premier Chicago blues band on the road and in the recording …
Video Rating: 5 / 5
Magic Slim and the Teardrops – So easy to love you.
Video Rating: 4 / 5


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DIVISION 3 - Design
Mission: To provide practical knowledge concerning the problems and needs, risks and rewards, and duties and liabilities of each of the parties involved in the design process, with particular emphasis on design delivery and implementation, construction project development, and project economics and financing in both the public and private sectors.
Chair: Buck S. Beltzer, Holland & Hart, Denver, Colorado
Hot Topic Calls
§ February 5, 2014: Marion Hack and Glenn Turner discusses City of Victorville v. Carter & Burgess, which held that design professionals have a fiduciary duty to their clients.
§ May 7, 2014: Topic to be determined.
Writing Projects
§ Matt Ninneman, Theresa Ringle, and Steve Scharr prepared a chapter on design for the Subcontracting book. Expected publication in 2014.
§ Ben Cornelius and Michael Kamprath prepared an article on the topic of "Good Samaritan" laws in design/construction.
§ Mark Mercante and Doug Jeremiah are co-chairing a subcommittee to create a 50-state survey of licensing requirements for design professionals.
Meeting Events:
Breakfast/Lunch Programs
§ Joint breakfast meeting with Division 2 (Washington, D.C.): Assignments of Design or Construction Contracts presented by Bruce Merwin and Matt Ninneman.
§ Mid-Winter 2014 Meeting (Atlantis, Bahamas): Lunch event with Division 2, including a presentation on behind the scenes of the Atlantis Resort.
§ Dinner event with Divisions 2 and 9 (Atlantis, Bahamas): Barbecue on the Beach
Outreach Events
§ Tour of Octagon Building (Washington D.C.): Tour followed by a presentation of the new AIA BIM documents and networking cocktail reception
§ Meeting with EJCDC Representatives (Washington, D.C.): Interested members of Division 3 met with EJCDC representatives to review and provide commentary on the EJCDC draft model concessionaire agreement for PPPs.
Upcoming Meeting Events
§ Spring 2014 Meeting (New Orleans): Division 3 plans to participate in the Ace Mentor program module with local high school students as the Division's lunch program.
Opportunities to Get Involved: Division 3 has monthly meeting calls that generally occur on the first Tuesday of each month at 2:00 p.m. (EST). In addition, Division 3 routinely offers "hot topic calls" on which emerging trends, new cases, and significant happenings in the construction industry are discussed. The Division also facilitates writing and speaking opportunities for its members. Division 3 members are often solicited by other trade groups to contribute to the review or editing of standard form contracts and trade documents. Anyone interested in joining Division 3 can contact Buck Beltzer at email@example.com.
DIVISION 5 – Project Performance
Mission: Study of legal issues that arise for project stakeholders in the course of the construction process and the provision of practical advice on managing construction risks.
Chair: Marilyn Klinger, Sedgwick LLP, Los Angeles, California
Presentation Series: "You Would Not Believe What Just Happened: ________________. Now What Do We Do?"
Construction Company Survey: "What Keeps You Up At Night? and What Steps Are You Taking to Get Some Sleep?"
Meeting Events:
Looking Forward
On March 17, 2014, Mike Koger of the American Institute of Architects will present "You Wouldn't Believe What Happened: Our Only Person who Knows Construction Just Left and We Need Someone to Manage our New Campus Construction. Now What Do We Do?"
In New Orleans, on Friday morning, April 11, 2014, Division 5 will join up with Division 3 (Design) for a presentation by New Orleans high school ACE Mentor students negotiating a contract pursuant to the Construction Forum's Construction Contract Negotiation Module.
Also in New Orleans, on Thursday evening, April 10, 2014, Division 5 will have its famous Dutch Treat dinner at a location TBD, organized by Charlie Rogers of Smith Currie.
Recent Activities
In the Bahamas, Division 5 joined up with the Forum Young Lawyers Division for an interactive lunch session on contract negotiation using the ACE Mentor Construction Contract Negotiation Module prepared by the Construction Forum. Division 5 also had its traditional Dutch Treat dinner at Mesa in the Atlantis Hotel & Spa.
On February 18, 2014, Jonathan Dunn of Sedgwick LLP presented: "You Would Not Believe What Happened: We Just Dug Up An Indian Burial Site/A Barrel Of Toxic Waste/Jimmy Hoffa!! – Now What Do We Do? Differing Site Conditions.
On December 16, 2013, David Kirschbaum and Wayne DeFlaminis of Baker Tilly presented: "You Wouldn't Believe What Happened: The Project Manager Just Showed up in a Lamborghini! What Do We Do Now? Options for when you suspect fraud on the job site.
On August 18, 2013, Amy Iannone of DPR Construction presented: "You Wouldn't Believe What Happened: My Construction Company Just Bought Another Construction Company. Now What Do We Do?
Opportunities to Get Involved: Division 5 has monthly telephone conferences on the third Monday of most every month at 6:00 p.m. (EST) to discuss upcoming events, the status of projects, the Forum goings on, and to listen to our "You Would Not Believe What Just Happened: ________________. Now What Do We Do?" Presentation Series.
Interested? Please contact Marilyn Klinger (firstname.lastname@example.com).
DIVISION 10 – Legislation and Environmental
Mission: To assemble and publish to Forum members all pertinent existing legislation and recent case law dealing with both construction and environmental issues, with a special emphasis on monitoring the "green" or sustainable trends emerging in the construction industry.
Chair: Edward B. Gentilcore, Sherrard, German & Kelly, P.C., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Report from Division 10 — Legislation and Environmental — for Winter 2014
Projects: We continue to advance to publication this year's edition of the annual 50 State Construction Law Update and the latest edition of Division 10's newsletter, "2X4X10," which is just about to be released. Division 10 also continues its support of the Forum's publication of "Green Building and the Construction Lawyer: A Practical Guide to Transactional and Litigation Issues." We encourage you to visit our newly updated Webpage, http://apps.americanbar.org/dch/committee.cfm?com=CI110000, view the new content available, and download a copy of the Division 10 "Deliverables Calendar" for this bar year. This will help you keep in touch with the latest objectives/goals for Division 10.
Meeting Events: The Mid-Winter Meeting at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas was a very positive one for the Forum as well as Division 10. In addition to our former Chair, Keith Bergeron, serving as a Program Co-Chair, we had many Division 10 members on key panel sessions throughout the Program. We also had a very successful luncheon presentation, "Pipe Lines, Pipe Liens and ... Pipe Dreams: Facing the Challenge of Securing Payment of Natural Gas, Oil and Alternative Energy Projects," co-sponsored with Division 7 (Bonds, Liens and Insurance). A big thank you to Division 10's Rhonda Caviedes and Division 7 (Dan King, Troy Miller and Pat Poff) for helping put this luncheon session together. Another equally big thank you to Sam Laurin, of Bose, McKinney and Evans, for developing the content for and presenting at this well-attended program.
Right after the Mid-Winter Meeting, Division 10 held an Outreach Cookout Event on the West Beach of the Atlantis Resort. With the assistance of Asha Escheverria and Bridget Miller, this event turned out great and was an enjoyable way to close out the Mid-Winter Meeting with some collegiality and style. Keith Bergeron promises an equally unique and stylish dining experience in his hometown of New Orleans in April 2014, so register for the Annual Meeting now.
Please make sure to also join us for our next Full Committee Call to be held on Thursday, February 27, 2014, at 5:30 p.m. (EST) where we will discuss future events in more detail. This is a revised date for the call, so please make a note of it. More details will be posted to the Webpage in the next week and circulated via the ListServe.
Opportunities to Get Involved: A great number of opportunities to participate, research, write and present are currently available. We still need authors for our quarterly newsletter, 2X4X10 (repurposed articles welcome, too). Please reach out to Erin Fallon at firstname.lastname@example.com if you can assist us. Additionally, as noted above, Division 10 publishes the 50 State Construction Law Update on an annual basis, which includes state and federal case law and statutory updates on construction law, federal contracting, and environmental issues. Authors are welcome and needed (contact Angela Stephens at email@example.com for additional information).
We also still need two volunteers to run Division 10's new "Social Committee," and plan future for Forum meetings, including dinners and other social get-togethers. We have advanced key outreach and collaborative initiatives with a number of significant organizations having strong topical synergies with Division 10, including The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) and the ABA Section of Public Utility, Communications and Transportation Law (PUCTL). Your input and assistance would be most helpful in making these bonds with the AGC and PUTCL grow deeper and stronger.
The above are just a few examples of options for getting involved with Division 10. We welcome and need your assistance and energy now more than ever!
Questions? Interested? Please contact Ed Gentilcore (email@example.com).
DIVISION 12 – Owners & Lenders
Chair: Cathy Lilford Altman, Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, LLP, Dallas, Texas
Mission: To educate and provide practical advice on the unique concerns of owners and lenders in all aspects of the construction process.
Projects: Division 12 regularly publishes valuable checklists for owner/lender counsel. Check out our website at http://apps.americanbar.org/dch/committee.cfm?com=CI109001 for a sample of our publications.
Meeting Events: Join us in New Orleans for a joint lunch program with Division 10.
Opportunities to Get Involved: Please join us for our monthly conference calls on the second Wednesday every month at 12:00 p.m. (EST) and we will get you plugged in. Dial In: 866-646-6488 / Passcode: 6135774053.
Interested? Please contact Cathy Lilford Altman at email@example.com.
YLD: Forum Young Lawyers Division
Mission: Building the best young construction lawyers through fun, fellowship, and opportunities for leadership and professional development.
Great Fun, Great Lawyers, Great Opportunities.
Chair: Angela R. Stephens, Stites & Harbison, PLLC, Louisville, Kentucky
Projects: Community Service Event (New Orleans): Friday April 25, 2014, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Meeting Events: Division Dinner (New Orleans): Wednesday, April 23, 2014. The Forum Young Lawyers Division ("YLD") hosts a dinner and either a lunch or breakfast meeting at each national Forum meeting. We again will host a YLD dinner on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, at the 2014 Annual meeting in New Orleans. Contact Erik Raines at email@example.com for details and to rsvp.
Opportunities to Get Involved: The YLD seeks law students, young lawyers, and lawyers beginning the practice of construction law (lawyers either younger than 36 or practicing less than five years in construction law) to join the Forum Young Lawyers Division. If you fit either of these descriptions and are not yet a YLD member, please join us for free by visiting: http://apps.americanbar.org/committee_join/ocj_action.cfm?comid=CI780267 and entering your ABA contact information. The YLD needs you as we create new and fun opportunities for lawyers to become involved in the ABA Construction Forum. The YLD has opportunities for speaking and writing, and is a great way to meet future Forum leaders. Check out our webpage for opportunities:
Start getting involved by joining our conference call on the first Friday of the month at 11a.m. (EST). Call 866-646-6488 (Access Code: 426-558-1843). And follow us on Twitter: @ABAConstructYLD.


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In a sometimes harshly worded ruling, a panel of federal appellate judges Tuesday evening smacked down the Louisiana funeral board's continued attempts to prevent the St. Joseph Abbey monks from selling their hand-crafted caskets. "The great deference due state economic regulation (does not require) courts to accept nonsensical explanations for naked transfers of wealth," wrote Judges Patrick Higginbotham, Catharina Haynes and Stephen A. Higginson of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. "We insist that Louisiana's rules not be irrational."
The appellate judges sent the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court, refusing to consider the funeral board's appeal of a previous court's ruling that found it unconstitutional for the state to give funeral directors exclusive rights to sell caskets.
"Simply put, there is nothing in the licensing procedures that bestows any benefit to the public in the context of the retail sale of caskets," U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. ruled in July 2011. "The license has no bearing on the manufacturing and sale of coffins. It appears that the sole reason for these laws is the economic protection of the funeral industry," which he wrote is not "a valid government interest."
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed the abbey's timberland outside Covington, a longtime a source of revenue, the monks decided to sell their handmade caskets as a way to supplement their income. The abbey invested $200,000 in St. Joseph Woodworks and sold two types of caskets, "monastic" and "traditional," priced at $1,500 and $2,000 respectively, "significantly lower than those offered by funeral homes," the court ruling stated.
"To be sure, Louisiana does not regulate the use of a casket, container, or other enclosure for the burial remains; has no requirements for the construction or design of caskets; and does not require that caskets be sealed," according to the court. "Individuals may construct their own caskets for funerals in Louisiana or purchase caskets from out-of-state suppliers via the internet. Indeed, no Louisiana law even requires a person to be buried in a casket."
The monks did not offer funeral services, prepare the body for burial or participate in funerals, except as pastors.
In response, the Louisiana Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors sent the monks a cease-and-desist letter, threatening thousands of dollars in fines and up to 180 days in prison based on a law prohibiting the sale of coffins without a funeral director's license.
In their Tuesday ruling, the appellate judges took aim at that regulation, stating its sole purpose is to restrict the intrastate sales of coffins "to funeral homes. There are no other strictures over their quality or use. The district court found the state's scheme to be the last of its kind in the nation. The state board had never succeeded in any enforcement actions against a third party seller prior to its effort to halt the abbey's consumer sales."


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Seaton gets set for the blues
PUBLISHED: 18:30 08 February 2012
One of the most exciting and stylish new wave bands on the circuit, Bournemouth-based The Producers, will be performing in Seaton in March.
They are among the leaders of the current Blues phenomenon topped by Joe Bonamassa and John Mayer.
Concerned with feel and attitude rather than slavishly copying 'hand me down' American music, The Producers move effortlessly between their own well-crafted material and seriously reinvigorated classics stamped with their own characteristic identity.
They are barnstorming across the country building a massive audience at sell-out club dates and developing an equally impressive reputation that no-one can ignore.
Being invited to play prestigious festival slots is always a sign of a band on its way, however, receiving invitations to open concerts from luminaries like John Mayall, Taj Mahal, Dr John, Peter Green and Robert Cray has quickly led to The Producers becoming a major attraction in their own right.
With seven acclaimed albums, air play and live appearances across Europe, the States, Australia and New Zealand, The Producers are now playing headline dates and rightfully assuming a prominent position on blues awards podiums.
Dave Saunders and Harry Skinner formed The Producers in 1990. They went on to be one the most popular blues outfit in the country winning the 'Blues Band of the Year' award four times and releasing seven CD albums one of which Ain't No Love in the World was nominated for the Best Blues Album award.
They regularly sold out blues clubs around the country which led to larger theatre and art centre bookings nationwide.
Many festival headliners including Colne, Burnley, Utrecht, Stanley Blues, Dublin Templebar, Cork, Farnham, North Wales Blues Festival and many others were played.
This will be the first UK concert after a tour of The Bahamas, from the Caribbean seaside to the Seaton shores!
The Producers will be appearing at the Gateway Theatre, Seaton Town Hall, on Friday, March 9. Tickets cost £10 in advance from the box office on 01297 625699, or on the door for £12. Doors open at 7.30pm, with the performance due to start at 8.30pm.


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June 5, 2013
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Home » Opinion » Opinion Columns
Guanxi helps many young people get jobs
Technically, he should be accused of theft involving an extremely huge sum, handed over to the justice system and dealt with to the letter of the law.
But think of Zhao Shuqi, a grassroots official in Yexian, Henan Province.
Until recently Zhao's son had been receiving more than 1,000 yuan in monthly wages as an employee of the unit under Zhao's supervision for six consecutive years, since the youth was 15 years old.
The son was not alone.
Of the 69 people on the payroll of that government unit, 10 were employed when they were less than 18 years old, and most of them were the chief's relatives.
Although this systemic theft of public money is more damaging to the country and people, we are less certain how to characterize them. Are they criminals practicing nepotism?
Recent experience suggests many of them would be guilty of procedural lapses or irregularities, with the consequence of the errant officials disciplined within the Party or government.
Consider the example of Wang Qian, who was born in 1991, started working in 2010, and before long was appointed to her current post as deputy chief of the Development and Reform Bureau of Yuetang District, Xiangtan City.
Her father was an official at the provincial level of the Development and Reform Commission.
Following a media uproar, and in the wake of an investigation started last year, all those people who played roles in the case have been dealt with "seriously," according to media reports.
Unlikely warning
That's is, all of them have been disciplined within the Party or government, except for one official who had been handed over to the justice system. The father only lost his official title.
In a subsequent interview with Xinhuanet, the whistleblower said, "If these people are not handed over to the justice system, they are unlikely to serve as a warning to future offenders. I am not satisfied with this kind of punishment."
The same whistleblower then targeted Xu Tao, a 27-year-old deputy head of Xiangtan County, Hunan Province, who had been given seven positions in five years, while studying full time for a master's degree at Xiangtan University since 2010.
Xu's father was the former director of the People's Congress of Yuhu District in Xiangtan County, and his mother was deputy director of the Yuhu District prosecutor's office.
An investigation conducted by the Hunan provincial government in March showed "there were no severe violations such as cheating during the promotion of Xu, but the process of promotion didn't strictly follow regulations."
As a consequence, six officials involved in Xu's promotion were "punished," which include being reprimanded, warned, or talked to, while Xu and Xu's parents were largely not or affected.
In explaining this punishment, a discipline inspection official said that Xu Tao was not punished because "on the face of it, there seemed to be no evidence that he played any role in effecting his fast promotions."
By comparison, people found in the possession of lost money or property are generally not given such benefit of the doubt.
Family connections
This is certainly not encouraging for millions of fresh graduates groping in the darkness of this year's job market, and fearing they have little chances of landing a good job without proper family connections.
Traditional Chinese society also stressed family connections greatly, but in the past official positions were also high-stakes position, in that if an official were to be convicted of a serious crime, his family members could be made to suffer collectively in a system known as zhulian (necessary implication of family members.)
Today some chiefs of rich entities of a public nature wield virtually absolute authority whether in hiring or firing, or in dispensing of benefits.
For instance, some senior executives from a tobacco company in Jilin Province have each received more than 10,000 yuan a month in housing allowances.
Following online exposure, they corrected their mistake by returning the excess money, but there are no signs they are being treated as criminals guilty of tax evasion or theft of public property.
It's no surprise that we hear more of such incidents. The latest online expose is about Liu Qiong, who became a vice township chief in Changde, Hunan Province, at the age 23 ("Nepotism claims probe," June 2, Shanghai Daily.)
Upward mobility
Chinese society has always been marked by upward mobility, for in the past 2,000 years we did not have anything like aristocracy.
Thus ambitious scholars were inspired by the vision that "In the morning he is still in the thatched cottage, but in the evening already being received by the emperor."
Today, with rare exceptions, the national college entrance exam system provides one channel for the rural youth to be truly urbanized.
However, the People's Daily commented on May 26 that since it is becoming increasingly difficult to be admitted to prestigious universities, many villager candidates are simply giving up on taking the test.
The article suggested that this points to the danger of perpetuating class divisions. One cause is that as education resources increasingly favor the privileged, rural youth are losing hope of distinguishing themselves academically.
For more than 10 years, our college enrollment has been increasing steadily, but the proportion of rural youth in key universities is dropping.
According to statistics, from 1978 to 1998, the percentage of rural students in Peking University was about 30 percent, but this has dropped to 10 percent since 2000.
When the lucky few who had made it to universities are looking for jobs, if they are not well-connected, they may have little hope of landing good jobs.
Many realize that for all their ambition and struggles, their socio-economic disadvantages would be transmitted from one generation to the next, with no relief in sight.
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AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES Micro Episode #20 - The Big House
Well... looks like this is it. The last Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes micro episode. It's been fun. But on the bright side, it just means it's nearly time for the real series to begin. On this offering, "The Big House", Marvel says:
"The astonishing duo of Ant-Man and Wasp take you on a tour of the Big House, the world's smallest super villain prison."
And the series doesn't begin until October 20. What are we to do until then, Marvel?
"Tune into Disney XD at 8:30pm/7:30pm Central from October 11-15 to watch a new set of four Micro-Episodes each night!"
(Have they been expecting me to capitalize "micro episodes" all this time? And what's with the hyphen?)
So they're stringing the micro episodes together to make longer ones, and we'll just be in withdrawal for a few days between the 15 and 20 of October. And if you just need to watch them all over and over, we've hoarded the whole batch of them here on our site.
I'll quit my yapping now and leave you to check into the Big House. If you feel like baking us a cake with a saw inside and smuggling it past security so we're all out in time for the premiere, visitation is in the comments area below.


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Thread: Vu Ted Lapidus
Can anyone please give me more information about the fragrance Vu from Lapidus? I would like to know some of the notes and classification and when it was launched and discontinued.
It is not listed at all in the basenotes directory ???
Any help is much appreciated.
RARE PERFUME DECANTS - FACEBOOK (closed group) - Hundreds of ultra rare extraits available, including Djedi and Nombre Noir.


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Detail Information
- ALS drug development: reflections from the past and a way forwardSwati Aggarwal
Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Neurology Clinical Trials Unit, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, USA
Neurotherapeutics 5:516-27. 2008..We present a critical overview of past clinical trials, how therapies are selected for testing in people, challenges with ALS clinical trial design and conduct, and ways to best move forward...
- Safety and efficacy of lithium in combination with riluzole for treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trialSwati P Aggarwal
Neurology Clinical Trials Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
Lancet Neurol 9:481-8. 2010..In a pilot study, lithium treatment slowed progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We aimed to confirm or disprove these findings by assessing the safety and efficacy of lithium in combination with riluzole in patients with ALS...
- Toward more efficient clinical trials for amyotrophic lateral sclerosisMerit E Cudkowicz
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Amyotroph Lateral Scler 11:259-65. 2010..Here we summarize our current thinking about phase II design options and the potential benefits of a clinical trial network for phase II trials in ALS...


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by revdbob
Rated: ASR · Essay · Philosophy · #977548
Differences exist in thought patterns of abstract and concrete thinkers between cultures
Why do people seem to talk at cross purposes, especially when they come from different cultures? How can words mean different things based on culture? How can people come to such different conclusions given the same raw material from which to draw them? And how can fundamentalists of any religion differ so much not only from their cultures at large, but from the vast majority of their non-fundamentalist co-religionists?
Part of the answer to such questions may be found in the profound differences between thought systems and patterns, particularly between what we might call concrete thinkers and abstract thinkers.
Some cultures are concrete cultures; they do not much think in abstracts. Their languages may even be poor in vocabulary for western abstract concepts. In some cultures, the question "why" is rarely asked directly, and when it is, it doesn't mean quite the same thing as it does to an abstract thinker. For western thinkers, the question "why"generally asks for abstractions.
If one reads the Bible in the original languages, one may be struck by the cultural fact that Hebrew thinkers are concrete thinkers. For example, they tend not to talk about "joy" per se; rather they say "the mountains skip like lambs," or some other more concrete pictorial way of expressing the abstract idea. Greek thinkers, on the other hand, of whose culture we in the Western world are the inheritors, are abstract thinkers, especially in the scholarly world. To abstractors, the question "why" is very meaningful, and as a result disciplines such as (our particular way of doing) science flourish in the western world. To concrete thinkers, the question "why" is not usually asked; rather it may be replaced by the question "when?" An abstractor would say "My toe hurts. Why?" The concretizer thinks "My toe hurts. When?" The answer in both cases sound similar and result in similar future behavior. The abstractor says "because I stubbed my toe. Why? Because it struck something in its way. In this case, a chair is in the way. What to do? Move the chair." The concretizer says "it happened when? After I stubbed my toe. Can it be prevented from happening again? Yes, let me move the chair."
Both Japanese (and many other Oriental cultures) and most Middle Eastern cultures, represent concretizers. It may be one reason why (thinking abstractly) it is often observed that the Japanese seem to be wonderful perfectors, but not notable innovators. They tend not to ask "why does this happen," and so stumble on a new approach, rather, they ask "when," and so improve what exists. Even when using the word "why," it means when or how to them, and you will tend to get an answer more akin to what we might answer to those questions, and they will tend to be see-hear-touch-taste-able explanations rather than an abstraction.
Here is another common illustration. Everyone has heard of the Zen koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Occidentals tend to be more mystified by this koan (if they have never heard it before) than Orientals, and more amazed by the simplicity of the accepted answer: to swing one hand forward as if to clap - to show rather than to explain the sound. This is concrete thinking. When a Western abstract thinker asks a concretizer "why" and gets what seems like a too obvious and trivial concrete answer he regards as unsatisfactory, the concretizer is mystified. The question asking for an abstract answer asks the concretizer to think in ways not culturally natural, and that, if you have ever really tried to do it yourself, is VERY difficult. I want to come back to this in a minute.
People who employ primarily concretizing ways of thinking tend to deal in concrete "facts," which must be right or wrong - black or white. Members of cultures where this way of thinking is predominant tend not to state controversial but important "facts" straight out. Rather, they do what we call beating around the bush. For example, in Papua New Guinea (where I lived for eight years), a villager who thought his neighbor's son had violated his daughter would NEVER say so straight out. He might be wrong, and even if he were right, to shame his neighbor would be wrong (more about this later). So he might say, "one of my chickens is missing!" To the abstract thinker, this seems to make no sense, but it is concrete picture language. The neighbor knows the father is not worried about chickens, and also knows it was not his own son who was messing with the neighbor's daughter. So he may say, "I saw your chicken around So-and-so's garden." He, too, does not say what he thinks straight out, but the father gets the idea and can investigate further.
With something important, members of many such cultures, notably the Oriental, want always to be right. Even more so than in our culture, to be wrong even in matters of fact is felt to be a moral failure and possibly an inexcusable error. This, I think, has to do with the relative values of shame and guilt. Anthropologists say we are a guilt culture. We carry our moral error around within ourselves, and if we have a conscience, feel guilty even if no one knows about the error. For us, forgiveness means absolution of guilt. We also tend not to feel guilty about errors with no moral significance. Orientals, culturally, tend not to experience guilt at all! Rather, they focus on shame. This means that, quite apart from what we in the West might consider morality, if your error is public, you are shamed. In some cultures, to be the cause of another's shame even by bringing his wrongdoing to light, is to be morally reprehensible. In New Guinea, for example, if you can defraud your neighbor without his realizing it, you are regarded as clever, but if you are caught, then you are shamed and disgraced. In Japan, to be shamed might lead to hara kiri for the one shamed, since there may be no recovery. Forgiveness in such a culture has to mean restoration of reputation, rather than merely excusing the penalties for guilt.
So if a student from a concrete-thinking shame culture does not wish to risk being shamed, s/he may decline to answer a "why" question at all! S/he expects the teacher to give a definitive answer to such questions. Combine that with the fact that "why" doesn't mean what Occidentals mean by it in their culture, so that their answers are very likely either to be wrong, or at least to be shown to be inadequate by the teacher's continuing to ask the question "why," and you have an explanation why such students may appear very silent. The shame of being "wrong" before others is deeply felt. There is a reason why there may be so relatively many suicidal oriental students in western situations. Orientals are not stupid, even though thought patterns differ, and when they catch on to the differences and can think like a westerner, they often excel beyond native westerners. By combining both ways of thinking, I suspect, they simply see more possibilities.
Coming back as I promised to an earlier reference, the problem of abstract vs. concrete thought is not merely cross-cultural. There are many concrete thinkers in our culture as well, including all children, to begin with.Children are very literal-minded. If you say "the moon is made of green cheese," children want to know what it tastes like. The very notion of symbols is difficult for the very young to apprehend. Most children are unable to think abstractly until they hit puberty, when there must be some kind of brain changes as well as other physical changes. It is not that children don't ask "why, why, why" in trying to figure out how the world works; it is just that a parent knows that s/he has to answer in concrete ways, not with an abstract philosophical explanation which is not at all what was requested!
A significant proportion of the western population, furthermore, is NEVER able to think well abstractly. Their lives run from one concrete, practical, down to earth moment to the next. "Why" is not of interest; they want to know what and when and how. As you have noticed, such things have concrete answers! Even in religion, they want answers, not abstract explanations, and they want their answers to be black and white, as nuance-free and as unchanging as possible. Many adults, even those capable of abstract thought, are not comfortable with it and prefer to see their world very concretely; but I believe a large proportion never really develop the ability to do it well at all!
One misconception relatively common in our culture about the nature of religious faith, but I think especially common among those who do not think well abstractly, is a confusion over the kinds of questions religion is able to, or properly is interested in answering. Religious faith is concerned with meanings and purpose of life, the universe, and everything. "What, when, and how" are matters for science and are not issues of particular concern or interest to proper religion, except, as it were, as clothespins upon which to hang the laundry of meaning and purpose. The clothespins are not what are important, even though one diligently keeps them and uses them. The important questions center on "why?" Why is the world as it is; what is its meaning and purpose? The concrete answers are grist for the thought mill; they are not the center of religious thought.
It may seem that I have just demonstrated how half the population even in abstract cultures think concretely and wonder how this can be so. Remember, it is not that concrete thinkers have no interest or concern in meaning and purpose, but that they express their concern and think about them in concrete ways. They are more interested in certainty, perhaps less able to deal with ambiguity and ambivalence (although everyone has to learn to deal with those things in a pragmatic way: it just will never happen that you will never again stub your toe or bark your shin if you are still walking!) Genesis, for example, is not giving us a recipe book for making people, for all that some people with distorted ideas seem to imagine it is. Neither the Bible, nor the various creation myths of other religions are attempting to explain God's methods of creation. Rather these stories are intended to answer more fundamental questions of why the universe exists and who is responsible; not how, but why human beings came to be; not which sin broke the ice, but why the relationship between humanity and God is, shall we say, strained? It tries to explain what the meaning of sin is, not what kind of fruit was on the tree or even that there was a tree with fruit. It wants to know why is there suffering at all, not what suffering is. An abstractor would say, "The world is here because it was created by God, Who, being a loving being, needed beings to love and by whom to be loved. Sin came about because any being that can love has to be able to choose whether or not to love, which means they must be capable of unlove, of selfishness. The break in relationship comes when humanity decides to set its own will above God, to love one's own ego more than God. Suffering is the result of that broken relationship." But that is all abstract, and lots of people can't follow the idea. The Hebrew wouldn't even have tried to express it that way; rather Hebrews, like other concrete thinkers, tell stories with concrete characters and events that mean much the same thing as the abstractors express.
It is not that the concretizer necessarily thinks those characters are real people with historical existence such as we think of history, anymore than the New Guinean thought his neighbor was talking about real chickens. The confusion of concrete with literal is a failure of understanding, a confusion common to cultures such as our own where we don't customarily speaking of meaning in concrete terms, and where when we do speak in concretes we tend to think of them in literal, almost journalistic ways.
Further trouble can come when an excessively literal mind focuses on the details rather than on the purpose of such stories, whether they originate in concrete or abstract cultures. This does often happen in certain fundamentalist sects, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist. In such cases, faith itself is transferred from God to teachings (doctrines) about God, to sacred books, or sacred acts (rituals), and the details become more important than the meanings, or the meanings are seen to be dependent upon the details, rather than the other way around. Among Christians, this shows up when the focus is upon the Bible or particular interpretations of particular passages within it, or on selected practices or counsels within it, rather than upon the Christ to Whom the Bible points. The Bible is the clothespin; Jesus is the laundry! When religious believers come to think faith is about what when and how instead of about why, religion becomes sick. The irreligious then point to the straw man of sick religion, and rejecting that, believe they have rejected the possibly healthy faith misrepresented by the proponents of sick religion. Thus when people focus their faith on knowing and believing stories which were intended to illustrate meaning and treat them as if they were stories in a newspaper about concrete details, they obscure the meanings and purposes of life which the faith - and the illustrative stories - were intended to offer and actually lead believers away from the faith they claim to follow.
Coming today from a Western, abstract-thinking culture and reading stories originating in a concrete-thinking culture from two to four thousand years ago is difficult enough. To grasp the concepts expressed we need to think with different vocabularies and assumptions than those which exist in our own culture. When added to that is a mindset which assumes that literature expressed in concrete ways must be taken literally, rather than as concrete expressions of abstract concepts, the problem multiplies. When in addition such a reader tends to be among those uncomfortable with abstractions in the first place, the result is fundamentalism: a substitution of details for meaning, a literal interpretation of stories intended to explain meaning, and a fervent clinging to such interpretations, fearing that to be mistaken will result in irrecoverable shame or guilt and, in terms of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions, damnation.
Is it any wonder those who have fallen victim to such handicaps fight so firmly for their misguided positions?


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MIT Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Stan N. Finkelstein, Ernst R. Berndt, Mark Moore, Paul E. Greenberg & Alison Keith, March 1997.
Among the greater management challenges that employers have faced in the last decade have been achieving greater employee productivity and getting a handle on spiraling health care costs. Ideally, both challenges can be addressed with one set of policies that target employee health investments; such targeted policies enhance productivity by reducing the absenteeism and impairment while at work associated with ill health.
Few would question the notion that a healthier workforce is more productive. Losses due to absenteeism, for example, have received considerable attention. Much of that attention has focused on injuries at work or illnesses closely tied to conditions at work. Here we adopt a more inclusive approach in order to capture the costs of absenteeism due to any illness that is prevalent in working-age populations, regardless of whether the "cause" of the illness is associated with work conditions.
However, another aspect of the value of treating illness, better at-work employee performance, has received very little attention. Greater interest on the part of employers and policy-makers could very well follow if a credible set of metrics were available to document that improved at-work productivity resulted from better health. This paper offers the elements of a framework to help identify illnesses that can be targets of opportunity -- targets for incremental additional investments in workplace health that could bring tangible economic returns to employers.
Charles King III, November 1996.
Marketing plays a major role in the promotion of pharmaceuticals, where marketing expenditures can range as high as 10 - 20% of sales. This paper investigates the role of marketing in product differentiation and competition in the ulcer drug market, one of the largest pharmaceutical markets. A variant of the discrete choice model of consumer behavior is developed that incorporates the effects of marketing by the firm and its competitors and that allows marketing to affect the scale of product differentiation. Using a panel of monthly data on four ulcer drugs from 1977 to 1993, the price and marketing elasticities of demand are estimated. These results suggest three primary effects of marketing during this period. First, marketing reduced firms' own price elasticities of demand. Second, total marketing by all firms reduced the degree of product differentiation in the market and raised the cost of entry to potential competitors. Third, marketing initially expanded the market for ulcer drugs but later became an increasingly important means of stealing business from competitors.
Ernst R. Berndt, Iain M. Cockburn & Zvi Griliches, 1996.
The construction and publication of measures of price inflation are important tasks carried out by governmental statistical agencies. In the U.S., the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes price indexes measured at the point of final consumer demand (the consumer price index, CPI), and at the initial production point, i.e., prices received by producers from whomever makes the first purchase (the producer price index, PPI). These price measurement tasks are difficult ones, particularly since new goods embody scientific discoveries and technological progress, inherent difficulties exist in measuring the output of services that themselves combine goods and time, and dynamic structural and compositional changes occur in the underlying markets for production, distribution and sale.
The health care marketplace contains all these features and presents particularly difficult challenges for price measurement. Health care expenditures represent a significant portion of GDP, and are likely to become increasingly important as the US population ages. The conceptual foundations for a health care-related CPI are clouded by the fact that in the US, many but not all health care products and services are paid for by insurance plans; thus, for example, currently the CPI for prescription pharmaceutical products weights only cash payment transactions from drug stores and mail order outlets, and excludes HMO, Medicaid or other purchases on behalf of an individual.
Charles L. Cooney, 1996.
Scott Stern, December 1996.
This paper estimates a model of product demand within a number of pharmaceutical markets, where each market is composed of a number of substitute therapies (FDA-approved molecules). Each molecule may be sole by the pioneer (the patent holder) and generic competitors. A number of empirical anomalies within these markets motivate this research. In particular, despite very aggressive entry by generic vendors, the prices of pioneer products rose during the 1980s. A model of consumer choice, relying on the institutional details of pharmaceutical decision-making, is developed to derive the regression framework. This framework includes two important features. First, I explicitly parameterize the substitutability among molecules and between pioneer and generic products. Second, the endogeneity of firm-level choice variables (price and advertising) is accounted for by the use of instrumental variables.
There are three principal findings. First, alternative pioneer products are relatively strong substitutes; in contrast, pioneer products often are substantially differentiated from their generic competitors. Second, pioneer firms wield market power, in part because they are multiproduct firms. Not accounting for the economics of multiproduct pricing reduces the degree of measured market power by up to 27%. An important corollary to these first two findings is that competition among pioneer firms provides an important check on pioneer market power. Finally, there is substantial variation among therapeutic markets. In the single market that did not experience new pioneer entry, there is little differentiation between the pioneer and generic sectors and relatively low intermolecular substitutability.
Scott Stern, December 1996.
Since the 1930's, extraordinary (though uneven) advances have been achieved in the chemical, biological and clinical sciences underlying drug discovery. Over this period, pharmaceutical firms have assimilated and exploited this underlying science base in different ways at different times; as well, some firms have been more aggressive than others in attempting novel organizational and/or scientific approaches to drug discovery. For example, starting in the late 1970s, some firms, such as Merck, started to provide strong support and high-powered incentives for collaboration and interaction with university-based scientists, while other firms, such as Bristol-Myers, maintained a more traditional (and less interactive) approach towards university research. Persistent differences in the management of drug discovery are somewhat puzzling, particularly since some strategies (such as openness to university science) have been found to be more "productive" than others. The goal of this paper is to understand the process by which particular practices and tools are adopted more closely. This paper examines the role that experience plays in shaping the underlying incentives and knowledge base that firms possess when contemplating adaptation to environmental change. In so doing, the difficulty inherent in the process of adaptation are highlighted through an examination of the challenges faced by firms in the 1980s as they attempted to respond to radical change in the biological sciences and computing technologies which underly drug discovery.
Iain Cockburn & Rebecca Henderson, 1995.
There is considerable evidence that there are significant and persistent "fixed effects" across firms. The classic production function literature demonstrated that some firms were persistently "inside" the efficiency frontier, and more recent work exploring the determinants of research productivity using panel data has consistently suggested that there are large and persistent differences in firm performance that cannot be ascribed to traditional measures of labor, knowledge or physical capital. Some authors have even suggested that the percentage of variance in profitability across firms that can be attributed to firm effects may be significantly greater than the percentage that can be attributed to industry effects.
These results are consistent with a long stream of work in the traditions of organizational behavior and strategic management which has suggested that organizations change only very slowly, despite the fact that differences across firms have important implications for both profitability and survival. They are also consistent with a vibrant managerial literature that exhorts senior management to adopt the latest techniques in organizational management, and they have given rise to a lively theoretical literature.
Iain Cockburn & Rebecca Henderson, 1995.
Iain Cockburn & Rebecca Henderson, July 1996.
Pharmaceutical companies display large and persistent differences in their innovative capabilities. Using detailed data gathered at the project level from inside the R&D labs of ten major pharmaceutical companies, we examine the roots of differential performance in the development of new drugs. One of the most interesting features of these data is the ability to distinguish between "discovery" and "development" efforts: the processes of identifying potentially valuable new compounds in the lab, and of subsequent testing and fine-tuning these drug candidates in human trials. In previous work, we found substantial advantages to size in drug discovery, stemming as much from economies of scope and the ability to absorb R&D spillovers as from economies of scale per se in performing pharmaceutical research. Here we contrast these results with the factors which determine success in the drug development phase, where the technology of R&D is very different and where larger amounts of money are spent. While we find no evidence of straightforward economies of scale, we again find some evidence that larger firms benefit from the ability to take advantage of economies of scope. In contrast to our previous findings in drug discovery, however, this result is not robust to the inclusion of controls for firm effects. These results have interesting implications for the theory of the firm, as well as for policy-orientated interest in the links between market structure, firm size, and performance in this important industry.
Iain Cockburn & Rebecca Henderson, 1995.
We empirically examine interaction between the public and private sectors in pharmaceutical research using qualitative data on the drug discovery process and quantitative data on the incidence of co authorship between private institutions. We find evidence of significant reciprocal interaction, and reject a simple "linear" dichotomous model in which the public sector performs basic research and the private sector exploits it. Linkages to the public sector differ across firms, reflecting variation in internal incentives and policy choices, and the nature of these linkages correlates with their research performance.
Frank Basa & Thomas J. Allen, 1996.
This questionnaire survey study of 45 drug development teams examines how the locus of decision influence between project leaders and departmental managers affects the performance of drug development projects at the US R&D laboratories of six large, multinational pharmaceutical firms. The study examines a series of relationships among locus of decision making influence, project leader characteristics, organizational support for teams, project phase, leadership structure, and project performance.
In this sample project performance is higher when team members perceive departmental managers to have greater influence over go/no-go decisions during both early and late phases of the development process. Project performance is also higher when project leaders have greater influence over clinical decisions during later phases. The technical knowledge of the project leader is related to project performance in a complex fashion. Technically knowledgeable project leaders are more effective during late phase projects. During early phases, project leaders who are rated as having greater technical knowledge head lower performing teams.
Ernst R. Berndt, Stan N. Finkelstein, Paul E. Greenberg, Robert Howland, Alison Keith, A. John Rush, James Russell & Martin B. Keller, October 1997.
Utilizing data from a clinical trial and an econometric model incorporating the impact of a medical intervention and regression to the mean, we present evidence supporting the hypotheses that for chronically depressed individuals: (i) the level of perceived at-work performance is negatively related to the severity of depressive status; and (ii) a reduction in depressive severity improves the patient's perceived work performance. Improvement in work performance is rapid, with about two-thirds of the change occurring already by week 4. Those patients having the greatest work improvement are those with both relatively low baseline work performance and the least severity of baseline depression.
Stan N. Finkelstein, Ernst R. Berndt, Paul E. Greenberg, Rod A. Parsley, James M. Russell, Martin B. Keller & the Chronic Depression Study Group, 1995.
We analyzed the relationship between depression and patient-assessed or clinician-rated work performance among chronically depressed patients followed for 12 weeks in a large clinical trial.
The data were collected in a double-blind design comparing sertraline, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, with imipramine, a tricyclic antidepressant, in 12 academic centers nationwide. Incorporating work-related questions from a portfolio of rating scales used to assess depression, we constructed several measures of work performance, assessed at baseline and at Week 12 of the clinical investigation, and examined how they changed with improvement in depressive symptoms.
As depressive symptoms subsided following treatment, patients reported substantial improvement in our measures of work performance. Eighty-six percent of the cohort reported some improvement from base-line to Week 12. The extent of improvement in work performance correlates highly with improvement in the depressive symptoms measured on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression.
Treatment of depression with antidepressant medications resulted in substantial improvement in subjective work performance among the patients studied.
Bart Clarysse, Koen Debackere & Peter Temin, February 1996.
Organizational ecology is evolving from a collection of rather unrelated concepts towards an integrated model of business failure and founding. Despite this increasing convergence within the ecological boundaries, little integration occurs with other intellectual streams. This paper presents a review of the theoretical models developed during the past five years and an assessment of future research opportunities: can institutional theory, strategic management and industrial economics enrich and stretch the boundaries of the ecological model?
Peter Temin, Stan Finkelstein & Bart Clarysse, February 1996.
Conventional wisdom about the United States pharmaceutical industry is based on the observation that there is market power in the sales of individual drugs. This market power is thought to derive from patent monopolies on new drugs and from economies of scale in pharmaceutical R&D, in shepherding new drugs through the regulatory process and in marketing. Economic analyses of the industry have been concerned largely with measuring and alleviating this power.
But the pharmaceutical industry cannot be seen simply as a collection of monopoly markets. There also are economies of scope within the pharmaceutical industry, and virtually all firms in the industry sell a multiplicity of drugs. Many if not most markets for individual drugs have at least some competition, either because the patent has expired or because there exist closely substitutable drugs. And since patents are only temporary, new drugs have to be introduced continually to maintain market power.
Alison Keith & Ernst R. Berndt, September 1994.
The interest in finding reliable measures of how prices change over time is by no means new. When writing Chronicon Preciosum in 1707, William Fleetwood, the Bishop of Ely, computed a price index for the living costs of an Oxford student 1707 compared to those of an Oxford student of 1460. He added up the costs of five quarters of wheat, four hogsheads of beer, and six yards of cloth and took the 1707 / 1460 total cost ratio as a price index. Several decades later, the Legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts generated its own market basket to index the pay of soldiers fighting in the Revolutionary War. (The need to find a reliable standard for adjusting pay was created by the rapid inflation that had drastically reduced the real value of the fixed nominal pay of the soldiers). According to Willard Fisher, the 1780 legislation decreed that the basket was to consist of five bushels of corn, 68 and 4/7 pounds of beef, ten pounds of sheep's wool and sixteen pounds of sole leather.
Today measures of price change are widely used, by businesses for assessing performance and for business planning, by diverse participants engaged in public policy debates, and by workers involved in labor-management disputes. Certain price measures are required to be disclosed publicly by companies. Specific measures are even incorporated into laws, regulations and contracts. In the U.S., these measures are typically drawn from the standard price index series produced by the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Producer Price Index (PPI).
Nevin M. Summers & Charles C. Cooney, February 1993.
The history of technological advancement shows that innovation is initially often dismissed as impractical -- and ignored. By the time the incumbent technology recognizes the new technology's threat it is too late. The new technology supplants the existing way of doing things and gradually establishes market dominance.
The history of biotechnology is an apt example of this process. As many industry observers have pointed out, if pharmaceutical companies had initially recognized the power of recombinant DNA drugs, there might be no biotechnology industry today. Pharmaceutical companies would have developed the technology internally, maintaining absolute dominion over the health-care industry. Understanding when an emerging technology is on the verge of launching a threat to your business allows you to steer your company in a direction that will take advantage of that change.
Michael Miller & Arnold Barnett, 1994.
Fiona Scott Morton, January 1994.
A Most Favored Nation contract between the buyer and seller of a good requires the seller to give the buyer the lowest price offered to any other buyer. Many theoretical models have shown that a Most Favored Nation clause commits a firm to compete less aggressively in prices. The Federal Government imposed such a rule in 1990 to govern the prices it would pay firms for pharmaceutical products supplied to Medicaid recipients. The firms had to give Medicaid their "best," or lowest, price. I show that average market prices rose after the MFN clause was implemented. Generic firms were not subject to the MFN rule and generic prices did not rise after the regime change. However, markets with three or fewer generic firms and one brand firm show a small rise in the generic price. The strategic externally is more concentrated in this situation. The MFN law was not a good policy choice; the higher prices it caused reduced consumption of pharmaceuticals and lowered national welfare.
Fiona Scott Morton, January 1994.
This paper models the entry decisions of generic pharmaceutical manufacturers into markets opened by patent expiration. In particular, Scott Morton examines the role of pre-expiration brand advertising to see if it deters generic entry. Other market characteristics affect the number of entrants; the most important of these is pre-expiration brand revenue. Drugs with high hospital share and those that treat chronic conditions also attract more entry. The previous literature has assumed advertising is exogenous to the entry decision when analyzing the role of advertising. The results under this hypothesis indicate that brands can deter generic entry very slightly by advertising before patent expiration. When instrumented, the coefficient on advertising more than doubles; however, its deterrent effect is still relatively small. I conclude that brand advertising is a barrier to entry by generic firms, but the effect is not strong enough to be of concern to entrants or policy makers.
POPI Working Paper Abstracts: # 1-92 thru 20-94
POPI Working Paper Abstracts: # 21-94 thru 40-97
POPI Working Paper Abstracts: # 41-97 thru 60-01
POPI Working Paper Abstracts: # 61-01 thru 64-03
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Well we've got 1000mhz P!!!'s and Athlons on sale now all be it a small quantity.We all know MHZ sell so whats Mr.Jobs next move?And what are G4's running at max 500mhz?I'll admit i don't know shit about Apple so let me know or flame on,i don't care!!
Why do you bother?
Because i honestly want to know CADdie!!........really!
The G4 architechture features somewhat short pipelines, which put some restraints on the clockspeeds it can achieve.
It's true that MHz sells in the x86 market, but I'm not sure that the same is true for Apple. I think people who buys Mac buys it for other reasons.
I'd say that I pay little attention to the MHz now, unless i am comparing the clock speeds of the same processor.
MHz does mean very little now that the processors out there are of varying stregths.
People never compare and say that a 500MHz celeron must be faster then a 450MHz PIII, so there should be no reason to compare G4s to PIIIs.
Simple as that..
It seems that Apple wants to compare in Gigaflops, but that seems to have been a flop of its own.
I won't say MHZ-wise, but I can think about their "form-factor".
iMAC is just the tradition all-in-one PC, and this can only be taken to the extent of the laptop, where it's reduced the human-interface elements: Monitor (flat panel) and keyboard.
Beyond that, it's time for a direct-neuron connection, I guess 8^).
Mhz DO sell computers. The average computer buyer looks at three numbers: HD size, RAM size, and CPU Mhz. HP in particular has been sucessful in pushing celeron-based PCs with big harddrives and lots of ram at the retail level (Office Depot, Walmart, Staples, etc).
The Imacs sold well when they were put against the celeron-based machines of similar specs. But now that Intel is rolling out 566 - 700 mhz celerons, I see trouble for the imacs if Motorola can't start ramping up the Mhz.
Guh. I can't even begin to express how wrong you are.