Archive
P&G’s CFO talks productivity, cost-cutting–Productivity is the great enabler.
P&G’s CFO Jon Moeller
James Ritchie Staff Reporter- Business Courier
Procter & Gamble Co. is adding 200 million consumers per year in developing markets as it expands distribution and promotes higher-tier products. The company also is several months ahead of schedule in its plan to cut $10 billion in costs by 2016.
P&G (NYSE: PG) Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller outlined the company’s growth, innovation and cost-cutting measures at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference in Boca Raton, Fla. The event draws some of the country’s top analysts.
P&G’s Asia sales hit $15 billion in fiscal 2012, up from $4 billion in 2001. The consumer-goods giant, whose brands include Tide detergent and Gillette razors, has added 100 new category/country combinations since 2010.
P&G served $3.8 billion consumers in developing markets in 2012, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010, according to the presentation.
Part of the company’s strategy is to nudge customers toward higher-priced products.
For example, in China, P&G expects its mid-tier Pampers product to account for 70 percent of the brand’s sales volume and its premium-tier Pampers to account for 8 percent this year. That’s up from 59 percent mid-tier and 3 percent premium tier in 2010.
Moeller also said P&G is on track to meet its goal of achieving $10 billion in cost reductions by 2016. About 5,850 jobs have been cut so far, which was part of the plan the company rolled out at the same conference last year. P&G expects to cut management and administrative expenses by 2 percent to 4 percent a year.
“Productivity is the great enabler,” he said. “It creates financial flexibility to pursue more growth. It empowers people to think differently about how things are done. And it provides a cushion to protect bottom-line growth even in a challenging macro environment.”
something to ponder…
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot, 1934
AD OF THE DAY: These Storefront Robots In Japan Mimic Customers
Christina Austin|Feb. 14, 2013,
United Arrows, a clothing retailer located in Tokyo’s airport, has found a great way to make people pay attention to its display windows.
The store has placed "MarionetteBots," two half mannequin/half robots, dressed in United Arrows clothing, in its storefront. They copy the movements of those who stand in front of the display. The mannequins are attached to wires controlled by Kinect technology.
Here’s a video of the "MarionetteBots" in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0XAhcBpYqDg
Optical switches for future optical computers–very cool stuff from Cornell
Small optical force can budge Nano scale objects
By Bill Steele
![clip_image001[4]](http://billhubbell.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/clip_image0014.jpg "clip_image001[4]")
Cornell Nanophotonics Group
Scanning electron micrograph of two thin, flat rings of silicon nitride, each 190 nanometers thick and mounted a millionth of a meter apart. Light is fed into the ring resonators from the straight waveguide at the right. Under the right conditions optical forces between the two rings are enough to bend the thin spokes and pull the rings toward one another, changing their resonances enough to act as an optical switch.
With a bit of leverage, Cornell researchers have used a very tiny beam of light with as little as 1 milliwatt of power to move a silicon structure up to 12 nanometers. That’s enough to completely switch the optical properties of the structure from opaque to transparent, they reported.
The technology could have applications in the design of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) — nanoscale devices with moving parts — and micro-optomechanical systems (MOMS) which combine moving parts with photonic circuits, said Michal Lipson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
From <http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov09/lightswitch.html>
History of the Light-Speed Debate
from the February 12, 2013 eNews issue
http://www.khouse.org (visit our website for a FREE subscription)
[Last week we began an overview on the possibility that the speed of light has been slowing down since the beginning of the universe. This is a continuation of that article.] Since 1987, when V. S. Troitskii argued that light speed had originally been about 1010 times faster than now, a multitude of papers on cosmology and the speed of light have shown up in journals and on the web. The theories abound as to what is changing, and in relation to what, and what the possible effects are. As the storm around the 1987 report settled down, Barry Setterfield got back to work, investigating the data rather than playing around with pure theory. Meanwhile, halfway around the world from Australia, in Arizona, a respected astronomer named William Tifft was finding something strange going on with the redshift measurements of light from distant galaxies. It had been presumed that the shift toward the red end of the spectrum of light from these distant galaxies was due to a currently expanding universe, and the measurements should be seen as gradually but smoothly increasing as one went through space. That wasn’t what Tifft was finding. The measurements weren’t smooth. They jumped from one plateau to another. They were quantized, or came in quantities with distinct breaks in between them. When Tifft published his findings, astronomers were incredulous and dismissive. In the early 1990s in Scotland, two other astronomers decided to prove him wrong once and for all. Guthrie and Napier collected their own data and studied it. They ended up deciding Tifft was right [T. Beardsley, Scientific American 267:6 (1992), p. 19;. J. Gribbin, New Scientist 9 July (1994), 17; R. Matthews, Science 271 (1996), 759]. What was going on? Barry Setterfield read the material and studied the data. The universe could not be expanding if the red shift measurements were quantized. Expansion would not occur in fits and starts. So what did the red shift mean? While most others were simply denying the Tifft findings, Barry took a closer look. And it all started to make sense. While many articles continued to be published regarding theoretical cosmologies with little regard for much of the data available, Barry was more interested in the data. Yet, his work is not referenced by any of the others. The Stanford paper is just about forgotten, if it was ever known, by the folks in mainstream physics and astronomy. However, not only are the measurements still there, but the red shift data has added much more information, making it possible to calculate the speed of light back to the first moment of creation. So Barry wrote another paper and submitted it to a standard physics journal in 1999. They did not send it to peer review but returned it immediately, saying it was not a timely subject, was of no current interest, and was not substantial enough. (It was over fifty pages long with about a hundred and fifty references to standard physics papers and texts.) So Barry resubmitted it to an astronomy journal. They sent it out to peer review and the report came back that the paper was really interesting but that it really belonged in a physics journal. So, in 2000, he sent it off to another physics journal. They refused it because they did not like one of the references Barry used: a university text on physics. There is a reason that Barry’s work is not being referenced by mainstream scientists – or even looked at by most. If Barry is right about what the data are indicating, we are living in a very young universe. This inevitable conclusion will never be accepted by standard science. Evolution requires billions of years. And there is a reason why the major creation organizations are holding his work at an arm’s length as well: they are sinking great amounts of money into trying to prove that radiometric dating procedures are fatally flawed. According to what Barry is seeing, however, they are not basically flawed at all: there is a very good reason why such old dates keep appearing in the test results. The rate of decay of radioactive elements is directly related to the speed of light. When the speed of light was higher, decay rates were faster, and the long ages would be expected to show up. As the speed of light slowed down, so the radioactive decay rates slowed down. By assuming today’s rate of decay has been uniform, the earth and universe look extremely old. Thus, the evolutionists are happy with the time that gives for evolution and the creationists are looking for flaws in the methods used for testing for dates. But if the rates of decay for the different elements have not been the same through time, then that throws both groups off! Here was an "atomic clock" which ran according to atomic processes and, possibly, a different "dynamical" clock, the one we use everyday, which is governed by gravity – the rotation and revolution rates of the earth and moon. Could it be that these two "clocks" were not measuring time the same way? A data analysis suggested this was indeed happening. Tom Van Flandern, with a Ph.D. from Yale in astronomy, specializing in celestial mechanics, and for twenty years (1963-1983) Research Astronomer and Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C., released the results of some tests showing that the rate of ticking of the atomic clock was measurably slowing down when compared with the "dynamical clock." (Tom Van Flandern was terminated from his work with that institution shortly thereafter, although his work carries a 1984 publication date.) In recognizing this verified difference between the two different "clocks," it is important to realize that the entire dating system recognized by geology and science in general, saying that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the universe somewhere around ten billion years older than that, might be thrown into total disarray. The standard science models cannot deal with that. The standard creation models cannot, at this point, deal with the fact that radiometric dating may be, for the most part, telling the truth on the atomic clock. And, meanwhile, the Hubble spacecraft keeps sending back data which keep slipping into Barry Setterfield’s model as though they actually belonged there. [The majority of this article was excerpted from "History of the Light-Speed Debate" by Helen Setterfield, originally published in the July 2002 Personal Update NewsJournal]
Related Links:
• History of the Light-Speed Debate – Koinonia House
• Speed of Light Slowing Down? – WorldNetDaily
• Physical Constants and Evolution of the Universe – Astrophysics and Space Science
• The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time – Setterfield.org
The Big Mac index
OUR Big Mac index is a fun guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that global exchange rates should eventually adjust to make the price of identical baskets of tradable goods the same in each country. Our basket contains just one thing, a Big Mac hamburger.
Today we launch our interactive Big Mac index, which allows users to choose a base currency and track the burger-based exchange rates of multiple nations over time.
Scientists have stored audio and text on fragments of DNA and then retrieved them with near-perfect fidelity—a technique that one day may provide a new way to handle the overwhelming data of the digital age.
By GAUTAM NAIK
The scientists encoded in DNA an audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech, a photograph, a copy of Crick and Watson’s famous "double helix" scientific paper from 1953 and Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. They were then able to retrieve them with 99.99% accuracy. The experiment was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Getty Images
A copy of Crick and Watson’s famous "double helix" scientific paper from 1953 was among items scientists successfully encoded. Above, a DNA model.
"All we’re doing is adapting what nature has hit upon—a very good way of storing information," said Nick Goldman, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, and lead author of the Nature paper.
DNA—the molecule that contains the genetic instructions for all living things—is one of the most effective storehouses of data. It is stable, durable and dense. A cup of DNA theoretically could store about 100 million hours of high-definition video and last for tens of thousands of years.
While DNA-based storage remains a long way from being commercially viable—high cost is one major hurdle—the scientific barriers are starting to fall. Last August, researchers at Harvard University reported in the journal Science the encoding of an entire 54,000-word book on strands of DNA.
"The experiments are very similar," said George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard and senior researcher for the project reported in Science. "Because these are truly independent efforts we’ve shown there’s a real field here rather than just one group."
Both experiments encoded similar amounts of information and had roughly similar accuracy rates, according to Dr. Church.
The European Bioinformatics Institute is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Europe’s flagship life sciences lab. EMBL is funded by public research money from 20 European member states.
Companies, governments and universities face an enormous challenge storing the ever-growing flood of digital information. Magnetic tapes can degrade within a decade, while hard disks are expensive and need a constant supply of electricity. Some computer experts have looked for answers in biology.
In recent years, they have found ways to encode trademarks in cells and poetry in bacteria, as well as store snippets of music in the genetic code of micro-organisms. DNA, though, offers a key advantage over the other nature-inspired methods: since DNA isn’t a living thing, it can sit passively in a test tube where it is less subject to biological changes.
Dr. Goldman and his colleagues first downloaded onto a computer a 26-second-clip of Dr. King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, the sonnets and the other things to be stored. The data was in normal computer code—a long string of ones and zeros. A software program devised by Dr. Goldman’s team converted those ones and zeros into the letters A, C, G and T, the four chemical bases that make up DNA.
The single, long DNA-based string was chopped up into about 150,000 fragments, each 120 letters long. Each fragment contained about 100 letters encoding the data. The remaining 20 letters were a sort-of index—instructions for later restoring the fragments in the right order.
The information was sent to Agilent Technologies Inc. A -0.76%of Santa Clara, Calif., where a laboratory machine used the data and appropriate chemicals to manufacture physical strings of DNA. Those fragments were shipped to Dr. Goldman’s lab in England.
"I thought the vial was empty when it arrived," said Dr. Goldman. But the DNA was there—it lay like a speck of dust at the bottom of the vial, almost impossible to see.
After some lab work, the DNA was dispatched to an EMBL lab in Heidelberg, Germany. There, a DNA-sequencing machine fired lasers at the fragments and read their genetic code, yielding a computer file in the form of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts.
Back in Hinxton, a computer program reassembled the fragments in the right order, and then converted them back into ones and zeros. When run on a laptop, those ones and zeroes were interpreted as the original audio clip, sonnets and other items—when the clip of Dr. King’s speech was played back, it sounded just like the original version, said Dr. Goldman.
There are plenty of challenges before DNA storage could become a useful technique. Writing DNA is still extremely expensive. And for the method to be commercially successful, it would have to be automated and turned into a reliable, industrialized process.
"In 10 years it’s probably going to be about 100 times cheaper," said Dr. Goldman. "At that time it probably becomes economically viable."
Nielsen Announces Choices For 10 Best Designed Intranets 2013, 70% Built on SharePoint
By David Roe (@druadh20) Jan 7, 2013
The Nielsen Norman Group has just announced its list of the 10 best intranets for 2013 and again, as in previous years, companies in the insurance vertical take three of the top spots followed by utilities, government, biotechnical and — surprisingly — the finance vertical only providing one.
Nielsen’s Best Designed Intranets
For those that thought intranets were a bit passé, it seems that social features and information filtering are creating considerable appeal, particularly among large companies where the size of intranet teams has doubled.
SharePoint is also playing a substantial role — with 70 percent of the winners using it with what Nielsen describes as extensive customization (what will happen with SharePoint 2013 is anyone’s guess, as Microsoft warned against this practice with the new release last year).
