Word: compact
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some of the elements of Boston's plan have been in place since 1982, when about 25 local companies began pledging jobs to the city's high school graduates under a unique undertaking called the Boston Compact. Last year the Compact, in which 350 firms now take part, provided jobs to 823 high school graduates, most of them entry-level positions, such as clerk and secretary, at an average salary of $5.30 an hour. The program has already helped to reduce the city's unemployment rate for high school graduates to 4.5%, well below the national level of 17%. Delegations...
Honda's obsession with quality is famed. Auto-industry experts point to the company's knack for designing compact, reliable engines, a legacy of its long experience with motorcycles. Honda quickly corrected a few problems on its early auto models, notably rust-prone bumpers and fenders on early Civics, and brakes that tended to fade on the first Accords. J. David Power, head of the California consulting firm that bears his name, lauds Honda's attention to owners' needs in designing its cars. He recalls one Honda design team that spent several days at a California shopping mall interviewing drivers...
...plastic CDs. "Metallic, gritty, grainy and unnatural," declares Harry Pearson, editor and publisher of the Absolute Sound, a journal devoted to the glories of old- fashioned analog recording. Claims for the superiority of CDs, say LP partisans, are hype. "Many of the people who were initially impressed by compact discs have been disappointed," asserts Gene Rubin, a Los Angeles-area audio retailer. "There is no way that LPs are going to vanish...
...debate over compact discs goes to the heart of the new medium. In analog recording, sound waves are transcribed as grooves onto a vinyl disc. The grooves are then traced by a diamond-tipped stylus in the tone arm of the turntable to re-create the sound. In digital recording, the music is sampled by a microchip at the rate of 44,100 times a second and expressed as a series of ones and zeros. Encoded in invisible "pits," the numbers are read by a player equipped with a laser beam, which relays the information to a microcomputer that converts...
Still, just as personal computers have steadily improved in speed and power, so a doubled sampling rate and better playback equipment should eliminate many of the current complaints. "The compact disc is a technology still in its infancy," says Michael Smolen, senior editor of Stereo Review magazine. "By the time it reaches adulthood, there won't be any of these specious arguments...