Word: wayes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...future, not to mention babbling Buicks and loquacious Lincolns. Ford and General Motors are tinkering with computerized voice synthesizers that in several years could replace the dashboard gauges with oral announcements about the condition of the car. Officials of both companies stress that audible autos are still a long way off, but, says a GM spokesman, "We might have something to show you in a couple of years...
...secretive about the way Speak & Spell works that competitors are buying the toy just to smash it and recover the chip. The Texas company has managed to put a fairly large vocabulary onto a computer chip at low cost. With that, synthetic speech becomes possible in many consumer products. Washing machines could gurgle when the suds get too high, and the refrigerator could snarl at the midnight raider. But what, the best brains in Detroit are wondering, will happen when a driver's eight-track quadraphonic recording of Disco Queen Donna Summer is interrupted by a disembodied voice warning...
...stock, the tall, silver-haired Carlson, 64, keeps both his personal life and his business private, and he is barely known outside his native Minnesota. He has collected a string of 101 companies in ten groups without ever having sold a share of stock to the public, along the way amassing a fortune estimated at $100 million. Because his companies are private, they are not required to report sales or profits figures. But he has allowed TIME Correspondent Patricia Delaney a closer look at the far-flung activities of the Carlson Companies...
...stalwarts among the Carlson groups accounted for almost half of last year's billion-dollar-plus sales. One of them, the catalogue showroom retailing operations, which grossed $216 million, embraces brand-name discount chains that require little in the way of display space, sales help and security personnel because customers order merchandise from catalogues. Thus the companies can undercut many of the big low-price chains like K mart. The other, the Carlson Premium Group, which last year got one-third of its $250 million revenues from Gold Bond Stamps, organizes incentive programs for companies that reward high-achieving...
Harvard and Monsanto are aiming at a tough scientific target, but Hanley figures that it is equally significant that they are demonstrating a means for working together to increase the effectiveness of the research under way in U.S. universities. Compared with cash-short colleges, companies have far larger resources to invest in basic research, and they are much more expert in managing that research, directing it to the market and recruiting scientists. "The transferral of technology from the university to the marketplace is a very flawed mechanism in this country," says Hanley. "It doesn't work worth a damn...