Sunday, April 14, 2013

PFT: Peyton: 'I'm better than I was last year'

Greg SchianoAP

With the NFL Draft approaching, we?re taking a team-by-team look at the needs of each club. Up next is the team with the No. 13 overall selection (for now), the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Cornerback: This is where the focus has been all offseason for the Bucs, even if nothing?s been done.

See, at the moment (checks watch) the Bucs haven?t traded for wantaway Jets corner Darrelle Revis, and they haven?t yet given him the giant contract extension he desires and the Jets don?t seem inclined to provide.

But sometime between two months ago and the start of the draft, everyone expects this to happen, and for the deal to include Tampa?s first-rounder (13th overall).

While there are corners the Bucs could go with at 13 and proceed, they seem set on Revis. In a division with at least two teams with multiple legitimate receiving threats, they can easily make the case they need him.

But they also look like a team that has money burning a hole in its pocket, and appear to be the only team ready to give up picks and then an extension to a guy coming off a torn ACL.

They strong-armed Eric Wright into a pay-cut after his guarantees voided, but lost E.J. Biggers in free agency, so they need someone here one way or another.

Defensive end: The Bucs didn?t seem concerned at all about losing Michael Bennett, who signed a cut-rate deal with the Seahawks.

That puts a lot of faith in Adrian Clayborn and Da?Quan Bowers ? talented players with suspect medical files.

Even if they could trust both to be well and whole, the Bucs lack depth, and need to find someone else to get pressure on the passer.

Tight end: Dallas Clark put up good enough stats last year, but they haven?t re-signed the 33-year-old. They did bring in former Green Bay spare Tom Crabtree, but he?s not the kind of downfield threat they need. Adding one is only going to help diversify an offense with a lot of potential.

Quarterback: For the moment, all the trust is in Josh Freeman, who is entering the final year of his rookie contract.

There are questions as to whether the entire organization is behind him, and questions as to whether they should be. Freeman has had stretches where he?s looked like the kind of guy you build around. But he hasn?t done that consistently enough to breed complete confidence.

The only thing they?ve done at the position is make backup Dan Orlovsky take a pay cut, so you figure at some point they?re going to do something.

Drafting one of the guys who fall to the second round would put the pressure on Freeman to produce, or set the stage for that guy to take over in a year.

With the stakes of a potential Revis trade, plus the looming contract decisions regarding Freeman, the Bucs have more subplots than in recent memory.

They?re an interesting team, good enough to contend if the parts fall into place, but also tenuous enough to take a steep fall if Freeman doesn?t respond to the challenge.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/04/14/peyton-manning-im-certainly-better-than-i-was-last-year/related/

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L-carnitine significantly improves patient outcomes following heart attack, study suggests

Apr. 11, 2013 ? L-carnitine significantly improves cardiac health in patients after a heart attack, say a multicenter team of investigators in a study published today in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Their findings, based on analysis of key controlled trials, associate L-carnitine with significant reduction in death from all causes and a highly significant reduction in ventricular arrhythmias and anginal attacks following a heart attack, compared with placebo or control.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Although many of the therapies developed in recent decades have markedly improved life expectancy, adverse cardiovascular events such as ventricular arrhythmias and angina attacks still occur frequently after an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack).

It is known that during ischemic events L-carnitine levels are depleted. Investigators sought to determine the effects of targeting cardiac metabolic pathways using L-carnitine to improve free fatty acid levels and glucose oxidation in these patients. By performing a systematic review and meta-analysis of the available studies published over several decades, they looked at the role of L-carnitine compared with placebo or control in patients experiencing an acute myocardial infarction.

L-carnitine is a trimethylamine which occurs in high amounts in red meat and is found in certain other foods, and is also widely available as an over-the-counter nutritional supplement which is claimed to improve energy, weight loss, and athletic performance. Its potential role in treating heart disease was first reported in the late 1970s.

A comprehensive literature search yielded 153 studies, 13, published from 1989-2007, were deemed eligible. All the trials were comparison trials of L-carnitine compared with placebo or control in the setting of acute myocardial infarction.

This systematic review of the 13 controlled trials in 3,629 patients, involving 250 deaths, 220 cases of new heart failure, and 38 recurrent heart attacks, found that L-carnitine was associated with:

? Significant 27% reduction in all-cause mortality (number needed to treat 38)

? Highly significant 65% reduction in ventricular arrhythmias (number needed to treat 4)

? Significant 40% reduction in the development of angina (number needed to treat 3)

? Reduction in infarct size

There were numerically fewer myocardial reinfarctions and heart failure cases associated with L-carnitine, but this did not reach statistical significance.

First author James J. DiNicolantonio, PharmD, Wegmans Pharmacy, Ithaca, NY, observes, "Although therapies for acute coronary syndrome (ACS), including percutaneous coronary intervention, dual antiplatelet therapy, b-blockers (BBs), statins, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs), omega-3 fatty acids, and cardiac rehabilitation, have markedly improved clinical outcomes, adverse cardiovascular (CV) events still occur too frequently after ACS. One promising therapy for improving cardiac health involves using L-carnitine to improve free fatty acid levels and glucose oxidation."

"The potential mechanisms responsible for the observed beneficial impact of L-carnitine in acute myocardial infarction are likely multifactorial and may, in part, be conferred through the ability of L-carnitine to improve mitochondrial energy metabolism in the heart by facilitating the transport of long-chain fatty acids from the cytosol to the mitochondrial matrix, where b-oxidation occurs, removing toxic fatty acid intermediates, reducing ischemia induced by long-chain fatty acid concentrations, and replenishing depleted carnitine concentrations seen in ischemic, infarcted, and failing myocardium," says DiNicolantonio.

L-carnitine is proven to be safe and is readily available over the counter. The investigators agree that the overall results of this meta-analysis support the potential use of L-carnitine in acute myocardial infarction and possibly in secondary coronary prevention and treatment, including angina. They advocate for a larger randomized, multicenter trial to be performed to confirm these results in the modern era of routine revascularization and other intensive medical therapies following acute myocardial infarction. But, says DiNicolantonio, "L-carnitine therapy can already be considered in selected patients with high-risk or persistent angina after acute myocardial infarction who cannot tolerate treatment with ACE inhibitors or beta blockers, considering its low cost and excellent safety profile."

These findings may seem to contradict those reported in a study published earlier this month in Nature Medicine by Robert A. Koeth and others (link below), which demonstrated that metabolism by intestinal microbiota of dietary L-carnitine produced trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) and accelerated atherosclerosis in mice. They also noted that omnivorous human subjects produced more TMAO than did vegans or vegetarians following ingestion of L-carnitine, and suggested a possible direct link between L-carnitine, gut bacteria, TMAO, and atherosclerosis and risk of ischemic heart disease.

"The Nature Medicine paper is of interest," agrees senior investigator Carl J. Lavie, M.D.,FACC,FACP,FCCP, Medical Director of the Cardiac Rehabilitation and Prevention Center at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute at the University of Queensland School of Medicine in New Orleans, "but the main study reported there was in animals, and unlike our study, lacks hard outcomes." He also notes that "there are various forms of 'carnitine' and our relatively large meta-analysis specifically tested L-carnitine on hard outcomes in humans who had already experienced acute myocardial infarction."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Elsevier, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal References:

  1. James J. DiNicolantonio, Carl J. Lavie, Hassan Fares, Arthur R. Menezes and James H. O?Keefe. L-Carnitine in the Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, June 2013; Volume 88, Issue 6 DOI: 10.1016/j.mayocp.2013.02.007
  2. Robert A Koeth, Zeneng Wang, Bruce S Levison, Jennifer A Buffa, Elin Org, Brendan T Sheehy, Earl B Britt, Xiaoming Fu, Yuping Wu, Lin Li, Jonathan D Smith, Joseph A DiDonato, Jun Chen, Hongzhe Li, Gary D Wu, James D Lewis, Manya Warrier, J Mark Brown, Ronald M Krauss, W H Wilson Tang, Frederic D Bushman, Aldons J Lusis, Stanley L Hazen. Intestinal microbiota metabolism of l-carnitine, a nutrient in red meat, promotes atherosclerosis. Nature Medicine, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nm.3145

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/rLgasNuDw8U/130412132321.htm

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JPMorgan's main businesses lukewarm in first quarter

By David Henry and Dan Wilchins

NEW YORK (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co posted higher first-quarter profit on Friday as it spent much less money on mortgage-related litigation, but most of its major businesses turned in tepid performances, and the bank's overall revenue declined.

The results reflected the pressure the largest U.S. bank is under, even as it recovers from the disastrous "London Whale" trading losses that cost more than $6 billion last year. Many of the gains came from accounting judgments rather than increased customer demand. JPMorgan shares dipped 0.2 percent to $49.21.

Profit in its consumer banking segment fell 12 percent to $2.6 billion, and ignoring accounting adjustments, its corporate and investment banking profit dropped 2 percent to $2.5 billion.

The difficulty in the businesses bodes poorly for other Wall Street banks, which are due to report next week. Shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc fell 1.2 percent to $147.31, and Citigroup Inc, due to report on Monday, fell 1.1 percent to $44.36.

For JPMorgan, commercial banking and asset management profit rose, but the growth was too small in dollar terms to affect overall results.

Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said in a statement that loan growth was soft across the industry in the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter, noting that small businesses remained cautious.

In some areas, the bank made more loans. Mortgage lending volume, for example, rose to $52.7 billion in the quarter from $38.4 billion last year. The gain came even as Wells Fargo & Co, the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, said its volume slowed.

But JPMorgan's profit from home lending fell. As the housing market recovers, more banks are stepping into the mortgage market, weighing on profitability.

With interest rates low, lending profits are broadly lower across the industry. Banks' highest-yielding assets are maturing, only to be replaced with lower-yielding ones, and funding costs are not falling nearly as much. JPMorgan's net interest margin, a measure of loan profitability, fell to 2.37 percent from 2.61 percent.

Its overall net income rose to $6.53 billion, or $1.59 a share, from $4.92 billion, or $1.19 a share, a year earlier. Total revenue fell 3.6 percent to $25.12 billion. Results for both periods included special items.

JPMorgan's corporate and private equity unit, which housed the group that posted the London Whale trading losses, generated a $250 million profit in the first quarter, compared with a $1.02 billion loss in the same period a year earlier. Year-ago revenue was reduced by $1.4 billion due to the Whale credit derivatives trades.

The improved performance of the corporate and private equity unit helped results in the quarter, but the bank benefited even more from its decision to set aside less money to cover legal expenses. The bank's litigation expenses were close to nil in the first quarter of 2013 versus about $2.5 billion in last year's first quarter.

JPMorgan's Dimon said on a conference call with journalists that the bank set aside less money to cover mortgage litigation because it had set aside so much in prior quarters.

Speaking on CNBC, Chief Financial Officer Marianne Lake said the bank's mortgage-related litigation expenses have fallen. JPMorgan has faced investigations, lawsuits and disputes over many parts of its mortgage business, including the way it processed foreclosures.

The bank made another accounting decision that helped it in the quarter, setting aside $617 million to cover credit losses, less than the $726 million it added to reserves in last year's first quarter.

The bank also drew down on reserves it had previously set aside to cover bad loans. By reducing reserves for future losses on mortgage and credit card loans, the company added 18 cents a share to results.

In the wake of the credit derivatives losses that cost the bank so much money, it said it is working harder to improve its controls and compliance.

The Federal Reserve told JPMorgan last month to fix flaws in the way it determines how much capital the bank can return to shareholders. The central bank also said JPMorgan could increase its dividend to 38 cents a share, and buy back $6 billion of its shares.

But the episode was a black eye for Dimon, who admitted in his annual letter to shareholders earlier this week: "The London Whale was the stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of."

JPMorgan took big bets starting in the first quarter last year on the relative performance of different indexes linked to corporate credit. Its positions were so large that a trader on a desk at the bank's Chief Investment Office in London came to be known as the London Whale.

(Reporting by David Henry and Dan Wilchins in New York; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/jpmorgan-reports-higher-first-quarter-profits-111742737--sector.html

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Saturday, April 13, 2013

Daas Torah - Issues of Jewish Identity: Special ed programs : Poor ...

NY Times??
But his success until then underscores how private contractors have
taken advantage of this generously financed but poorly regulated segment
of the special-education system, often called special ed pre-K,
according to an investigation by The Times.?

At Mr. Park?s company, the costs to treat these 3- and 4-year-olds were enormous. The government routinely spent more than $50,000 in a single year on services for one child, according to an analysis of billing records.?

In all, that occurred 281 times from 2005 to 2012, the records show.?

The money went to Mr. Park?s company, Bilingual SEIT, and other providers of related services, including contractors that transported children to his schools.?

In the 2011-12 school year, Bilingual SEIT billed more than $17 million to the city and state, up from $725,000 it had billed a decade earlier.[...]

Yet The Times found that a network of contractors has arisen that routinely bill for questionable services.?

The Times?s investigation drew on interviews with more than 50 former workers at Mr. Park?s company, including teachers, therapists, administrators and clerks. Parents, city and state education officials, state auditors, and executives and workers at other contractors in the industry were also interviewed.?

The bar to entry was low. One preschool contractor had a previous career in Medicare fraud, federal records showed. Another was convicted of weapon possession and workers? compensation fraud.

State and city education officials said The Times?s findings were troubling.[...]

Source: http://daattorah.blogspot.com/2013/04/special-ed-programs-poor-government.html

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Healing by the clock

Friday, April 12, 2013

Circadian rhythms keep time for all living things, from regulating when plants open their flowers to foiling people when they try to beat jet lag. Day-night cycles are controlled through ancient biological mechanisms, evolutionarily speaking, so in essence, a human has the same internal clock as a fly does.

These circadian clocks govern daily rhythms through genes that synchronize molecular pathways that promote or repress protein production, influencing a multitude of body functions. Even before waking, for example, our clock-driven metabolism turns on enzymes and transporters that prepare our bodies to eat and digest food.

One of the circadian clock's transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene activity, is called period. Stem cell biologist Phillip Karpowicz, HMS research fellow in genetics, did not expect to find period in the gut of a fly. Working in the lab of Norbert Perrimon, the James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology in the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics, Karpowicz studies flies to see how the intestine regenerates cells when they are injured.

Screening for transcription factors active in damage repair revealed that the gene period was needed. Further experiments showed that this component of the circadian clock is critical to intestinal regeneration, meaning that in flies, gut healing fluctuates according to the time of day. Karpowicz, Perrimon and their colleagues published their results April 11 in Cell Reports.

"We thought this was really weird. I would not have thought that regeneration would tend to work better at one part of the day versus another part of the day," Karpowicz said. "But now we've shown that there's a rhythm in stem cells that's really important for the regeneration process."

"This is a beautiful example of why we do genetic screens in the first place. By taking an unbiased approach, the fly tells us what is important to study," Perrimon said.

Intestines are hotbeds of regeneration because they are constantly vulnerable to damage. Harmful bacteria or harsh chemicals that animals ingest can injure cells lining their intestines, which are essential for absorbing nutrients or blocking infectious agents from crossing through thin intestinal walls.

To understand how a circadian clock might operate in intestinal stem cells, the scientists bred mutant flies to lack the period gene. The flies were normal except for their arrhythmic bursts of activity throughout the 24-hour day. Their intestines also appeared normal, until they ingested a chemical that caused inflammation.

Compared to other flies, the mutants mounted a weaker response to repair their damaged cells. Their stem cells divided poorly and in a more haphazard manner, impairing the healing process.

In further experiments, the scientists tested whether period was active in cells called enterocytes that surround the intestinal stem cells and absorb nutrients. Disrupting period in enterocytes also weakened the cells' response to damage. The scientists showed that this rhythm originates in the intestine, rather than in the brain, which typically controls circadian rhythms.

The scientists widened their lens to look at all the genes that were turned on or off during the day. Performing genome-wide expression studies, they discovered 430 genes?about 3 percent of the fly genome?that are rhythmically expressed in fly intestines.

"We think these cells may be more acutely sensitive to damage at a certain time of day," Karpowicz said.

The next step will be to confirm these fly findings in mice. The scientists have already contemplated the potential applications to human health, including the timing of chemotherapy so a patient might best tolerate the treatment's side effects.

"This could be quite relevant in terms of when you should time the absorption of those drugs to work in sync with the intestinal regeneration process," Karpowicz said.

###

Harvard Medical School: http://hms.harvard.edu

Thanks to Harvard Medical School for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127724/Healing_by_the_clock

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PayPal has uphill battle to break shoppers' swipe habit

PayPal will soon be ubiquitous in U.S. retail stores, but just being there may not be enough.

The online payment service will take a giant step beyond its Internet roots on April 19, when a partnership with Discover Financial Services officially kicks in. The deal means PayPal will be accepted as a payment option in roughly 2 million retail stores that already take Discover credit cards.

For parent eBay Inc, PayPal's expansion is crucial. The 13-year-old payment service accounts for about 40 percent of eBay's revenue and its growth is slowing. A foothold in physical payments, a $10 trillion market roughly 10 times the size of online transactions, could power longer-term growth.

But a nagging question hangs over PayPal's push to checkout counters: How can it convince consumers to try its new payment method when swiping a credit or debit card is so easy?

"Consumers need to be convinced they need a single digital wallet or card that links to all their other cards," said Rick Oglesby, a payments industry analyst at Aite Group, which provides research to financial services clients. "That's a huge mindset shift and the average consumer wonders why they would need it."

PayPal has been testing its physical payments service at Home Depot Inc stores since early 2012. At the checkout counter, shoppers can use PayPal by typing in a mobile phone number and a four-digit PIN that has to be set up online beforehand. They can also use a PayPal card that links to their account.

PayPal's uphill battle becomes clear from interviews with employees at the Home Depot store in San Carlos, California, one of the first to test the new service. Cashiers there said very few customers chose to use PayPal - and some who did soon gave up because they found keying in a bunch of numbers was not as convenient as swiping a credit card.

"I ask at my local Home Depot and I get the same response - not many people have used it," said Brian Kilcourse of RSR Research, a consulting firm focused on retail technology. "Unless there are specific benefits that consumers can touch and feel, they're unlikely to adopt something new."

Don Kingsborough, the PayPal executive overseeing the offline push, said the company will soon be releasing an updated smartphone app that makes it easier for consumers to enroll in the program. PayPal will also be sending out new PayPal cards to users who still prefer to swipe.

Kingsborough said he expects the cards to be used a lot at first, but they will be slowly replaced by the app as more stores set up mobile payments and shoppers get comfortable using their smartphones to make purchases.

"An average credit card user uses the card 18 to 20 times a week. For us to get to those kinds of levels will take time," he said in an interview. "But by Christmas PayPal will start to be a more prevalent way to pay."

Rivals
PayPal's offline initiative is in part a response to stiffening competition in the payments market.

Square, a mobile payments start-up headed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is used by more than 300,000 merchants and has struck a partnership with Starbucks. Credit card giants Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc are working on their own digital wallets. These companies declined to comment on PayPal's expansion.

When people pay with PayPal, the purchases are often funded by credit cards. That means PayPal pays huge amounts of fees to Visa and MasterCard, making it a valuable partner. However, as PayPal expands into physical stores it will be more of a rival because it can forge closer ties to consumers and distance them from the credit card networks and card issuers.

PayPal originally caught on online because it offered users an easy way to pay for goods without having to type in personal information, like credit card numbers and addresses.

In the physical world, this advantage no longer applies. That forces PayPal to attract customers through a mix of financial incentives and small fixes for what it calls "consumer pain points," or irksome shopping experiences.

For example, Home Depot and PayPal have run several promotions in recent months, offering $5, $10 or $25 rewards to users who spend a certain amount in-store with PayPal. One such promotion was expected to last two weeks but proved so popular that it lasted only 30 minutes before the budgeted reward money ran out, Kingsborough said.

Home Depot is also working with PayPal to improve customer service. One possible solution would help contractors track the money they give plumbers and other specialists to buy equipment for a project.

At Jamba Juice, customers can use PayPal smartphone apps to order and pay for smoothies, then pick them up from a dedicated line. PayPal ran a similar test with McDonald's in France last year.

The new smartphone app will also let diners order and pay without waiters approaching their table. And another solution PayPal is testing allows users at stadium events to order and pay for food and drinks from their seats.

Retailers are interested in working with PayPal because it may give them leverage to negotiate better terms with the likes of Visa and MasterCard. PayPal is also offering to share more valuable customer data with merchants.

Kingsborough said he hopes to turn PayPal into a kind of digital Swiss Army knife: "It solves so many of your problems that you're willing to carry it."

Jury still out
It remains to be seen if these tactics will win over enough customers to give PayPal a significant physical footprint. Wall Street is largely optimistic - shares of eBay are up about 75 percent since mid-2011, when PayPal revealed its offline plans.

Home Depot Treasurer Dwaine Kimmet said he had low expectations about the initial use of PayPal in its stores and the experience so far has confirmed such caution. But when PayPal is more widely available in other stores and enrollment gets easier, adoption should increase, he said.

"The real killer app comes when PayPal rolls all the incremental functionality around the transaction and the shopping experience," Kimmet told Reuters.

Guitar Center, the world's largest musical instruments retailer, began to accept PayPal at its stores on October 15 last year and says the service still accounts for less than 1 percent of in-store payments. But that number is growing, said Wes Muddle, vice president of finance at Guitar Center.

Although a February promotion was not successful in boosting PayPal usage, Guitar Center is not giving up because it believes the partnership would help the retailer know its customers and market better to them over the long term.

"Would we have preferred the promotion move the needle more? Yes," he said. "There's no silver bullet for switching people from credit cards to PayPal. It will just take some time."

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653351/s/2a9b5a1d/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Cbusiness0Cpaypal0Ehas0Euphill0Ebattle0Ebreak0Eshoppers0Eswipe0Ehabit0E1C930A9286/story01.htm

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Friday, April 12, 2013

Devastating PC decline is literally incomprehensible to industry experts

PC Sales Decline AnalysisWindows 8

Despite ill omens, the IDC report about PC volume decline hitting -14% in the first quarter shows once again how much trouble the tech industry is having when it comes to dealing with the ongoing computer meltdown. As I wrote last December, IDC has been completely out to lunch about this key trend for years. In March of 2012, IDC was still expecting ?desktop and laptop sales to take off?in the second half of 2012.? Last December, IDC cheerfully predicted 1.2% growth in computer sales between 2012 and 2016. Of course, the PC industry is tucking into a majestic swan dive that makes those projections downright surreal. How can one of the most respected research firms in the computer sector be so disconnected from reality? The answer is simple: Analysts from largest research firms simply aren?t allowed to call major turning points.

[More from BGR: HTC One Review]

The clients of these research outfits include the largest computer hardware and software companies in the world. Predicting a steep downturn that does not materialize is far more dangerous than closing your eyes and looking away from the imminent collapse.?So analysts seem to play it safe and deliberately ignore the most negative scenarios.

[More from BGR: Photo of purported entry-level iPhone part leaks for first time]

The same exact pattern happened before the epic mobile handset downturn of 2001-2002 and the nasty consumer electronics recession of 2008-2009. Big research firms simply aren?t in the business of calling big cycle turns; their core business is holding the hands of major hardware vendors and making mostly soothing noises.

The downside of this is that those companies who actually believe in the forecasts of IDC and its ilk can get their product road map planning disastrously wrong. It is now becoming clear that all laptop and netbook vendors should have started planning a very aggressive shift towards other product categories for 2013.

Fairly soon, we will discover which ones have their escape plans plotted out ? and which ones will be caught in the smoldering ruins of the PC industry.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/devastating-pc-decline-literally-incomprehensible-industry-experts-133534489.html

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