University setting costs

Since its publication I have used the book as an accompanying text in courses on catalyst characterization, both at the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Netherlands Institute for Catalysis Research, NIOK. It has been very rewarding to learn that several colleagues in catalysis have adopted the book for their courses as well. I will be very grateful for comments and corrections. Colleagues who are interested in the exercises we use at Eindhoven are most welcome to contact me, the set is available at nominal cost. 

Each project has its own unique characteristic physical, environmental, cultural, and regulatory setting. No single approach (technology, process, or cleanup standard) can be universally applied. The following sections discuss the key elements that impact the economic decisions of remediation projects and result in the most efficient, cost-effective restoration. 

In 1983, I set up my own company P.S. Analytical. A broad range of analytical modules with hardware and software have been designed, developed and manufactured by the company and are sold internationally. The main expertise of P.S. Analytical is to research a problem and to provide, at an economic cost, a fully engineered solution for routine use. The company collaborates with other companies, with universities and with government laboratories. P.S. Analytical has exposed me to different areas of analytical chemistry and has allowed me to tackle many areas of analytical apphcation, for example types. I have been actively involved in all aspects of the automation, especially economics, philosophy and management. P.S. Analytical has flourished and increased its range of products from simple accessories to fully integrated instrumental systems, for example, the Merlin Plus Fluorescence system for the determination of ultra-trace levels of mercury. 

Price discrimination refers to the practice of selling identical products to different sets of customers at different prices. Expressed another way, different customers pay different markups over the identical incremental cost of producing an identical product. Price discrimination is widely practiced in the hotel and airline industries, by universities in the United States that can vary their tuition through scholarships, by electric power companies, and in the health care industry. Hospitals in the United States, for example, routinely charge different payers different prices for the same services. In the U.S. pharmaceutical market, different prices are charged to different insurance carriers and to self-paying patients. Worldwide, the same pharmaceutical firms sell the identical product to different countries at different prices. 

The concept of the producer cash cost curve, that aligns and ranks producers in ascending order based on their cash costs of production and the intersection of which with market demand identifies the marginal - and therefore price-setting -producer, is universally known in commodity industries and requires no further explanation here. 

Infrastructure and distribution raise similar problems. Capable third-party chemical distributors offering consistently high levels of service are not universally available. According to a 2002 study published by the State Council s China Development Research Centre, 70 percent of China s commercial enterprises have their own fleet of vehicles and 80 percent own their warehouse facilities. MNCs thinking about setting up their own (Western-style) nationwide chemical distribution network have soon been discouraged by the high risks and costs involved. 

Typically, between 20 and 80 healthy adults (this number can certainly be lower) participate in these relatively short studies, and subjects are often recruited from university medical school settings where trials are being conducted. Subjects are typically paid for their participation. (This payment may be one reason why the term volunteers originated to describe these subjects—see the discussion in Section 1.8.2. However, there are financial benefits to many clinical trial participants in later clinical trials too, in that medical procedures involved in trials are conducted at no cost to the subjects.)... 

However, there is no set fee that can be universally applied to a contractor s services. Remember, in most cases a contractor, unlike a regular manufacturer, has no product line. Whether or not it has business is entirely at the whim of its customers. The quantity of business available to the contractor is governed by how well a client s products are doing in the clinic or in the marketplace. The contractor can make a guess as to how much business it will do each year, but the uncertainty is great. Therefore, a contractor usually bases his fees on the costs associated with each batch to be produced, rather than the projected total output of its production each year. To gain discounts, clients must be prepared to offer reasonable guaranteed production requirements. 

Dr. Hamish Fraser at Ohio State University directs a project intended to develop modeling tools that will predict material properties for a set of components critical to the operation of aircraft gas turbine engines. The properties of interest are low cycle fatigue and fatigue crack growth. Expected outcomes of this research not only will effect an acceleration of the materials optimization and insertion process but also will play a major role in the reduction of costs associated with extension of component life. 

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