A Swan's Secret.

Yield of Black Swans

h EXCEPT FOR GETTING your chip to market on time, optimizing yield is perhaps the most important thing we can do to improve IC profitability. We address this problem in several ways: design for manufacturability (DFM) through layout rules, process control, and increasingly clean cleanrooms. In an ideal world, this would solve our yield problems. We know it doesn’t, so we build a diagnostic capa...

Black Swans and white tablets

The Black Swan, a metaphor for highly improbable, high impact events, warns us to understand the limits of our predictions and expect the “unknown unknowns” everywhere, from war to science and industry. From the earliest stages of discovery to post-marketing events, we argue that fundamentally the structure of pharmaceutical industry is driven by and impacted by both positive and negative Black...

Waiting for medicine's black swans.

Ducks, Geese, and Swans of the World: Tribe Anserini (Swans and True Geese)

Hiding from swans: optimal burial depth of sago pondweed tubers foraged by Bewick’s swans

1 We used a combination of laboratory and field experiments to test the hypothesis that the burial depth of Potamogeton pectinatus tubers will vary with local sediment type and swan predation pressure. 2 In the field, mortality due to predation by swans decreased linearly with burial depth (from 100% at the surface to 55% at 225 mm depth) and with sediment clay content. Average tuber size showe...