Keynote Summary: Black swans, dragons and the phoenix: rebuilding citrus after HLB

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...

Transcriptome Profiling of Huanglongbing (HLB) Tolerant and Susceptible Citrus Plants Reveals the Role of Basal Resistance in HLB Tolerance

Huanglongbing (HLB) is currently the most destructive disease of citrus worldwide. Although there is no immune cultivar, field tolerance to HLB within citrus and citrus relatives has been observed at the USDA Picos farm at Ft. Pierce, Florida, where plants have been exposed to a very high level of HLB pressure since 2006. In this study, we used RNA-Seq to evaluate expression differences between...

Black Swans and the Domains of Statistics

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (hence TBS) is only critical of statistics, statisticians, or users of statistics in a very narrow (but consequential) set of circumstances. It was written by a veteran practitioner of uncertainty whose profession (a mixture of quantitative research, derivatives pricing, and risk management) estimates and deals with exposures to higher order s...

Waiting for medicine's black swans.