The Great Obsession: An Oriental Riddle

Sustaining an Industry Obsession

September–October 2002 0740-7475/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE DEVICE SCALING has long been an accepted mantra, even an obsession, in the semiconductor industry, and if recent predictions are true, the march of deep-submicron (DSM) devices into the nanoscale era will continue. Process and device engineers will somehow find a way to overcome the looming technical challenges, just like they always have f...

Rethinking Philosophy in an Oriental Way

Solution to “the Kuznets Riddle”

S. Kuznets's study that the average propensity to consume is a constant value were nexpected because they denied one of the basic provisions of the Keynesian theory. This fact was called "the riddle of Kuznets".  F. Modigliani and M. Friedman, using the hypothesis of the life cycle and the concept of constant income, proposed two options that explain its solution. But models should not explain,...

Genomic Imprinting: An Obsession with Depilatory Mice

Excessive grooming in mice has been promoted as a model of human obsessive-compulsive disorders. A recent paper adds Grb10 to the list of genes with effects on behavioral hair loss, with the added twist that this time the gene is imprinted.

The Mass Distribution of White Dwarfs: An Unwavering Obsession

We discuss some of our current knowledge of the mass distribution of DA and non-DA stars using various methods for measuring white dwarf masses including spectroscopic, trigonometric parallax, and gravitational redshift measurements, with a particular emphasis on the problems encountered at the low end of the cooling sequence where energy transport by convection becomes important. 1. An Unwaver...