The Sacrificial Goat

Global Warming: the Sacrificial Temptation

The claimed unanimity of the scientific community about the human culpability for global warming is questioned. Up today there exists no scientific proof of human culpability. It is not the number of authors of a paper, which validates its scientific content. The use of probability to assert the degree of certainty with respect the global warming problem is shown to be misleading. The debate ab...

Three-Dimensional Sacrificial Etching

In MEMS fabrication micro-mechanical components have to be partially released from a substrate. Selectively etching away sacrificial layers, such that a free standing structure remains, is a widely used technique for this purpose. Free standing structures allow MEMS devices to induce or to sense mechanical movements or vibrations. During sacrificial etching lower etch rates than the blanket one...

Sacrificial Worship of the Old Testament

Sacrificial Learning in Nonlinear Perceptrons

Using the cavity method we consider the learning of noisy teachergenerated examples by a nonlinear student perceptron. For insufficient examples and weak weight decay, the activation distribution of the training examples exhibits a gap for the more difficult examples. This illustrates that the outliers are sacrificed for the overall performance. Simulation shows that the picture of the smooth e...

Rapid Sacrificial Germanium Etching Using Xenon Difluoride

We present a novel micromachining procedure employing the noble gas halide, xenon difluoride (XeF2), to rapidly undercut a sacrificial layer comprised of low-temperature deposited amorphous germanium (α-Ge). As a proof of concept, this process is utilized to fabricate electrostatically-actuated suspended Bragg mirrors applicable to wavelength-tunable surface-normal photonic devices. Exploiting ...