A New Distribution Function for Risk Analysis

This paper presents an alternative to the beta continuous probability distribution for risk analysis. Particular attention has been given to two major applications of distributions, namely project management risk and critical path analysis (PERT). In conjunction with the beta, the triangular and normal distributions are frequently employed in order to give sufficient robustness to risk analysis. The beta distribution, as used in PERT, has a major theoretical implementation flaw. The new distribution was developed to give a possible alternative method of assessing risk. It is shown that the requirement to estimate the most pessimistic variate may be replaced by the probability to exceed the mode. Proposals for other simplifications in risk analysis are discussed. Practical means to validate the most appropriate distributions for risk analysis are outlined, and a cost-data case study is included.     

Existence and Stability for Spherical Crystals Growing in a Supersaturated Solution

We consider the growth of a spherical crystal in a supersaturatedsolution. In the first part, existence and uniqueness resultsfor radially symmetric growth are obtained, provided that thesupersaturation is not too large; conversely, when the far-fieldsupersaturation exceeds a critical value, it is shown that theradially symmetric solution ceases to exist in finite time.In the second part, we examine the linear stability of a radiallysymmetric similarity solution (in which the radius grows ast?) to shape perturbations. The results are compared with previousquasi-static analyses, and, in particular, the critical radiusat which the crystal becomes unstable is found to be largerfor small supersaturations, but smaller for large supersaturations,than those predicted by the quasi-static analysis     

Onset of crater formation during short pulse laser ablation

We report morphologic changes of metallic surfaces at the onset of ablation, starting from gentle ablation to the emergence of ablation craters. The evolution of both observed melting zones and of ablation craters therein are investigated in dependence of the ablation laser fluence for nanosecond ultraviolet laser pulses. Further, consequences of crater formation for cluster synthesis within the released atomic vapor are pointed out. PACS 52.38.Mf; 79.20.Ds; 65.40.De     

On decomposition of continuity

Summary The main purpose of this paper is to introduce the concepts of η-sets, ηζ-sets,η-continuity and ηζ-continuity and to obtain a decomposition of continuity.     

Addendum to "On the L1-Condition Number of the Univariate Bernstein Basis"

The paper mentioned above is a contribution of the authors to Volume 18 (2002) of this journal, see . Recently, J. Domsta pointed out to us that the proof of Theorem 4.2 in that paper contains an error. The purpose of this addendum is to present a correct argument for it.