............................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iv List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... ix Li...

The reliability analysis method and the allowable stress method were both applied in this study to determine design values of ultimate compression strength (UCS) of visually-graded 40 x 65 mm dimension Chinese larch lumber. A total of 784 lumber samples were tested on the static full-size compression strength, according to Chinese National Standards. The goodness-of-fit for the UCS distribution...

This paper presents a degradation-based model to jointly determine the optimal burn-in, inspection, and maintenance decisions, based on degradation analysis and an integrated quality and reliability cost model. Degradation modeling plays an important role in reliability prediction and analysis for many highly reliable components and equipment, when the failures can rarely be observed. Unlike tr...

NOTICE: this is the authors' version of a work that was accepted for publication in Trends in Genetics. Changes resulting from the publishing process such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Abstract 1 By conventiona...

The coefficient of variation is often used as a measure of precision in medical and biological sciences. When it is known a priori that several independent normal populations have equal coefficient of variations, procedures for constructing confidence intervals for the common coefficient of variation based on the concept of generalized variables had been discussed by other researchers. This pap...

Statistical properties of an order book and the effect they have on price dynamics were studied using the high-frequency NASDAQ Level II data. It was observed that the size distribution of marketable orders (transaction sizes) has power law tails with an exponent 1 + μmarket = 2.4 ± 0.1. The distribution of limit order sizes was found to be consistent with a power law with an exponent close to ...

For more than a century, microbiologists have sought to determine the species richness of bacteria in soil, but the extreme complexity and unknown structure of soil microbial communities have obscured the answer. We developed a statistical model that makes the problem of estimating richness statistically accessible by evaluating the characteristics of samples drawn from simulated communities wi...

We examine the evolution of the IGM Lyα optical depth distribution using the transmitted flux probability distribution function (PDF) in a sample of 63 QSOs spanning absorption redshifts 1.7 < z < 5.8. The data are compared to two theoretical τ distributions: a model distribution based on the density distribution of Miralda-Escudé et al. (2000) (MHR00), and a lognormal distribution. We assume a...

Degradation experiments are usually used to assess the lifetime distribution of highly reliable products which are not likely to fail under the traditional life tests or accelerated life tests. Several factors, such as the inspection frequency, the sample size and the termination time, are closely related to the experimental cost and the estimation precision. Obviously, an inappropriate setting...

Prevalence and counts of Salmonella Typhimurium in fresh pork sausage packs at the point of retail were modeled by using Irish and United Kingdom retail surveys' data. A methodology for modeling a second-order distribution for the initial Salmonella concentration (lambda0) in pork sausage at retail was presented considering the uncertainty originated from the most probable-number (MPN) serial d...