Parrondo’s paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version of Parrondo’s paradox in reliability theory involving two systems in series, the units of the first system being less reliable than those of the second. If ...

Cell adhesion in the presence of hydrodynamic forces is a critical factor in inflammation, cancer metastasis, and blood clotting. A number of assays have recently been developed to apply forces to small numbers of the receptor–ligand bonds responsible for adhesion. Examples include assays using hydrodynamic shear in flow chambers or elastic probe deflection assays such as the atomic force micro...

Parrondo’s paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version of Parrondo’s paradox in reliability theory involving two systems in series, the units of the first system being less reliable than those of the second. If ...

We present a foundational theory of software system reliability based on components. The theory describes how component developers can design and test their components to produce measurements that are later used by system designers to calculate composite system reliability — without implementation and test of the system being designed. The theory describes how to make component measurements tha...

In this paper, we propose a new way of looking at the reliability of a network using percolation theory. In this new view, a network failure can be regarded as a percolation process and the critical threshold of percolation can be used as network failure criterion linked to the operational settings under control. To demonstrate our approach, we consider both random network models and real netwo...