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Nondestructive Evaluation: A Tool in Design, Manufacturing, and Service Revised Edition

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The work's field is nondestructive evaluation (NDE). NDE contains the instruments which engineers use to detect flaws in structures which function under mechanical stress.

The work starts off well enough. However,in Chapter 2 it ventures into one's motivation for using NDE. Here, the work founders.

Why would one use NDE? Because, the authors suggest, a sufficiently small false negative error probability reduces the inspected structure's probability of collapse.

However, to state the issue this way is to ignore one-half of the requirements of the user of any diagnostic instrument. The full requirement is for sufficiently small false positive and false negative error probabilities.

However, the reader who searches the literature of NDE for knowledge of the two probabilities will search in vein. This can be said with confidence, for a recent paper demonstrates that NDE violates an axiom of probability theory in relationship to the two probabilities (see "Erratic Measure" (in NDE in the Energy Industry 1995, pp. 1-6. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York, NY).