My husband, Harold Ascher, was a senior life member of IEEE. He lost his battle with cancer and passed away on May 5. He will be very much missed. But his many shared stories and experiences will be fondly remembered by our family. I would appreciate your mentioning his passing at your next annual conference. His particular interests were in reliability and maintainability.

–Barbara Ascher, wife of Harold Ascher (in a note to C. Hansen)

HAROLD ASCHER

On Monday, May 5, 2014, Harold Ascher of Potomac, Maryland. Beloved husband of Barbara Ascher; loving father of Sharon Kessler (Steven) and Matthew Ascher (Eileen); adored grandfather of Daniel, Ben, Eric, Gary and Haley. The burial will be at Mount Hebron in New York City on Wednesday. Shiva will be observed at Eileen and Matthew's residence on Thursday evening May 8 with prayers at 7 p.m. Memorial contributions may be made to the Jewish National Fund, the Simon Wiesenthal Center or the LUNGevity Foundation, all of which were sincerely supported by Harold. Harold had a distinguished career as a reliability engineer with the Naval Research Laboratory followed by 20 years as a private consultant. He was a well recognized published author in his field. His multifaceted interests included classical music, art, and biblical history. His most cherished memories are of his grandchildren and world travel with his wife, Barbara.

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Rememberances

Christian Hansen, Reliability Society President

On May 5, 2014 the Reliability Society lost a distinguished senior life member and I lost a dear friend. Harold (Harry) E. Ascher was known widely in the reliability engineering community for his many contributions, especially in the area of statistical modeling of repairable systems reliability. The 1984 book co-authored by Harry Ascher and Harry Feingold, Repairable Systems Reliability: Modeling, Inference, Misconceptions and Their Causes [1] was the first book to thoroughly address statistical modeling of systems that are repaired rather than discarded after the first failure. Currently, Google Scholar [2] alone identifies 890 publications which cite the 1984 book by Ascher and Feingold.
Harry Ascher earned degrees in Operations Research from City College of New York and New York University and spent most of his career with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington DC. Following his retirement from NRL, he spent more than 20 years as a private consultant. He also enjoyed traveling, usually accompanied by his wife Barbara, giving talks around the world. He received many distinctions and awards including the Allan Chop Award from ASQC (now ASQ) in 1995.

One of Harry Ascher’s greatest visions, as a professional, was to “clean up” notation and terminology from what he considered to be results of inherent and avoidable ambiguities between properties of repairable systems and, in contrast, properties of (non-repairable) parts. For example, the term “Failure Rate” in the literature is used in multiple conflicting meanings, sometimes even within the same article. One meaning is the derivative of the expected cumulative number of failures for a repairable system (also known as a “Rate of Occurrence of Failures” of “Failure Intensity Function”). The other, quite different, meaning is the ratio of the Probability Density Function and the Reliability Function for a part (also known as the “Force of Mortality” or “Hazard Function”). Additionally, he pointed to what he called “t-for-two” as a conflict resulting from using the symbol t to denote both the age of a system (also known as “Global Time”) and the age of a part or time since most recent system failure (also known as “Local Time”). In his many talks on the subject, one would often see a slide with the statement “Will the Real Failure Rate Please Stand Up?” In private conversations, he could go on and on about this for hours and perhaps with a sign of frustration in his voice say that “even after publishing articles and giving talks about this around the world for more than 30 years, people still don’t get it!”

Apart from his many publications pointing out the confusing and conflicting notation being used, he introduced us the fact that the most important analysis to perform on statistical data for a repairable system is to test for trend. This may possibly classify the system as a “Happy System” (times between failures tend to get larger and larger, a “Sad System” (times between failures tend to get shorter and shorter) or a “Non-Committal System” (times between failures show no significant sign of trend). He would repeatedly state that, when it comes to modeling a repairable system, “a set of numbers is not a data set.” Often, the particular pattern in which failures occur provide more useful information about a system, than does a set of numbers describing the observed times between failures. He taught us that a renewal process is generally an inappropriate model to use for a complex repairable system consisting of many parts that have either “infant mortality” or “wear-out” characteristics. To demonstrate how absurd the renewal process model is, when used to describe a complex system such as a car he often told his “Honest John” story. This is about a used-car salesman trying to sell a worn-out car with multiple mechanical issues by telling the customer: “Two days ago the battery was dead, so we charged it. So the car is two days old!”

I personally got to know Harry in 1991 around the time when as a young professional I moved to Washington DC to begin work as a reliability specialist at Intelsat. I was about to finish my PhD dissertation on the subject of repairable systems reliability, using the 1984 book by Ascher and Feingold as my most important reference and top inspiration for my research. I was surprised one day when I received a letter in the mail from Harry requesting copies of some of my articles. As I responded, I mentioned to him that I would soon be moving to Washington DC and that I would enjoy meeting him sometime. After I had settled into my new job, he invited me to come for dinner at his home and we began a friendship and professional collaboration that would last up until his death this year. Over the next two decades, we often spoke for hours on the phone discussing reliability concepts and we collaborated on several articles together [3]-[5]. Although I ended up settling in the “other Washington,” 2500 miles from Washington DC, he and I often saw each other at the RAMS conference which he attended almost every year until illness made it difficult for him to travel. Even in the months before his death, we were actively collaborating on a revision and expansion of our IEEE e-learning module (formerly Expert Now) on Repairable Systems [6] which we were close to finishing when he lost his battle with cancer.

I feel privileged to have known Harry. As a colleague I greatly admired his work and, as a friend I will miss him dearly. My deepest condolences go out to Harry’s family and my thoughts and prayers are with them during this time of grief.
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References:
[1] Ascher, H.E. and Feingold, H. (1984). Repairable Systems Reliability: Modeling, Inference, Misconceptions and Their Causes. New York: Marcel-Dekker
[2] http://scholar.google.com (keyword: Repairable Systems Reliability)
[3] Ascher, H. E., & Hansen, C. K. (1998). Spurious exponentiality observed when incorrectly fitting a distribution to nonstationary data. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 47(4), 451-459.
[4] Hansen, C. K., & Ascher, H. E. (2002). Modeling repair events under intermittent failures and failures subject to unsuccessful repair. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 18(6), 453-465.
[5] Ascher, H. E., & Hansen, C. K. (2000). Comment on: stupid statistics [Editorial]. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 49(2), 134-135.
[6] Hansen, C. K., & Ascher, H. E. (2009). Concepts and Models for Repairable Systems Reliability, IEEE e-learning module http://ieee-elearning.org/course/category.php?id=39

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Louis Gullo

I also received a letter from Harry's wife, Barbara, giving me the bad news. I have known him for a shorter time than you, but feel that we share a bond related to similarities in our careers. One special location that Harry liked to reminisce about was Valley Cottage. He was fond of the time he spent in this small town in NY about 20 miles north of NYC. When I told him that I grew up in Valley Cottage, and told him stories of my time there, he would light up. He remembered the historical road, the King's Highway and Casper Hill Rd with its steep grade. We would wonder how horse drawn carriages ever made it up the road in the times of George Washington. Even George himself traveled this road between Boston and NY. Many old colonial houses along the way bragged: "George Washington Slept Here". The road was very narrow and he was amazed that as a kid, I would ride my bike delivering newspapers while dodging traffic in both directions. Very fond memories of Harry.