A study is made of the stability of laminar boundary-layer profiles on slightly curved walls relative to small disturbances that result from vortices whose axes are parallel to the principal direction of flow. The result is an eigenvalue problem by which, for a given undisturbed flow at a prescribed wall, the amplification or decay is computed for each Reynolds number and each vortex thickness. For neutral disturbances (zero amplification) a critical Reynolds number is determined for each vortex distribution. The numerical calculation produces amplified disturbances on concave walls only.

Macroscopic physics provides us with a great variety of pattern-forming systems displaying propagation phenomena, from reactive fronts in combustion, to wavy structures in convection and to shear flow instabilities in hydrodynamics. These proceedings record progress in this rapidly expanding field. The contributions have the following major themes: - The problems of velocity selection and front morphology of propagating interfaces in multiphase media, with emphasis on recent theoretical and experimental results on dendritic crystal growth, Saffman-Taylor fingering, directional solidification and chemical waves. - The "unfolding" of large-scale, low-frequency behavior in weakly confined homogeneous systems driven far from equilibrium, and more specifically, the envelope approach to the mathematical description of textures in different cases: steady cells, propagating waves, structural defects, and phase instabilities. - The implications of the presence of global downstream transport in open flows for the nature, convective or absolute, of shear flow instabilities, with applications to real boundary layer flows or shear layers, as reported in contributions covering experimental situations of fundamental and/or engineering interest.