New generation ambient air samplers operate at much lower sampling flow rates than do their “high volume” predecessors, namely 16.7 liters/minute. When these new air samplers emerged several years ago there were limited tools available with which to assess and calibrate their operating flow rate. In 1996 a flow meter specifically designed for these new air samplers came available, known as the ...

Passive sampling was used to deduce water concentrations of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the vicinity of a marine Superfund site on the Palos Verdes Shelf, California, USA. Precalibrated solid phase microextraction (SPME) fibers and polyethylene (PE) strips that were preloaded with performance reference compounds (PRCs) were codeployed for 32 d along an 11-station gradient at bottom,...

We present results of a numerical study of the differential equation governing the stationary states of the two-dimensional planetary atmosphere and magnetized plasma (within the Charney Hasegawa Mima model). The results show an interesting similarity with the morphology of a tropical cyclone. Quantitative comparisons are also favorable and several scaling laws can be formulated connecting the ...

Recently, Hofheinz, Jager, Khurana, Sahai, Waters and Zhandry [9] proposed a new primitive called universal samplers that allows oblivious sampling from arbitrary distributions, and showed how to construct universal samplers using indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) in the ROM. One important limitation for applying universal samplers in practice is that the constructions are built upon indist...

Urban air background concentrations of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX) were measured in 2007 in the Tricity area (Gdansk, Gdynia, and Sopot) and Tczew applying two types of passive samplers: Home-made permeation passive samplers and two diffusive passive samplers Orsa 5 (National Dräger) and Radiello (FS Maugeri). Differences between the time-weighted annual averages concentr...

The parameter configuration of a network protocol can be formulated as a black-box optimization problem with network simulation evaluating the performance of the blackbox, i.e., the network. This paper proposes a unified search framework (USF) to handle such large-scale black-box optimization problems. The framework is designed to provides a general platform on which tailored optimization algor...

Exposure to various chemicals can cause adverse effects to health, such as asthma and allergies, especially in children. Data on personal exposure levels in children are scarce, thus small lightweight diffusive mini-samplers for aldehydes and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were designed to measure the exposure level of children to these chemicals. The aim of the study was to validate and exa...

The preparation of a range of asymmetric iron and ruthenium-cyclone complexes, and their application to the asymmetric reduction of a ketone, are described. The enantioselectivity of ketone reduction is influenced by a single chiral centre in the catalyst, as well as by the planar chirality in the catalyst. This represents the first example of asymmetric ketone reduction using an iron cyclone c...

Global climate change (GCC) has led to increased focus on the occurrence of, and preparation for, climate-related extremes and hazards. Population exposure, the relative likelihood that a person in a given location was exposed to a given hazard event(s) in a given period of time, was the outcome for this analysis. Our objectives were to develop a method for estimating the population exposure at...

Here I use a simple numerical model of reef profile evolution to show that the presentday morphology of carbonate islands has developed largely in response to late Pleistocene sea level oscillations in addition to variable vertical motion and reef accretion rates. In particular, large amplitude 'ice-house' sea-level variability resulted in long lagoonal depositional hiatuses, producing the morp...