Silicone passive samplers have gained an increasing attention as single-phased, practical and robust samplers for monitoring of organic contaminants in the aquatic environment in recent years. However, analytical challenges arise in routine application during the extraction of analytes as silicone oligomers are co-extracted and interfere severely during chemical analyses (e.g. gas chromatograph...

The Gibbs sampler is a very simple yet efficient method for the performance evaluation of product form loss networks. This paper introduces the setwise Gibbs sampler as a flexible technique for analysing closed BCMP networks, which model telecommunication networks using window flow control. The efficiency of another variant, the filtered Gibbs sampler (FGS), is also investigated. It is shown th...

We measured inhalable, thoracic, and so-called ``total'' wood dust exposure in British Columbia lumber mill workers. Particle-size selective sampling was conducted using the GSP and Seven hole inhalable samplers, the PEM thoracic sampler and the 37-mm closed-face cassette ``total'' sampler. All measurements were full-shift personal samples, obtained from randomly selected workers. We obtained i...

BACKGROUND Sampler filling time begins with the initial flash of blood in the needle hub until the preset sampler volume is obtained. Previous studies have shown statistically significant differences between arterial and venous sampler filling times, but included only a few subjects with abnormal blood pressures. OBJECTIVE To determine whether the time required to fill a vented arterial sampl...

A passive sampler (the polar organic chemical integrative sampler; POCIS) was assessed for its ability to sample natural estrogens (17β-estradiol, E2; estrone, E1 and estriol, E3) and the synthetic estrogen (17α-ethynylestradiol, EE2) in the outlet of a sewage treatment works over several weeks. The performance of the POCIS was investigated and optimised in the laboratory before field deploymen...

This paper studies the design of an optimal relaxed causal sampler using sampled data system theory. A lifted frequency domain approach is used to obtain the existence conditions and the optimal sampler. A state space formulation of the results is also provided. The resulting optimal relaxed causal sampler is a cascade of a linear continuous time system followed by a generalized sampler and a d...

The independence sampler is one of the most commonly used MCMC algorithms usually as a component of a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm. The common focus for the independence sampler is on the choice of proposal distribution to obtain an as high as possible acceptance rate. In this paper we have a somewhat different focus concentrating on the use of the independence sampler for updating augment...

Gaussian sampling over lattices is a cornerstone of latticebased cryptography as it allows to build numerous cryptographic primitives. There are two main algorithms performing this task. The rst one is due to Klein (SODA 2000) and Gentry, Peikert and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2008), and outputs vectors of good quality but runs rather slowly, in quadratic time. The second one is due to Peikert (CRYPT...

There is a need for a small personal aerosol sampler for measuring occupational exposure to airborne particles in the breathing zone. Existing aerosol samplers are too large to be mounted inside modern welder's protective equipment without disturbing the worker. A headset-mounted mini sampler has been developed to fill this gap with focus on manganese exposure. This mini sampler is easy to use ...

This study presents the results of the particle size distribution (PSD) analyses of dusts from two agricultural facilities using filters from collocated PM10 and total suspended particulates (TSP) samplers. Ideally, PM10 concentrations obtained using the PM10 sampler should be the same as those using the TSP sampler. However, it was observed from numerous sampling episodes that there exists a b...