The Fussler sampling technique for populations with discrete or a continuous distribution of thickness

Abstract

In this paper we show that the Fussler sampling technique in book shelves is always better than systematic sampling by length. So far this result was only known to be true in the idealized situation of two categories of books : "thin" and "thick" books (Bookstein, Rousseau). In the present paper we allow any distribution of thicknesses of bookson the shelf and furthermore we show that the same result is true for systems with a continuous distributions of thicknesses, which has applications in sampling by time.