VCW, Inc. Workplace Committee Overview

Includes mission statement and quality expectations. Report Submitted to the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations.Report_VCW.pdf: 245 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Preliminary Ecological Assessment of Waller Creek

This report assesses the ecological character of Waller Creek. This includes a general description, its physical setting, vegetation and habitat descriptions, ecological value indexes, and other ecological metrics.Waller Creek Working Grou

Serving Limited English Proficient Clients

When serving walk-ins, the goal is to provide the same services, information and referrals as we would provide to the English-speaking public. This is true whether the walk-in ultimately turns out to be eligible for our services or not. When in doubt, ask yourself what services, information or referrals you would provide to an English speaking person in the same situation. Then make sure the Limited English Proficient person gets that same service, information or referrals

Impervious Surface Analysis for Durham Under Current and Build-Out Conditions In Support of Stormwater Management

An analysis was performed to determine current and projected impervious surface areas in the Town of Durham, New Hampshire with the purpose of generating data to guide the adoption of stormwater management practices in the Town. Because impervious surfaces affect stormwater runoff peak flows and volumes significantly, it is critical to understand the Town’s impervious area characteristics (and the resulting stormwater management implications) under current conditions in order to develop appropriate stormwater management policies

Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality

The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of "Canada" and "Air" cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada". Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible

Portsmouth Vernal Pool Inventory

West Environmental, Inc. (WEI) conducted a city-wide Vernal Pool Inventory to locate, document and map vernal pools in Portsmouth. This effort was coordinated with the Portsmouth Planning Department and Conservation Commission to help the City of Portsmouth in vernal pool identification and mapping. The goal of this project was to locate isolated wetlands that provide vernal pool habitat. Currently the City of Portsmouth’s wetland regulations exempt wetlands less than 5,000 square feet from the local 100’ buffer zone. This study identified smaller wetlands which have the potential to provide vernal pool habitat that may deserve the 100 foot buffer protection. It should be noted that vernal pool habitat can exist in a variety of freshwater wetlands including larger red maple swamps. These areas were also mapped when encountered. A field workshop was held for the Conservation Commission members to give them hands-on training in vernal pool ecology. The results of this Vernal Pool Inventory were presented to the Portsmouth Conservation Commission in July of 2008. Based on the results of this study and the recent revisions to the NHDES Wetlands Bureau regulations which added rules for vernal pool protection, the Portsmouth Conservation Commission has recommended a change to the Article 8 - Environmental Protection Standards of the City of Portsmouth to include vernal pool identification and protection with a 100’ buffer

Tracking Users across the Web via TLS Session Resumption

User tracking on the Internet can come in various forms, e.g., via cookies or by fingerprinting web browsers. A technique that got less attention so far is user tracking based on TLS and specifically based on the TLS session resumption mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first that investigate the applicability of TLS session resumption for user tracking. For that, we evaluated the configuration of 48 popular browsers and one million of the most popular websites. Moreover, we present a so-called prolongation attack, which allows extending the tracking period beyond the lifetime of the session resumption mechanism. To show that under the observed browser configurations tracking via TLS session resumptions is feasible, we also looked into DNS data to understand the longest consecutive tracking period for a user by a particular website. Our results indicate that with the standard setting of the session resumption lifetime in many current browsers, the average user can be tracked for up to eight days. With a session resumption lifetime of seven days, as recommended upper limit in the draft for TLS version 1.3, 65% of all users in our dataset can be tracked permanently.Comment: 11 page

Economic Contributions of Winter Sports in a Changing Climate

In mountain towns across the United States that rely on winter tourism, snow is currency. For snow lovers and the winter sports industry, predictions of a future with warmer winters, reduced snowfall, and shorter snow seasons is inspiring them to innovate, increase their own efforts to address emissions, and speak publicly on the urgent need for action. This report examines the economic contribution of winter snow sports tourism to U.S. national and state-level economies. In a 2012 analysis, Protect Our Winters and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that the winter sports tourism industry generates $12.2 billion and 23 million Americans participate in winter sports annually. That study found that changes in the winter season driven by climate change were costing the downhill ski resort industry approximately$1.07 billion in aggregated revenue over high and low snow years over the last decade