Isinglass River Conservation Corridor Project

The New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP) provided a $9,075 grant to Bear-Paw Regional Greenways to support the Isinglass River Conservation Corridor Project. The grant helped fund some of the transaction costs associated with the project that protected high-value conservation land along the Isinglass River and in other areas of the watershed in Strafford, New Hampshire. The$2.9 million project was a collaboration of Bear-Paw, the Trust for Public Land (TPL), and the Town of Strafford that protected five properties and 868 acres of forest, over one mile of road frontage, more than three miles of frontage on streams and rivers (including more than 1½ miles on the Isinglass River), several ponds, and two historic mill sites. All of these properties are in areas that have been identified as important to protect in the Land Conservation Plan for New Hampshire’s Coastal Watersheds, a Conservation Plan produced by Bear-Paw Regional Greenways, the New Hampshire Wildlife Action Plan

ORGANIC SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: A CASE STUDY FOR AGILE DEVELOPMENT

This project examines the efforts and results of United States Strategic Command’s (USSTRATCOM) Targeting Process Improvement Working Group (TPIWG) as a case study. The TPIWG conducted an evaluation of USSTRATCOM J52/J2T Joint Targeting Division's current target maintenance processes and identified areas of improvements. After identification of areas requiring improvement, the TPIWG conceived the idea for and began design and development of an automated change detection software program for target maintenance.Methodology includes an analysis of what processes were identified for improvement and how change was implemented, how well software development processes were implemented and adhered to, analysis of the process to secure funding support from the U.S. Air Force and subsequent contracting for full time support of the software. This case study documents challenges, innovative ideas, risks taken and faced by the TPIWG during the course of process analysis, software development and implementation phases. Documentation of challenges to sustainment funding from a cost, schedule, and performance perspective. Exploration of pros and cons to having the completed work then contracted to a secondary party, not part of the TPIWG. Identification of future challenges contractors may face in the sustainment or future improvements of the software. Lastly, this case study tries to determine what the overall improvement and benefit is for the warfighter.Lieutenant Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

On implementation aspects of decode and forward and compress and forward relay protocols

In this work, the common relay protocols Decode-and-Forward and Compress-and-Forward (CF) are investigated from a practical point of view: This involves on the one hand the impact of imperfections like channel and carrier phase stimation errors and on the other hand, the question of how to implement relay protocol specific signal processing like quantization for CF which is modeled in information theory simply by additive quantizer noise. To evaluate the performance, achievable rates are determined either numerically with the help of the Max-Flow Min-Cut theorem or by link level simulations.Diese Arbeit untersucht die Relay-Protokolle Decode-and-Forward und Compress-and-Forward (CF) mit dem Fokus auf einer praktischen Umsetzung. Es werden sowohl Störeinflüsse wie Kanal- und Phasenschätzfehler betrachtet als auch spezielle Kompressionsverfahren für das CF Protokoll implementiert. Von großer Bedeutung ist hier die Kompression in Form der Quantisierung, weil diese in der Informationstheorie lediglich durch Quantisierungsrauschen modelliert wird. Zur Auswertung der Leistungsfähigkeit der Protokolle werden die erzielbaren Raten entweder numerisch oder durch Simulation bestimmt

Recognizing Topic Change in Search Sessions of Digital Libraries based on Thesaurus and Classification System

Log analysis in Web search showed that user sessions often contain several different topics. This means sessions need to be segmented into parts which handle the same topic in order to give appropriate user support based on the topic, and not on a mixture of topics. Different methods have been proposed to segment a user session to different topics based on timeouts, lexical analysis, query similarity or external knowledge sources. In this paper, we study the problem in a digital library for the social sciences. We present a method based on a thesaurus and a classification system which are typical knowledge organization systems in digital libraries. Five experts evaluated our approach and rated it as good for the segmentation of search sessions into parts that treat the same topic

Imaging through turbulence with a quadrature-phase optical interferometer

We present an improved technique for imaging through turbulence at visible wavelengths using a rotation shearing pupil-plane interferometer, intended for astronomical and terrestrial imaging applications. While previous astronomical rotation shearing interferometers have made only visibility modulus measurements, this interferometer makes four simultaneous measurements on each interferometric baseline, with phase differences of π/2 between each measurement, allowing complex visibility measurements (modulus and phase) across the entire input pupil in a single exposure. This technique offers excellent wavefront resolution, allowing operation at visible wavelengths on large apertures, is potentially immune to amplitude fluctuations (scintillation), and may offer superior calibration capabilities to other imaging techniques. The interferometer has been tested in the laboratory under weakly aberrating conditions and at Palomar Observatory under ordinary astronomical observing conditions. This research is based partly on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope