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Description
This dissertation analyzes two regional systems of involuntary servitude (Indian captive slavery and Mexican debt peonage) over a period spanning roughly two centuries. Following a chronological framework, it examines the development of captive slavery in the Southwest beginning in the early 1700s and lasting through the mid-1800s, by which time debt peonage emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude that augmented Indian slavery in order to meet increasing demand for labor. While both peonage and captive slavery had an indelible impact on cultural and social systems in the Southwest, this dissertation places those two labor systems within the context of North American slavery and sectional agitation during the antebellum period. The existence of debt bondage and Indian captivity in New Mexico had a significant impact on America's judicial and political institutions during the Reconstruction era.
Debt peonage and Indian slavery had a lasting influence on American politics during the period 1846 to 1867, forcing lawmakers to acknowledge the fact that slavery existed in many forms. Following the Civil War, legislators realized that the Thirteenth Amendment did not cast a wide enough net, because peonage and captive slavery were represented as voluntary in nature and remained commonplace throughout New Mexico. When Congress passed a measure in 1867 explicitly outlawing peonage and captive slavery in New Mexico, they implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the Thirteenth Amendment. The preexistence of peonage and Indian slavery in the Southwest inculcated a broader understanding of involuntary labor in post-Civil War America and helped to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor. These two systems played a crucial role in America's transition from free to unfree labor in the mid-1800s and contributed to the judicial and political frameworks that undermined slavery.
Debt peonage and Indian slavery had a lasting influence on American politics during the period 1846 to 1867, forcing lawmakers to acknowledge the fact that slavery existed in many forms. Following the Civil War, legislators realized that the Thirteenth Amendment did not cast a wide enough net, because peonage and captive slavery were represented as voluntary in nature and remained commonplace throughout New Mexico. When Congress passed a measure in 1867 explicitly outlawing peonage and captive slavery in New Mexico, they implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the Thirteenth Amendment. The preexistence of peonage and Indian slavery in the Southwest inculcated a broader understanding of involuntary labor in post-Civil War America and helped to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor. These two systems played a crucial role in America's transition from free to unfree labor in the mid-1800s and contributed to the judicial and political frameworks that undermined slavery.
ContributorsKiser, William S., 1986- (Author) / Fixico, Donald L. (Thesis advisor) / Simpson, Brooks (Committee member) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Committee member) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation develops a second order accurate approximation to the magnetic resonance (MR) signal model used in the PARSE (Parameter Assessment by Retrieval from Single Encoding) method to recover information about the reciprocal of the spin-spin relaxation time function (R2*) and frequency offset function (w) in addition to the typical steady-state transverse magnetization (M) from single-shot magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Sparse regularization on an approximation to the edge map is used to solve the associated inverse problem. Several studies are carried out for both one- and two-dimensional test problems, including comparisons to the first order approximation method, as well as the first order approximation method with joint sparsity across multiple time windows enforced. The second order accurate model provides increased accuracy while reducing the amount of data required to reconstruct an image when compared to piecewise constant in time models. A key component of the proposed technique is the use of fast transforms for the forward evaluation. It is determined that the second order model is capable of providing accurate single-shot MRI reconstructions, but requires an adequate coverage of k-space to do so. Alternative data sampling schemes are investigated in an attempt to improve reconstruction with single-shot data, as current trajectories do not provide ideal k-space coverage for the proposed method.
ContributorsJesse, Aaron Mitchel (Author) / Platte, Rodrigo (Thesis advisor) / Gelb, Anne (Committee member) / Kostelich, Eric (Committee member) / Mittelmann, Hans (Committee member) / Moustaoui, Mohamed (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Detection of extruded features like rooftops and trees in aerial images automatically is a very active area of research. Elevated features identified from aerial imagery have potential applications in urban planning, identifying cover in military training or flight training. Detection of such features using commonly available geospatial data like orthographic aerial imagery is very challenging because rooftop and tree textures are often camouflaged by similar looking features like roads, ground and grass. So, additonal data such as LIDAR, multispectral imagery and multiple viewpoints are exploited for more accurate detection. However, such data is often not available, or may be improperly registered or inacurate. In this thesis, we discuss a novel framework that only uses orthographic images for detection and modeling of rooftops. A segmentation scheme that initializes by assigning either foreground (rooftop) or background labels to certain pixels in the image based on shadows is proposed. Then it employs grabcut to assign one of those two labels to the rest of the pixels based on initial labeling. Parametric model fitting is performed on the segmented results in order to create a 3D scene and to facilitate roof-shape and height estimation. The framework can also benefit from additional geospatial data such as streetmaps and LIDAR, if available.
ContributorsKhanna, Kunal (Author) / Femiani, John (Thesis advisor) / Wonka, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Razdan, Anshuman (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
National infrastructure form the bedrock for economic growth and social security, both of which lowers conflict risks. This encourages states and international organizations to invest heavily in post-conflict infrastructure reconstruction efforts, believing that infrastructure provision will reduce future political instability. This belief is based largely on the perceived successes of reconstruction efforts in prior eras, especially after World War II. Today, post-conflict reconstruction efforts are much less successful in this regard and, overall, are not reducing political instability---Iraq being the quintessential example of such policy failure. In the face of both ongoing conflict and persistent needs for infrastructure reconstruction after conflicts, therefore, there is a critical need to understand two questions: Why are current reconstruction efforts failing to reduce political instability or even, in some cases, increasing it? And, how can reconstruction efforts be organized to do better? To address these questions, this dissertation examines infrastructure reconstruction across a wide range of national contexts. In doing this, an updated viewpoint is provided on the role of infrastructure in conflict-prone areas to include a long-term perspective on infrastructure system's role in society, technological integration, and relationship between the state and conflicting groups. This dissertation finds that though provision of different types of infrastructure might increase conflict risks in the short term, such provision can reduce conflict in the long run depending on how and where infrastructure is provided vis-a-vis excluded populations. These results provide crucial input towards the redesign of reconstruction policies to limit future political instability risks through infrastructure.
ContributorsMolfino, Emily Suzanne (Author) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Fisher, Erik (Committee member) / Wood, Reed (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014