Curating Contemporary Japanese Art: Exhibition Catalogue Production for Hidden Landscapes: Yasuaki Onishi and Invisible Space

In the last decade, there has been a telling increase of attention given to contemporary Asian artists exhibited in the United States and Europe. Since 2008, artists from China, Japan, South Korea, and Central Asia have been featured in exhibitions from the Venice Biennale to the Whitney Biennale, and are becoming ever more present on the Western art stage. Meanwhile, curatorial practice, once focused on the care of objects, is shifting to encompass a wider range of creative activity. Curators are taking time to engage with living artists in a collaborative setting, rather than as impartial facilitators. This capstone seeks to address the lack of non-Western art in the rural United States Southwest in an effort to further the academic conversation around contemporary Japanese artistic practices. Through the publication of an exhibition catalogue, Northern Arizona will have the opportunity to engage with the ongoing intercultural dialogue on the globalized artistic stage, and support the international practice of emerging contemporary artist Yasuaki Onishi

Patriarchy and The Protestants: A New Historical and Feminist Reading of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

In her novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson establishes a correlation between the presence of Protestantism and constricting gender roles women experience in the United States. Living in 1956 Gilead, Iowa, seventy-six-year-old Pastor John Ames begins writing to his seven-year-old son in a series of journal entries after he is diagnosed with a terminal case of angina pectoris. In these journal entries to his son, Ames records the histories of his reverend father, reverend grandfather, his own life, and present observations as the beauty of life continues to captivate him. Ultimately he hopes to “to tell [his son] things [he] might never have thought to tell [him]” had he been able to father his son longer. Notably, all of the previously mentioned relationships are between two males. John Ames, the narrator, examines his male ancestry as he writes to his male heir. The women of Gilead are wives or caretakers, and seem solely mentioned because of the males they are associated with. In the novel, Ames mentions his former wife, who dies in childbirth early in their marriage; his current wife, whose name is not given; Glory, the single daughter of a nearby family who takes care of her father and household; his mother; grandmother; and the wife of a man named Jack Boughton. Robinson marginalizes women in the text, making them of peripheral importance to the narrative, but of great importance to providing a window into the early 20th century’s treatment of women

Online Remote Sensing Interface

BasinTools Module 1 processes remotely sensed raster data, including multi- and hyper-spectral data products, via a Web site with no downloads and no plug-ins required. The interface provides standardized algorithms designed so that a user with little or no remote-sensing experience can use the site. This Web-based approach reduces the amount of software, hardware, and computing power necessary to perform the specified analyses. Access to imagery and derived products is enterprise-level and controlled. Because the user never takes possession of the imagery, the licensing of the data is greatly simplified. BasinTools takes the "just-in-time" inventory control model from commercial manufacturing and applies it to remotely-sensed data. Products are created and delivered on-the-fly with no human intervention, even for casual users. Well-defined procedures can be combined in different ways to extend verified and validated methods in order to derive new remote-sensing products, which improves efficiency in any well-defined geospatial domain. Remote-sensing products produced in BasinTools are self-documenting, allowing procedures to be independently verified or peer-reviewed. The software can be used enterprise-wide to conduct low-level remote sensing, viewing, sharing, and manipulating of image data without the need for desktop applications

Leadership Identity Development in Greek Life Organizations: Lessons Learned

This study focused on the multi-faceted process of leadership identity development through an-in dpeth analyis of the life experiences of students involved in Greek life at a mid-size researched institution in the Souther United States region. Research was conducted within the framerwork of the Leadership Identity Development (LID) model authored by Komives, Owen, Longerbem, Mainella, and Osteen (2005). Of particular interest was the degree to which the data upheld the presence of the four development influences of the LID model : 1) peer influences 2) meaningful involvement 3) reflective learning and 4) adult influence.Framed by an understanding of college student development and emerging explanatations of the process of leadership identity development, the qualitiative study examined the influence of fraternity and sorority membership on the leadership identity development of college students. The findings derived from semi-structure interviews with fraternity and sorority leaders illustrate the context and cultures in which the particapants develop an identity as an leader. In addition, the study describes the processes and experiences that facilitate or hinder development.Nominated by student affairs professionals, twelve undergraduate fraternity and sorority members at one southern U.S. research institution particapated in the study. The findings suggest organizational factors and meaningful relationships support leader identity development ofr fraternity and sorority members. The study also suggests advancing practical applications of the theoretical construct of leadership identity development. The study concludes with recommendations for program development, practice, and further research

Self-Organization, Emergence, and Constraint in Complex Natural Systems

Contemporary complexity theory has been instrumental in providing novel rigorous definitions for some classic philosophical concepts, including emergence. In an attempt to provide an account of emergence that is consistent with complexity and dynamical systems theory, several authors have turned to the notion of constraints on state transitions. Drawing on complexity theory directly, this paper builds on those accounts, further developing the constraint-based interpretation of emergence and arguing that such accounts recover many of the features of more traditional accounts. We show that the constraint-based account of emergence also leads naturally into a meaningful definition of self-organization, another concept that has received increasing attention recently. Along the way, we distinguish between order and organization, two concepts which are frequently conflated. Finally, we consider possibilities for future research in the philosophy of complex systems, as well as applications of the distinctions made in this paper

A bounded actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning

This thesis presents a new actor-critic algorithm from the domain of reinforcement learning to solve Markov and semi-Markov decision processes (or problems) in the field of airline revenue management (ARM). The ARM problem is one of control optimization in which a decision-maker must accept or reject a customer based on a requested fare. This thesis focuses on the so-called single-leg version of the ARM problem, which can be cast as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) and SMDPs suffer from the curses of dimensionality and modeling, making it difficult to create the transition probability matrices (TPMs) necessary to solve them using traditional methods such as dynamic and linear programming. This thesis seeks to employ an actor-critic algorithm to overcome the challenges found in developing TPMs for large-scale real-world problems. Unlike traditional actor-critic algorithms, where the values of the so-called actor can either become very large or very small, the algorithm developed in this thesis has an updating mechanism that keeps the values of the actor s iterates bounded in the limit and significantly smaller in magnitude than previous actor-critic algorithms. This allows the algorithm to explore the state space fully and perform better than its traditional counterpart. Numerical experiments conducted show encouraging results with the new algorithm by delivering optimal results on small case MDPs and SMDPs and consistently outperforming an airline industry heuristic, namely EMSR-b, on large-scale ARM problems --Abstract, page iii

CropEx Web-Based Agricultural Monitoring and Decision Support

CropEx is a Web-based agricultural Decision Support System (DSS) that monitors changes in crop health over time. It is designed to be used by a wide range of both public and private organizations, including individual producers and regional government offices with a vested interest in tracking vegetation health. The database and data management system automatically retrieve and ingest data for the area of interest. Another stores results of the processing and supports the DSS. The processing engine will allow server-side analysis of imagery with support for image sub-setting and a set of core raster operations for image classification, creation of vegetation indices, and change detection. The system includes the Web-based (CropEx) interface, data ingestion system, server-side processing engine, and a database processing engine. It contains a Web-based interface that has multi-tiered security profiles for multiple users. The interface provides the ability to identify areas of interest to specific users, user profiles, and methods of processing and data types for selected or created areas of interest. A compilation of programs is used to ingest available data into the system, classify that data, profile that data for quality, and make data available for the processing engine immediately upon the data s availability to the system (near real time). The processing engine consists of methods and algorithms used to process the data in a real-time fashion without copying, storing, or moving the raw data. The engine makes results available to the database processing engine for storage and further manipulation. The database processing engine ingests data from the image processing engine, distills those results into numerical indices, and stores each index for an area of interest. This process happens each time new data is ingested and processed for the area of interest, and upon subsequent database entries, the database processing engine qualifies each value for each area of interest and conducts a logical processing of results indicating when and where thresholds are exceeded. Reports are provided at regular, operator-determined intervals that include variances from thresholds and links to view raw data for verification, if necessary. The technology and method of development allow the code base to easily be modified for varied use in the real-time and near-real-time processing environments. In addition, the final product will be demonstrated as a means for rapid draft assessment of imagery

Decision Support for Emergency Operations Centers

The Flood Disaster Mitigation Decision Support System (DSS) is a computerized information system that allows regional emergency-operations government officials to make decisions regarding the dispatch of resources in response to flooding. The DSS implements a real-time model of inundation utilizing recently acquired lidar elevation data as well as real-time data from flood gauges, and other instruments within and upstream of an area that is or could become flooded. The DSS information is updated as new data become available. The model generates realtime maps of flooded areas and predicts flood crests at specified locations. The inundation maps are overlaid with information on population densities, property values, hazardous materials, evacuation routes, official contact information, and other information needed for emergency response. The program maintains a database and a Web portal through which real-time data from instrumentation are gathered into the database. Also included in the database is a geographic information system, from which the program obtains the overlay data for areas of interest as needed. The portal makes some portions of the database accessible to the public. Access to other portions of the database is restricted to government officials according to various levels of authorization. The Flood Disaster Mitigation DSS has been integrated into a larger DSS named REACT (Real-time Emergency Action Coordination Tool), which also provides emergency operations managers with data for any type of impact area such as floods, fires, bom

Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century

Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century considers interactivity in digital art practices. Emerging technologies advance so quickly that artworks using such technologies are not fully understood. Digital artworks are susceptible to unprecedented threats, including technology obsolescence, file incompatibility, and software updates that might considerably alter the artwork in a matter of months. However, immaterial characteristics such as interactivity are often overlooked in the panic of preserving physical technologies. Software and hardware do not always indicate how interactive a work should be, if it involves one or many participants at once, or how exhibition space should facilitate interaction. In this dissertation, I establish a framework to quantify and prioritize the many ways in which participants interact with artworks that make use of digital technologies. I propose a three-part typology – individual interactive experience, collective interactive experience, and distributed interactive experience – as illustrated with case studies including the VR artwork The Chalkroom (2017) by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, the immersive digital exhibition Continuity (2021-2022) by the Japanese “ultratechnologist” collective teamLab, and the social media performance Excellences & Perfections (2013) by Amalia Ulman. The project offers clarity to the nature of interactivity, with an eye to long-term preservation when digital artworks are on display, on loan, or acquired in museum collections