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PRECIOUS MANGROVE: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESILIENCE
The Seri indigenous people of Mexico have been living in the desert along the Sea of
Cortés for thousands of years. Their territory includes the northern most mixed mangrove estuary
in Mexico. After reviewing previous literature about the Seri and the estuary, I developed a set of
questions and visited their villages for interviews and a field trip.
The interview topics included how their family groups are defined, what the name was of
the group that used to live near the estuary, the status of who is allowed to perform songs and
explain traditions, and what environmental changes they have seen at the estuary. Theories about
the connection between oral history, oral tradition, and historical events, provided a framework
to examine what they told me.
To provide another view of this estuary, I created a Normalized Data Vegetation Index
using satellite imagery from the years 2000 to 2018 that provides information about the
mangrove vegetation. Instead of only being research subjects, the communities in which
anthropologists engage can be considered partners. Since some of the Seri are trained
paraecologists, this vegetation index will be presented to them to help in their environmental
observations
Real-time filtering and detection of dynamics for compression of HDTV
The preprocessing of video sequences for data compressing is discussed. The end goal associated with this is a compression system for HDTV capable of transmitting perceptually lossless sequences at under one bit per pixel. Two subtopics were emphasized to prepare the video signal for more efficient coding: (1) nonlinear filtering to remove noise and shape the signal spectrum to take advantage of insensitivities of human viewers; and (2) segmentation of each frame into temporally dynamic/static regions for conditional frame replenishment. The latter technique operates best under the assumption that the sequence can be modelled as a superposition of active foreground and static background. The considerations were restricted to monochrome data, since it was expected to use the standard luminance/chrominance decomposition, which concentrates most of the bandwidth requirements in the luminance. Similar methods may be applied to the two chrominance signals
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