Beyond methodological nationalism: The contribution of Robert E. Park to the history of intercultural communication

The legacy of nineteenth century social theory followed a “nationalist” model of society, assuming that analysis of social realities depends upon national boundaries, taking the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis, and developing the concept of methodological nationalism. This perspective regarded the nation-state as the natural - and even necessary - form of society in modernity. Thus, the constitution of large cities, at the end of the 19th century, through the intense flows of immigrants coming from diverse political and linguistic communities posed an enormous challenge to all social research. One of the most significant studies responding to this set of issues was The Immigrant Press and its Control, by Robert E. Park, one of the most prominent American sociologists of the first half of the 20th century. The Immigrant Press and its Control was part of a larger project entitled Americanization Studies: The Acculturation of Immigrant Group into American Society, funded by the Carnagie Corporation following World War I, taking as its goal to study the so-called “Americanization methods” during the 1920s. This paper revisits that particular work by Park to reveal how his detailed analysis of the role of the immigrant press overcame the limitations of methodological nationalism. By granting importance to language as a tool uniting each community and by showing how the strength of foreign languages expressed itself through the immigrant press, Park demonstrated that the latter produces a more ambivalent phenomenon than simply the assimilation of immigrants. On the one hand, the immigrant press served as a connecting force, driven by the desire to preserve the mother tongue and culture while at the same time awakening national sentiments that had, until then, remained diffuse. Yet, on the other hand, it facilitated the adjustment of immigrants to the American context. As a result, Park’s work contributes to our understanding of a particular liminal moment inherent within many intercultural contexts, the space between emigrant identity (emphasizing the country of origin) and immigrant identity (emphasizing the newly adopted country). His focus on the role played by media in the socialization of immigrant groups presaged later work on this subject by communication scholars. Focusing attention on Park’s research leads to other studies of the immigrant experience from the same period (e.g., Thomas & Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America), and also to insights on multi-presence and interculturality as significant but often overlooked phenomena in the study of immigrant socialization.

The daily and hourly energy consumption and load forecasting using artifitial neural network method: a case study using a set of 93 households in Portugal

It is important to understand and forecast a typical or a particularly household daily consumption in order to design and size suitable renewable energy systems and energy storage. In this research for Short Term Load Forecasting (STLF) it has been used Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and, despite the consumption unpredictability, it has been shown the possibility to forecast the electricity consumption of a household with certainty. The ANNs are recognized to be a potential methodology for modeling hourly and daily energy consumption and load forecasting. Input variables such as apartment area, numbers of occupants, electrical appliance consumption and Boolean inputs as hourly meter system were considered. Furthermore, the investigation carried out aims to define an ANN architecture and a training algorithm in order to achieve a robust model to be used in forecasting energy consumption in a typical household. It was observed that a feed-forward ANN and the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm provided a good performance. For this research it was used a database with consumption records, logged in 93 real households, in Lisbon, Portugal, between February 2000 and July 2001, including both weekdays and weekend. The results show that the ANN approach provides a reliable model for forecasting household electric energy consumption and load profile. © 2014 The Author.

Performance assessment of a wind energy conversion system using a hierarchical controller structure

This paper deals with a hierarchical structure composed by an event-based supervisor in a higher level and two distinct proportional integral (PI) controllers in a lower level. The controllers are applied to a variable speed wind energy conversion system with doubly-fed induction generator, namely, the fuzzy PI control and the fractional-order PI control. The event-based supervisor analyses the operation state of the wind energy conversion system among four possible operational states: park, start-up, generating or brake and sends the operation state to the controllers in the lower level. In start-up state, the controllers only act on electric torque while pitch angle is equal to zero. In generating state, the controllers must act on the pitch angle of the blades in order to maintain the electric power around the nominal value, thus ensuring that the safety conditions required for integration in the electric grid are met. Comparisons between fuzzy PI and fractional-order PI pitch controllers applied to a wind turbine benchmark model are given and simulation results by Matlab/Simulink are shown. From the results regarding the closed loop point of view, fuzzy PI controller allows a smoother response at the expense of larger number of variations of the pitch angle, implying frequent switches between operational states. On the other hand fractional-order PI controller allows an oscillatory response with less control effort, reducing switches between operational states. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.