Finnish Americans and the Farm Revolt of the 1930s

Farm protest in the United States attracted widespread attention in the 1930s as militant farmers interfered with foreclosure sales, demonstrated at county court houses and state capitals, and blocked highways and stopped trains to prevent crops and livestock from going to market in an effort to raise farm prices. The best known of the protest groups was the Farmers Holiday Association, which was formed in 1932. Prior to the Holiday, however, a left-wing group organized by Communists in 1930 known as the United Farmers League (UFL) gained an initial following in the cutover country of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, and parts of the Dakotas and northeast Montana. Finnish Americans dominated the UFL in the Upper Midwest and in a few locales in the Dakotas. Evidence for this high level of influence comes from the fact that the head of the Communist Party’s Agrarian Department was Henry Puro, a key figure in Finnish American Communist circles and a member of the Party’s Politburo. This paper will focus on Finnish American involvement in the UFL and, to a lesser extent, the broader-based Farmers Holiday movement.

Integrated solar energy and absorption cooling model for HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) applications in buildings

The demands in production and associate costs at power generation through non renewable resources are increasing at an alarming rate. Solar energy is one of the renewable resource that has the potential to minimize this increase. Utilization of solar energy have been concentrated mainly on heating application. The use of solar energy in cooling systems in building would benefit greatly achieving the goal of non-renewable energy minimization. The approaches of solar energy heating system research done by initiation such as University of Wisconsin at Madison and building heat flow model research conducted by Oklahoma State University can be used to develop and optimize solar cooling building system. The research uses two approaches to develop a Graphical User Interface (GUI) software for an integrated solar absorption cooling building model, which is capable of simulating and optimizing the absorption cooling system using solar energy as the main energy source to drive the cycle. The software was then put through a number of litmus test to verify its integrity. The litmus test was conducted on various building cooling system data sets of similar applications around the world. The output obtained from the software developed were identical with established experimental results from the data sets used. Software developed by other research are catered for advanced users. The software developed by this research is not only reliable in its code integrity but also through its integrated approach which is catered for new entry users. Hence, this dissertation aims to correctly model a complete building with the absorption cooling system in appropriate climate as a cost effective alternative to conventional vapor compression system.

EXTRACTION OF PICTORIAL ENERGY INFORMATION FROM CAMPUS UNMETERED BUILDINGS USING IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES

In recent years, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) has been the main research focus due to the traditional power grid has been restricted to meet development requirements. There has been an ongoing effort to increase the number of AMI devices that provide real-time data readings to improve system observability. Deployed AMI across distribution secondary networks provides load and consumption information for individual households which can improve grid management. Significant upgrade costs associated with retrofitting existing meters with network-capable sensing can be made more economical by using image processing methods to extract usage information from images of the existing meters. This thesis presents a new solution that uses online data exchange of power consumption information to a cloud server without modifying the existing electromechanical analog meters. In this framework, application of a systematic approach to extract energy data from images replaces the manual reading process. One case study illustrates the digital imaging approach is compared to the averages determined by visual readings over a one-month period.