"Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman: The Spectralization of the Other and the Zombie”

This volume is the product of a joint effort to bring together critical views "from the Old World" on the field of American Studies. The contributors are leading Americanists working in Spanish academia who believe in the importance of working on American Studies from a multidisciplinary, inclusive perspective. The volume constitutes a testimony to the current state of research on American Studies in Spain, which occupies a key position in the transatlantic appreciation of the field. Ranging from Romanticism to Postmodernism, form the human to the post-human, from the Salem witchcraft trials to the Holocaust, from the Other to the Zombie, from fiction to history, from African-American slavery to Native-American reservations, from Spanish Unamunian philosophy to Whitmanesque poetry—to name just a few of the themes discussed in these pages—this entire volume is grounded on a transatlantic vision and dialogue, which has taken on great importance after the so-called "transatlantic turn." All in all, this book provides the critical gaze of the "expert outsider" who is able to offer a somewhat different but complementary point of view, which can only enrich the general appreciation of American Studies

A virtual power plant model for time-driven power flow calculations

This paper presents the implementation of a custom-made virtual power plant model in OpenDSS. The goal is to develop a model adequate for time-driven power flow calculations in distribution systems. The virtual power plant is modeled as the aggregation of renewable generation and energy storage connected to the distribution system through an inverter. The implemented operation mode allows the virtual power plant to act as a single dispatchable generation unit. The case studies presented in the paper demonstrate that the model behaves according to the specified control algorithm and show how it can be incorporated into the solution scheme of a general parallel genetic algorithm in order to obtain the optimal day-ahead dispatch. Simulation results exhibit a clear benefit from the deployment of a virtual power plant when compared to distributed generation based only on renewable intermittent generation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Degenerate parametric oscillation in quantum membrane optomechanics

The promise of innovative applications has triggered the development of many modern technologies capable of exploiting quantum effects. But in addition to future applications, such quantum technologies have already provided us with the possibility of accessing quantum-mechanical scenarios that seemed unreachable just a few decades ago. With this spirit, in this work we show that modern optomechanical setups are mature enough to implement one of the most elusive models in the field of open system dynamics: degenerate parametric oscillation. The possibility of implementing it in nonlinear optical resonators was the main motivation for introducing such model in the eighties, which rapidly became a paradigm for the study of dissipative phase transitions whose corresponding spontaneously broken symmetry is discrete. However, it was found that the intrinsic multimode nature of optical cavities makes it impossible to experimentally study the model all the way through its phase transition. In contrast, here we show that this long-awaited model can be implemented in the motion of a mechanical object dispersively coupled to the light contained in a cavity, when the latter is properly driven with multi-chromatic laser light. We focus on membranes as the mechanical element, showing that the main signatures of the degenerate parametric oscillation model can be studied in state-of-the-art setups, thus opening the possibility of studying spontaneous symmetry breaking and enhanced metrology in one of the cleanest dissipative phase transitions.Comment: We welcome comments, suggestions, and (constructive) criticis

Dimensionality reduction with image data

A common objective in image analysis is dimensionality reduction. The most common often used data-exploratory technique with this objective is principal component analysis. We propose a new method based on the projection of the images as matrices after a Procrustes rotation and show that it leads to a better reconstruction of images

Spaces and flows in the Puerto Rican barrio: Latero Stories, Bodega Dreams

Producción CientíficaTaking Manuel Castells’s idea of globalization in a world of late capitalism as a “space of flows,” where mobility and instability are essential to the workings of the system, the article looks at the role of the barrio and its ethnic dwellers as forces of stability and local resistance. If it is undeniable that many recent political movements of a clearly oppositional stance have gained visibility through the occupation of particularly prominent sites (whether in Zucotti Park, Tahrir Square or la Puerta del Sol, among others), can we also view the barrio as another site of metaphorical occupation, a bulwark against the forces of capitalist infiltration and gentrification? Can we then assume barrio dwellers as largely opposed to the economic dynamics of globalization? The article explores this issue by analyzing two Puerto Rican texts, Tato Laviera’s “Latero Story” and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams, where the characters occupy diverse and complex positionalities with regards to the promises of a renewed American dream

Hospitality in American Literature and Culture

Producción CientíficaThis volume examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating this ancient virtue at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring the relationship among the intersecting themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the United States, the book concentrates on the ways the US administers protocols of belonging and non-belonging, and distinguishes between those who can feel at home from those who will always be outside the body politic, even if they were the original "hosts." The volume opens with a genealogy of hospitality through a focus on its sites, from its origins in the Bible, to its national and post-national renditions in contemporary American literature and culture. The authors explore recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in Spielberg's The Terminal and Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, to the different ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the United States in Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer, Karen T. Yamashita's I Hotel, Junot Díaz's "Invierno," and Ernesto Quiñonez's Chango's Fire, concluding with the spectrality of the immigrant body in George Saunders' "The Semplica Girl Diaries." Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to specialists in post-colonialism; American Studies; immigration, diaspora, and border studies; and critical race and gender studies for its innovative approaches to media and literary texts.Filología InglesaMIBEC

CMOS circuit implementations for neuron models

The mathematical neuron basic cells used as basic cells in popular neural network architectures and algorithms are discussed. The most popular neuron models (without training) used in neural network architectures and algorithms (NNA) are considered, focusing on hardware implementation of neuron models used in NAA, and in emulation of biological systems. Mathematical descriptions and block diagram representations are utilized in an independent approach. Nonoscillatory and oscillatory models are discusse