The ubiquitous pre-fabricated panel buildings that sprang up around the Soviet Union have become one of the calling cards of the former Eastern Bloc. Considered unattractive and outdated at best, and at worst in a poor state of repair and barely conforming to modern standards of living, the question of what to do with the buildings is a burning one, not least for their inhabitants.

The solution may lie partly in the experience of Germany, which faces the same problem in federal districts of former East Germany, and during the past 15 years has actively worked on renovating its panel buildings. Architects from Germany and Russia will gather to discuss the issue of modernization and exchange ideas at a conference next week entitled “Modernizing Pre-Fabricated Panel Buildings,” followed by an exhibition entitled “Modernizing Pre-Fabricated Panel Buildings. Germany’s Experience” organized within the framework of the Week of Germany in St. Petersburg.
“The concept of pre-fabricated panel buildings is in Germany primarily associated with the former German Democratic Republic,” said Christina Grawe, the exhibition’s curator in Germany.

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the image of such buildings rapidly deteriorated. Many consider them to be the embodiment of standard, unappealing East German architecture, but this is a false conception. There were such constructions in West Germany too. In Berlin, there are apartments as well as clubs and other entertainment venues in pre-fabricated panel buildings that remain popular even after reunification,” she said.

Having gradually overcome their reputation as architectural pariahs, the potential of such buildings is now recognized in Germany and they are continuously modernized in a variety of ways that will be showcased at the exhibition.

“The exhibition will present the most successful examples of how, during the past 15 years in Germany, panel buildings and their surrounding territory have been transformed, along with the architectural and design methods used to make them more attractive” said Grawe.

Home Sweet Home

The German projects on display will include residential buildings, public buildings and infrastructure, some of which were realized as part of large-scale city reconstruction programs.

Grawe said that panel buildings are often used for a different purpose following redevelopment. She cited the example of a workers’ hostel that was turned into a community center. Another of the projects shown at the exhibition is a cottage built from elements of a deconstructed panel building.

The Russian part of the exhibition will portray the current state of pre-fabricated panel architecture in the country and attempts to renovate such buildings. The exhibits range from completed projects to fantastical designs, with the aim of illustrating both the physical and ideological foundation to which German experience could be applied.

The focus of both the German and Russian parts of the exhibition is residential buildings.

“The main question tackled by the Russian part of the exhibition is of course large-scale residential panel buildings and what to do with them,” said Vladimir Frolov, curator of the Russian part of the exhibition.

In Germany, many pre-fabricated panel residential buildings were left empty following a decline in the urban population of both eastern and western Germany about ten years ago. This is far from the case in Russia, where much of the urban population still lives in Krushchyovki, as the standard five-story panel buildings built in the 1950s and 60s during the reign of Nikita Krushchev are known.
“Unlike Germany, there are hardly any ‘extra’ buildings abandoned by their residents, which could be turned into middle-class housing by means of a new design, technical innovations and increased space,” said Frolov. “On the contrary, we have a real housing deficit.”

Frolov said that German experience in the sphere of updating panel buildings was already being applied in Russia.

“The Russian part of the exhibition includes projects in St. Petersburg designed by the Berlin architectural bureau nps.tchoban.voss,” he said. “The designs would modernize industrial buildings dating from the late Soviet era by turning them into interesting new architectural objects without demolition or new construction.”

Differing Conditions

As well as parallels between such architecture in Russia and Germany, contrasts in the task facing the two countries and the differing situations and existing conditions will also be reliance calling card in the exhibition.

“The exhibition does not present universal recipes for successful modernization,” said Grawe. “By showing a range of diverse building tasks, it demonstrates that behind the seemingly dull theme of modernizing panel buildings, there is room for fantasy and imagination.”

“German experience can be used where it is appropriate and suitable,” said Frolov.

Grawe said that the exhibition would demonstrate how modernization can significantly increase the quality of panel buildings, both in terms of technology and aesthetics. Non-traditional solutions will comprise a vital part of the work on display.

“The results of modernization need not be boring,” she added.

In conjunction with the exhibition in St. Petersburg, the Chamber of Architects in Germany has organized a competition to find the best work in the sphere of urban construction, landscape architecture, infrastructure and residential accommodation. The jury will consist of representatives from German architectural bureaus.

The exhibition also features a series of photos taken by Alexei Naroditsky. Titled “Pigeonholes,” the photos depict the often dilapidated condition of panel buildings on the outskirts of Moscow today.

The project is sponsored by the German Consulate in St. Petersburg along with the German Chamber of Architects.

The conference “Modernizing Pre-Fabricated Panel Buildings” will take place at the Pro Arte Institute in the Peter and Paul Fortress on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The exhibition “Modernizing Pre-Fabricated Panel Buildings. Germany’s Experience” runs from April 21 to May 4, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Nevskaya Kurtina of the Peter and Paul Fortress. www.deutsche-woche.ru
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Do you want to limit your expenses? Do you want to prevent huge monthly bills? Of course the common answer for these questions is YES. Nothing in this world would dream of high expenditure. But most of the time you cannot avoid having huge monthly bills and high expenses because you need to communicate with your love ones or friends.

Making call is the best way to communicate to other people. This is the only way to reach out those husbands who are working abroad or those children who are staying to other places. Of course you want to have constant communication with them and making calls is the only way to make it.

Now there are some ways on how to keep communication line open. Many people now who are hook in using the internet. They usually send emails and do some chatting with them. This is usually done through the computer that has internet connection. But how can you communicate if you do not have computer at home? This is the advantage of this way. You must have computer plus internet connection in order to communicate. You communication is limited only in front of the computer. What if you are in other place where there is not computer but you need to make a call?

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With this it is still the best to use prepaid calling card in order to limit your expenses. But you have to search for the best prepaid calling card manufacturer in order to get a high quality service. It is better to check on the credibility of the manufacturer to avoid encountering future problems.
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The streaming software - which was created at the T.J. Watson Research Center, in Hawthorne, New York - is designed to not just do complex queries against data that is a bit more amorphous than fields stored in a database. But as the streaming part of its name suggests, it's also meant to continuously update that data as it changes in real-time.
Information - which is what happens to data when you filter out useless stuff and add context so human beings can make decisions - cannot be easily generated or quickly integrated with business processes. The advent of the Internet and its various forms of media complicate the task of turning data into information, what government people are fond of calling "actionable intelligence." Mashing up various text, video, and audio streams with databases and other data storehouses is a grand challenge, one that needs something that looks and smells like a supercomputer.

Which is why the techies at IBM Research have been working for more than six years on a project called the System S. This stream computing system runs on IBM's BlueGene massively parallel supercomputing iron, but it puts the iron to work running very different kinds of software than is typically used in a supercomputer to do weather or financial modeling.

IBM started talking publicly, and very sketchily, about System S back in June 2007, and this week, the company announced that TD Securities, the investment banking arm of Toronto Dominion Bank, has taken the first prototype of the System S machine, which runs a bit of software that Big Blue calls InfoSphere Streams atop a BlueGene/P supercomputer.

The streaming software - which was created at the T.J. Watson Research Center, in Hawthorne, New York - is designed to not just do complex queries against data that is a bit more amorphous than fields stored in a database. But as the streaming part of its name suggests, it's also meant to continuously update that data as it changes in real-time.

As IBM explains in this whitepaper, in a normal information system, you ask a bunch of questions of a relatively static database and you get data that you need to make a decision. With a streaming system, huge amounts of raw information from as many sources as you can stomach are streamed into the box, and the InfoSphere Streams software keeps a database of your queries and constantly updates the data it provides to decision makers.

In one system, you ask a database to list all the people with the last name of Smith who live within 100 miles of the center of the city. With the System S, you ask that question once, and it taps all the available information you feed into it - government databases, Web traffic, email, GPS data, sensors, badge swipes, video feeds, audio feeds, what have you - and it tells you how the Smiths identified in the original query are moving around the city within a 100 mile radius in real-time (presumably when Smiths leave and new ones arrive).

Personally, I can't imagine why anyone would want such information, but remember System S when you are tweeting your freaking brains out like a teenager or sending text messages over your cell phone.

Anyway, the System S super is not just about surveillance, and TD Bank isn't interested in the box for that reason. But the same InfoSphere Streams software can be used to consume vast amounts of news feeds, financial information databases, and other sources of data to make decisions about stock trades, and TD Securities says that it has in fact put the System S through the paces and created an options trading system front-ended by the super that can process 21 times more information that the prior systems that the bank's securities trading experts have put together. (That doesn't mean people are 21 times smarter at using that data, unfortunately).

According to the Financial Information Forum, the amount of data generated by the securities and options trading systems in the world has been doubling every year since 2003, and TD Securities took the System S prototype from Big Blue because it wants to create an options trading system that will be able to cope with the data streams it expects two to three years from now. And IBM slapped the InfoSphere Streams software on the BlueGene/P, its most scalable server, to give TD Securities plenty of scalability room. That said, IBM says that the software works just fine on anywhere from 50 to 500 server nodes and that it did development, testing, and production on a one-rack BlueGene/P machine.

The BlueGene/P super, you will recall, puts four 850 MHz single-core PowerPC 450 chips onto a single processor card and then links them by symmetric multiprocessing so they can share 2 GB of DDR2 main memory. A single rack has 1,024 of these four-core processor nodes, if you can believe it, and would be rated at around 13.9 teraflops of number-crunching performance if it was running simulations.

The prototype options trading system build atop the System S setup is able to crunch 5 million options valuations per second, which is 20 times the record for this kind of trading, apparently. So System S can consume 21 times the data and do options trading 20 times faster. Milliseconds are millions of dollars in this racket, so it is hard to imagine IBM won't be selling these machines to every financial services firm very shortly.
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1. Make sure to print on card stock
2. Print as many designs as you need.  Each person playing should have a different design.
3. Print the "Call Card" and cut out the different pictures.  Use these to "call" as you would with numbers.  But instead of a number, describe/show the picture to the players.  You decide which letter the picture will be associated with. For example, our Easter bingo cards are 4 pictures across by 4 pictures down.   The word at the top is EGGS.  As you choose a picture to call out, choose one of the letters to associate it with.  Such as  G - Chick in Egg,  S - Bunny Running 4. Have players use pennies or jelly beans to use as markers.

Choose a card to print, click on the link, print card, use your back button and choose another card to print.  Do the same for the Call Card - click to print, use the back button to return to this pages.
source http://www.kidprintables.com/bingo/easter/
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Leading telecom service provider Bharti Airtel Wednesday launched a new offer for its US customers which will enable them to make calls to India at 1 cent per minute using online calling cards.

'With our IndiaOne Offer, we are delighted to take the lead in offering the best value for US to India calling. Our tariff at 1 cent per minute is a compelling customer proposition and is in line with Airtel's commitment to make calling to India more affordable,' Airtel executive director Syed Safawi said.

'Through this offer, we are looking at delivering unmatched value to the three million strong NRI population in the US, who reach out to their friends and family in India,' he added.

Airtel has also launched a number of new features for its US consumers, including auto recharge, free SMS from the web and audio conferencing facilities.

Airtel subscribers can buy this calling card for $10 by logging on to the company's website.
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Make international calls

The KKK thinks it's A-OK to start openly recruiting again and left some international calling cards at a Davie restaurant recently.

A waitress at the Garden Grill found the cards, with KKK spelled out in big, red letters scattered on tables and news racks at the restaurant, according to the Sun-Sentinel.

The cards warned of white children "quickly becoming America's new minority."

"It was no big deal - they didn't rally," the waitress, who didn't want her name used, told the paper.

Davie was long a haven for the Klan, where rallies were a frequent occurrence in the 1980s. A rally was held there as recently as 1993, when they protested the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and Haitian immigration.

Of its 90,000 inhabitants, Davie's black population has held at a steady 4 percent over the past ten years, a low figure compared with the 25 percent in Broward county.

Klan members nation-wide are estimated to be near 7,000.

Some think that despite Davie's ugly reputation, things are changing for the better.

“Someone in that restaurant was disturbed by that card and called [the paper],” former Davie politician Geri Clark told the Sun-Sentinel. “That might not have happened 20 years ago.”

“We can’t tolerate anything that is tied to hate,” Davie Mayor Judy Paul said. “I don’t know what we can do about it. It’s something you know is there but you wish it wasn’t.”
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