Façades and Functions Sigurd Frosterus as a Critic of Architecture

Alongside his work as a practising architect, Sigurd Frosterus (1876–1956) was one of Finland’s leading architectural critics during the first decades of the 20th century. In his early life, Frosterus was a strict rationalist who wanted to develop architecture towards scientific ideals instead of historical, archaeological, or mythological approaches. According to him, an architect had to analyse his tasks of construction in order to be able to logically justify his solutions, and he must take advantage of the possibilities of the latest technology. The particular challenge of his time was reinforced concrete. Frosterus considered that the buildings of a modern metropolis should be constructivist in expressing their purpose and technology honestly. The impulses of two famous European architects – Otto Wagner and Henry van de Velde – had a life-long influence on his work. Urban architecture with long street perspectives and houses with austere façades and unified eaves lines was the stylistic ideal that he shared with the Austrian architect Wagner. An open and enlightened urban experience was Frosterus’s future vision, not National Romantic capriciousness or intimacy drawing from the Middle Ages. According to Frosterus, the Belgian van de Velde was the master interior architect of the epoch, the interior of the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar being an excellent example of his work. However, already in the 1910s Frosterus’s rationalism developed towards a broader understanding of the functions of the façades of business edifices. In his brilliant analyses of the business palaces by the Finnish architects Armas Lindgren and Lars Sonck, he considered the symbolic and artistic values of the façades to be even more important than technological honesty. Moreover, references to the history of architecture had a crucial role in the 1920s and 1930s when he wrote about his main work– the Stockmann department store in the centre of Helsinki. &nbsp

Gustaf Strengell and Nordic Modernism

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Applications on emerging paradigms in parallel computing

The area of computing is seeing parallelism increasingly being incorporated at various levels: from the lowest levels of vector processing units following Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processing, Simultaneous Multi-threading (SMT) architectures, and multi/many-cores with thread-level shared memory and SIMT parallelism, to the higher levels of distributed memory parallelism as in supercomputers and clusters, and scaling them to large distributed systems as server farms and clouds. All together these form a large hierarchy of parallelism. Developing high-performance parallel algorithms and efficient software tools, which make use of the available parallelism, is inevitable in order to harness the raw computational power these emerging systems have to offer. In the work presented in this thesis, we develop architecture-aware parallel techniques on such emerging paradigms in parallel computing, specifically, parallelism offered by the emerging multi- and many-core architectures, as well as the emerging area of cloud computing, to target large scientific applications. First, we develop efficient parallel algorithms to compute optimal pairwise alignments of genomic sequences on heterogeneous multi-core processors, and demonstrate them on the IBM Cell Broadband Engine. Then, we develop parallel techniques for scheduling all-pairs computations on heterogeneous systems, including clusters of Cell processors, and NVIDIA graphics processors. We compare the performance of our strategies on Cell, GPU and Intel Nehalem multi-core processors. Further, we apply our algorithms to specific applications taken from the areas of systems biology, fluid dynamics and materials science: pairwise Mutual Information computations for reconstruction of gene regulatory networks; pairwise Lp-norm distance computations for coherent structures discovery in the design of flapping-wing Micro Air Vehicles, and construction of stochastic models for a set of properties of heterogeneous materials. Lastly, in the area of cloud computing, we propose and develop an abstract framework to enable computations in parallel on large tree structures, to facilitate easy development of a class of scientific applications based on trees. Our framework, in the style of Google\u27s MapReduce paradigm, is based on two generic user-defined functions through which a user writes an application. We implement our framework as a generic programming library for a large cluster of homogeneous multi-core processor, and demonstrate its applicability through two applications: all-k-nearest neighbors computations, and Fast Multipole Method (FMM) based simulations

Naisvoimistelusukupolvien ihanteet aikansa kasvatuskulttuurin heijastumina

The first female gymnasts in Finland in the 1880´s set fairly radical aims for the educational work of girls and women. The educational cultures of the next generations of female gymnasts reflected the then prevailing educational objectives and the original goals developed with time to become more and more conservative. In my article I will describe how gymnastic style, the ideal gymnast and the pattern for the teacher were shaped from the 1880's to the 1960's. I will also outline what elements female gymnastics adopted from the educational ideologies of different times: public education, Herbartism, Deweyism and reform pedagogy. There is no earlier research on the subject.1880-luvulla ensimmäiset naisvoimistelijat asettivat maamme tyttöjen ja naisten kasvatustyölle varsin radikaaleja tavoitteita. Seuraavien naisvoimistelusukupolvien kasvatuskulttuurit omaksuivat piirteitä aikansa yleisessä koululaitoksessa vallinneista kasvatuspyrkimyksistä ja liikkeen alkuperäiset tavoitteet kehittyivät ajan myötä yhä konservatiivisemmiksi. Artikkelissa kuvaan, miten voimistelutyyli, voimistelijaihanne ja opettajamalli muuttuivat 1880-luvulta 1960-luvulle. Lisäksi hahmottelen miten naisvoimistelijat sovelsivat eri kasvatusideologioita kuten kansanvalistusta, herbartilaisuutta, deweylaisuutta ja reformipedagogiikkaa

Sigurd Frosterus : from prograssive to critic of technology

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 27. bis 30. Juni 1996 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚Techno-Fiction. Zur Kritik der technologischen Utopien

Low Frequency Noise in CMOS transistors

The minimum measurable signal strength of an electronic system is limited by noise. With the advent of very large scale integrated (VLSI) systems, low power designs are achieved by reducing the supply voltage and the drive current. This reduces the dynamic range of the system. As the signal in an amplifier system is usually set to be a significant fraction of the dynamic range, all other factors being equal, reduction in dynamic range leads to a degradation of the signal to noise ratio (SNR). This thesis addresses this issue in low power design. Focus is given to low frequency (< 1 kHz) noise. This frequency range is dominated by flicker noise, also referred to as pink or 1/f noise. Most biomedical and audio signals lie in this low frequency domain. For example, electrocardiograms (ECGs) record signals which are < 50 Hz. Audio signals have a large portion of signals that lie in the low frequency bandwidth. The focus here is on low-frequency performance of CMOS transistors. This represents a significant challenge in detection as noise in solid state devices tends to increase with decreases in frequency. That is, it becomes ``pink," weighted to the low frequency spectral range. Usually, we find that noise power changes reciprocally with frequency as we reach the kilohertz frequency range. While there has been no single, definitive theory of pink noise, system design principles can be formulated to minimize the impact of this noise. There are two factors to consider here. First, the pink noise process appears to be related to interaction with the defect structure of the solid through which charge is transported. As the number of defects is finite, there is a limit to the number of charges that can interact with this defect population. Thus, there is a limit on the amount of fluctuation in this interaction ``current." This limit depends on the number of defects present in the solid through which transport occurs. It also depends on the number of charges transported. Thus, the trivial and often cited optimization principle demanding a reduced solid defect density presents itself. This leads to a second, less obvious principle of optimization. If the number of transported charges is large, and the trap defect parameters (number density, cross-section, trap lifetime, etc.) does not depend on total current passed, it is possible to ``overcome" the defect-related noise. This is done by increasing the bias current. For fixed defect density, increased bias current will ``saturate" the 1/f-noise fluctuation at some level resulting in an increase in SNR. Large current leads to large power dissipation, an undesirable side-effect of saturating the 1/f-noise current. This problem of SNR and power optimization has been addressed in this work. The main contribution of the work is development of an analog design methodology utilizing saturation effect to improve system SNR through bias optimization. Flicker noise measurement was carried out for the low frequency region in 0.5um and 130 nm CMOS process and SNR studied under different gate bias voltages. We further investigated the impact of size variation, radiation stress and hot electron injection on the optimal bias point of the device. In addition, low temperature noise spectroscopy was conducted to study the noise behavior. Double channel method was used which enabled measurement of pink noise at very low gate biases. The work investigates signal, noise and power in deep-subthreshold region for the first time