Nerdnite Auckland – Chapter 19

Right. So the first thing to note is the change of venue. We’re trying out new digs at Galbraiths, number 2 Mt Eden Rd, where the beer is significantly better this month. It’s right at the top of Mt Eden Road near the intersection of Mt Eden, New North Road and Symonds St. The second thing to note is that we want a good crowd to make a make a good impression so they’ll want us back – so make sure you get all your geeks (and yourself) along. 

 

The 3rd (and possibly most important) thing to note are our speakers. This, my friends is what you’re in for this month:

First up we have Vanessa Jordan discussing the selective publication of research and its effects on the body of evidence from which consumers and clinicians make healthcare decisions. In particular Vanessa will discuss the events that led the Cochrane Collaboration to pursue unpublished evidence on the drug Tamiflu and how Roche managed to sell billions of dollars of this drug worldwide based on selected (and biased) research data. Vanessa is a New Zealand Fellow of the highly regarded Cochrane Collaboration and a recognised expert in systematic review methodology.

Kate Hannah will be along to talk to us about the both the history and the correct usage of the comma. I am given to understand that specific mention will be made of the Oxford comma. Those of you with a fondness
for grammar can probably bring examples from my misuse of commas in this blurb to be painfully examined and worked over.

And we have one John Radford, an artist who is coming along to talk about some of his work and the inspiration that has been provided by Auckland and the Grafton that was before the motorway came along.

Right that about sums it up. Come grab a seat at table, a pint, and a feed. Next Tuesday. Galbraiths. 

Nerdnite Auckland – Chapter 18

Nerdnite is indeed on again this month, as it is most months, on the 1st Tuesday. That being Tuesday the 3rd of June. Or in a few days time. Nectar, upstairs from the Kingslander, 6:30ish onwards.

 

This month for your perusal, we present Kate Hannah after noting the many deplorable grammatical habits of scientists, will be enlightening us as to the history and correct usage of the comma. I believe an opinion may be expressed on the desirability of using the Oxford comma, where appropriate.

 

Beau Pontré will be talking about magnets. An incredibly wide range of magnets. From their use as compasses for navigation, to electricity generation through to the past few decades, when magnetism has been exploited in the form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a diagnostic tool to aid in the assessment of disease – now sufficiently advanced that we can go beyond simple images of the body and capture the movement of the beating heart. Cantor! Cantor! Cantor!

 

Gavin Marten will give us a talk about the mathematician Cantor – who seriously rocked by the way. An infinite number of infinities anyone? Georg Cantor’s work was described by Poincaré as a “grave disease” infecting the discipline, and described him as a “scientific charlatan”. So what was all the fuss about ? Basically the foundations of set theory and of the infinite. How real numbers are not as simple as we might think. Gather your cold and thirsty geeks and bring them in for an evening of learning about seriously cool stuff that you are probably remiss for not knowing about beforehand.

 

Gather your cold and thirsty geeks and bring them along for a warm pint and some brain stretching.

Nerdnite Auckland – Chapter 17

So, time for some geekery then. That time being next Tuesday evening in Kingsland. We have a bioengineer and a paleobotantist coming to speak geeky things at you while you sit back and relax with a beverage of your choice. Luxury.

First up, we have David Cumin. The specialisation of modern healthcare has meant great advances in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. However, it has also meant greater complexity in the system and a need for staff to communicate effectively. David will talk about a novel project to train operating room teams that has just been piloted in Auckland. Come see how a little movie magic and some stressful situations could make our  hospitals even safer.

Next, paleobotanist Mark Large will be cramming an epic spanning millions of years into a 20 min time slot. In the Late Triassic c.201 MYBP – an event occurred that caused the mass extinction of a fifth of all families of  marine animals (34% of marine genera). On land, many large archosaurs and large amphibians became extinct. At least half of the species now known to have been living on Earth at that time disappeared. This extinction  seems to have taken less than 10,000 years and occurred just before Pangaea started to break apart. Gradual climate change, and mass volcanism in the late Triassic reached a tipping point. However, this does not explain the suddenness of the extinctions in the marine realm. Is this past the key to our future?

The story of this event links the explorations of Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander in NZ, the pre-WII Greenland holiday activities of a Cambridge professor of Botany, Thomas Harris, and our own studies here in 21st century Auckland.

Got that? Right. Make sure you friends have seen this, then have a sit down and discuss over a beer or three over the weekend. Make it the subject of intelligent Sunday morning coffee conversation. Then remember to head along to Nectar in Kingsland next Tuesday around 6:30/7ish.

Cheers

Ben.

Nerdnite Auckland – Chapter 16

So…. after a bit of misstep in March (sorry about that) we’re back. All going according to plan, we’ll be back in Kingsland with a pint in our hands and something interesting in our ears on Tuesday the 1st of April. An architect, a meteorologist and a biologist or two have so far agreed to provide us the interesting bits. The beer you’ll have to get from the bar.

 

So, first up (in details being delivered, not speaker order mind, I’ve only got a vague idea as to how that’s going to go at the moment) is one Grant Bannatyne from Ignite Architects who will be talking about a project in London that he worked on a while ago conceived by Italian architect Renzo Piano. You may have heard of The Shard. It was the home of The Great Intelligence in the Doctor Who episode “the Bells of St John”. You all know which one I mean.

 

We also have on Georgina Griffiths from the Metservice coming along to talk to us about the Life and Times of cyclone Lusi. Lusi being the one that hit Northland a few weekends ago. Given the blasé reaction of Aucklanders to the news of an imminent storm, I suspect it’s about time some of you became reacquainted with what an actual cyclone is he mused.

 

And then there are Eli Christian and Jess Fitch, Phage Hunters. Some of you may recall Heather Hendrickson’s talk last year about phage? These are two of her students who went out and discovered some new ones.
These are viruses that parasitize specific bacteria, called bacteriophages. There is obviously growing interest in finding phages that infect bacterial pathogens. Like PSA – the bacteria that that is currently destroying kiwifruit. Eli And Jess spent a summer characterizing a set of potential Pseudomonas phages that will contribute to an understanding of phages that may be used as biosecurity agents.

That should be enough for you for one night. Now go out and gather up your geeks to make sure they’re in Kingsland on Tuesday he said. Go on. Go and gather them.

Nerd Nite Chapter 15

Aaaaaaaaand Nerd Nite Auckland is back for 2014!

Tues Feb 4th – same time, same place, new year and new nerdy talks.

For newbies and those of you who have forgotten since 2013, that’s 6.30 pm (talks start at 7 pm) on Tuesday 4th February, at Nectar, 472 New North Road, Kingsland (the bar above The Kingslander).

Our first speaker for 2014 is Raewyn Dalziel, who will be talking about facts and myths about women’s suffrage. Last year, New Zealand marked 120 years of women’s suffrage and some old questions resurfaced about the significance of this momentous electoral law change. Raewyn taught in the Department of History at the University of Auckland for many years before becoming Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the University. She is a Guardian of the Alexander Turnbull Library and chairs a research advisory panel for Te Papa.

Next up we have Patrick Bowman, a professional physicist and amateur medieval re-creator. His historical interests include costuming, brewing, dancing, music and martial arts. Patrick will talk about his activities within the Society for Creative Anachronism and the fun of attempting to replicate and understand aspects of pre-seventeenth century European life. The talk will include pictures of Patrick and his friends in silly clothing, and some “show and tell”.

And our third speaker is Lisa McDonnell who is currently working as an analyst for Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand (SPRINZ). Lisa will be talking about the science behind muscle spasms, through a story about her attempt at finishing the Auckland Marathon!

Nerd Nite Chapter 14

Last chance to nerd it up this year! Where did the time go? While our illustrious speakers will not be answering that particular question (well they might if you ask them directly), they will be answering many more.

Alrighty, first up we have Craig Stevens; a professional physical oceanographer and amateur noise maker based in Wellington. Field expeditions have taken him from Cook Strait to Antarctica; from water-filled mine pits in Canada to tidal turbines in the U.K.; from inland seas in Europe to the southern ocean. Someone has to do it. Craig will be speaking about ‘Ocean Turbulence – The Earth System Viewed from the Perspective of a Record Needle’

Quote: [Horace Lamb attr.] I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather more optimistic.

Energy gets put into the earth system at celestial scales (tides, solar heating) and does its thing driving atmospheres and oceans – but we sort of fudge the dissipation of all this energy with somewhat ad hoc numbers in computer models. Craig’s science is to try and capture this turbulent dissipation of energy which happens at tiny scales (say ~ 2 mm) and relate it back to global scales. The approach evolved out of looking for submarine wakes after WWII but it’s not far off strapping a record needle to a torpedo and shooting it through the ocean looking for the “sound of turbulence”.

Next up, we have Keith Giles, Photographic Collections Librarian at the Sir George Grey special Collections, Auckland Central Library talking about 19th century New Zealand photographers. In this case we shall let the pictures tell a thousand words (or a thousand words per picture? That would be a lot of words…)

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Last but not least is Joseph Nichols from the University of Auckland Microfabrication Lab, who will lead “A discussion of the Scale on the Universe with a Micro machinist.” Joseph will be talking about some of the cool things they do to exploit the incredibly unique properties of the “tiny” universe – and how it all ties in with everything that we can see and do from a scientific and engineering viewpoint.

Nerdnite – Chapter 13

So Nerdnite is once again upon us. Again, we’re making no pretence of having a theme. Talks will cover, apparently, Rock Paper Scissors, 18th Century French political scientists, the martial art of Wing Chun and a game called Pounamu that is being used to figure out where New Zealand science should go. Find a theme in that, I dare you.

 

Want to lose and afternoon? Look up Wing Chun on Wikipedia. Or come along to Nerdnite and listen to Barney Teng talk about the history, origins, philosophy of Wing Chun and it’s place in daily life. If you’re lucky, he might ask for a volunteer from the audience (technically that’s you lot, not me) for a demonstration.

 

We will be also be welcoming back our first ever Auckland Nerdnite speaker, Thomas Lumley of Statschat and UOA Department of Statistics fame.

Rock, paper, scissors: transitivity and statistical comparisons.
The game of rock, paper, scissors was known in Asian millennia ago. At about the time of Captain Cook, a French political scientist discovered that it isn’t always possible to construct an ordering by considering things two at a time.  In the 1970s a statistician showed how to cheat at dice using this idea. The implications for experiments with a treatment group and a control group are still under appreciated.
Finally, we have Shaun Hendy, VUW physicist and science communicator extraordinaire.
Pounamu: an on-line conversation about New Zealand’s future.
Pounamu was a free, online game set in a future world where EVERYONE in New Zealand could use science as easily as they can use a computer. Anyone was welcome to play; from primary school students to research scientists, from young entrepreneurs to kuia and koro. You could play from anywhere with an internet connection for your browser. As a country, we have some big choices to make and Pounamu offered the ability to explore hundreds of paths forward. Shaun will discuss how the game worked, who played and what they talked about. He will also talk about plans for running the game again next year.

Gather your geeks, round up those that need some education forced into them at the end of a beer, bring them along next Tuesday, the 1st of October,  same nerdy time, same nerdy place. 6.30 pm for a 7 pm start at Nectar Bar, Kingland (470 New North Road, above the Kingslander). We have a diverse range of talks this month. Be there and be square!

Nerdnite Auckland – Chapter 12

So Nerdnite is once again upon us. Again, we’re making no pretence of having a theme. Talks will cover, apparently, Rock Paper Scissors, 18th Century French political scientists, the martial art of Wing Chun and a game called Pounamu that is being used to figure out where New Zealand science should go. Find a theme in that, I dare you.

 

Want to lose and afternoon? Look up Wing Chun on Wikipedia. Or come along to Nerdnite and listen to Barney Teng talk about the history, origins, philosophy of Wing Chun and it’s place in daily life. If you’re lucky, he might ask for a volunteer from the audience (technically that’s you lot, not me) for a demonstration.

 

We will be also be welcoming back our first ever Auckland Nerdnite speaker, Thomas Lumley of Statschat and UOA Department of Statistics fame.

Rock, paper, scissors: transitivity and statistical comparisons.
The game of rock, paper, scissors was known in Asian millennia ago. At about the time of Captain Cook, a French political scientist discovered that it isn’t always possible to construct an ordering by considering things two at a time.  In the 1970s a statistician showed how to cheat at dice using this idea. The implications for experiments with a treatment group and a control group are still under appreciated.
Finally, we have Shaun Hendy, VUW physicist and science communicator extraordinaire.
Pounamu: an on-line conversation about New Zealand’s future.
Pounamu was a free, online game set in a future world where EVERYONE in New Zealand could use science as easily as they can use a computer. Anyone was welcome to play; from primary school students to research scientists, from young entrepreneurs to kuia and koro. You could play from anywhere with an internet connection for your browser. As a country, we have some big choices to make and Pounamu offered the ability to explore hundreds of paths forward. Shaun will discuss how the game worked, who played and what they talked about. He will also talk about plans for running the game again next year.

Gather your geeks, round up those that need some education forced into them at the end of a beer, bring them along next Tuesday, the 1st of October,  same nerdy time, same nerdy place. 6.30 pm for a 7 pm start at Nectar Bar, Kingland (470 New North Road, above the Kingslander). We have a diverse range of talks this month. Be there and be square!

Chapter 11

September Nerdnite is coming up, same nerdy time, same nerdy place. 6.30 pm for a 7 pm start at Nectar Bar, Kingland (470 New North Road, above the Kingslander). We have a diverse range of talks this month. Be there and be square!

Our first speaker is astrophysicist Phil Yock, from the University of Auckland, with a talk entitled “We see them come, we see them go, some are fast, some are slow”.

All stars in the Milky Way are in motion. When one passes in front of another, Einstein predicted the background star would brighten up, not dim down, because light is bent by gravity. The world’s largest telescope devoted to observing Einstein’s brightening effect is in New Zealand. It is called MOA. The MOA telescope finds about 500 brightenings every year, from fast ones caused by rogue planets to slow ones caused by black holes. Several cool planets have been found orbiting stars beyond the snowline where temperatures fall to about – 200C. MOA’s prime goal would be to find an inhabited planet out there, following Giordano Bruno’s prediction of the 16th century.

Next up, we have Ali Seyfoddin, who will be talking about delivering drugs beyond the cornea.

From Arsenic containing Fowler’s solution to controlled release nanoparticles, pharmacists have come a long way in promoting public health. Ali’s presentation introduces the concept of drug delivery and gives insights into what is involved in ocular drug delivery, challenges, obstacles, and the opportunities.

And last, but certainly not least, is Gemma Cookson, urban designer.

In Gemma’s talk, ‘Occupying the Edge : An exploration of Christchurch urban housing’, she will discuss work from her Masters of Architecture (UNITEC) final project, which looks at the Social, Environmental and Economical factors shaping the rebuild, and will present a potential solution that involves urban aerodynamics, community gardens and canals to enhance the quality of life and bring people back into Christchurch´s Center City.

 

Chapter 10

So we sort of almost have a theme this month, with talks from three people who work with places that are both far away and quite close at the same time – cosmology, the past and under the sea. This months line up is quite frankly, superb. So for those of you who missed last months (also superb) talks about geckos, cricket statistics and ancient Egyptian orgies, I recommend you gather your geeks and come along next Tuesday, August the 6th, to Nectar in Kingsland. Around 6:30 is a good time to get there.

And now, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I now provide you with the full speaker list for the August Nerdnite …

 

One fish, two fish, Big fish, little fish Tom Trnski is an authority on the larval stage of fishes from Auckland Museum. He studies their identity and the consequence of their behaviour on dispersal and connectivity in marine populations. Museums have collected specimens for centuries and they continue to make new species discoveries, providing a record of the distribution of species over time, and evidence for the mechanisms responsible for the observed distributions. Tom will be taking us through the results of two recent expeditions to islands north of New Zealand, demonstrating the interplay between environment and behaviour that explains unexpected species distributions.

 

Richard Easther – you remember him? The physics professor chap who gave that very cool talk about Beatrice Tinsley earlier in the year? When he’s not helping authors write books about physicists, Richard is a physicist whose research focusses on the mechanism of the big bang and the evolution of the overall universe. And he’s back. This time, with a talk called: Dead Man’s Hand: Does the Sky Play With A Stacked Deck? The universe is big. Very big. But we only have one of them. So how could we tell whether our universe was weird? And what does “our” mean in that last sentence? You mean there is more than one universe?? That would be weird. Richard will talk about the structure of the universe on very large scales, what we can learn from it, and what we already know.

 

And finally, one I’ve been trying to organise for quite some time now, Brigid Gallagher, archaeologist, lover of dirt and jigsaw puzzles. Dirt conceals evidence associated with decay, survival and a treasure trove of information. An archaeological jigsaw is a 3-dimensional puzzle that comes on a micro and macro scale, and enables the ultimate detective story that delves into the recent and ancient past to unfold. These are the stories that describe the birth of nations. Brigid has worked on sites dating from 50 to 9000 years old, for Auckland Museum, at Catal Hoyuk in Turkey, all over England with Time Team and for her own company in Waihi Beach. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I imagine her talk will involve dirt, but as anyone who’s watched Time Team knows, dirt can be very, very exciting.