Auckland’s final Nerd Nite for 2014 is this Tuesday December 2nd at Galbraith’s (2 Mt Eden Rd, Grafton) from 6.30 pm. We will be wrapping up the year with talk of patterns in biology, criminal sentencing, and giant penguins.
Our first speaker will be familiar to any Nerd Nite regulars, as he is indeed your friendly Nerd Nite host, Ben Curran. After 2 and a half-ish years of running these things, the time has finally come for Ben to finish off the Nerdnite year by talking a little it about what it is that he does. Which involves Patterns, in Numbers, in Biology. Or at least one little corner of it. Which involves combing through large amounts of RNA looking for patterns that might give us hints as to the underlying structures that control an immune response.
Our second speaker, Fergus Whyte, is a solicitor specialising in litigation and a former clerk to the Judges of the High Court of New Zealand. He will be talking about criminal sentencing. Sentencing is something we see a lot about in the media and hear a lot of people expressing an opinion about it but how does it actually work? Fergus will be discussing the process of sentencing for serious crimes and the tensions inherent in the sentencing process.
And finally, Daniel Thomas is vertebrate zoologist at Massey University and he studies fossil penguins. He will be talking about the ancient history of New Zealand and the giant penguins that used to live here. Well over a meter tall, these penguins would have hunted far offshore at a time when New Zealand was mostly underwater. Daniel’s talk will introduce you to these giant, 30 million year old seabirds.