Join us on the first Wednesday of every month!
Next event is 3 September at A Rolling Stone.
3 September Speakers
“Incarceration and its discontents; how many people do we need in prison?”
by James Mehigan
James will discuss the crisis of mass incarceration in NZ prisons and ask if another Aotearoa is possible.
James is Associate Professor of Law at UC and a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in England. He is interested in the injustices of the criminal justice system and how powerful people and organisations can be held accountable for the harms they cause.
————————
“Swim Training Patterns”
by Dr. Christoph Bartneck
Swim training, like many other physical exercises, uses instructions to tell athletes what to do. In the case of swimming, variations are important since staring at tiles hardly keeps the swimmer mentally fit. Surprisingly, training instructions are a programming language, similar to what we use to control computers. This talk will dive into how natural, artificial and formal languages are used to communicate ideas and patterns. Find out what the ideal way to stack squares is, how to build a pyramid and how you can calculate what the most repetitive pop song is. Even better, you will find out how you can use these patterns to improve your training routine using numbers!
Dr. Christoph Bartneck is a professor of computer science and a competitive swimmer with several national records. He actively promotes Masters Para Swimming in his role as a para swimming coordinator. He is an experienced science communicator with an interest in the intersection of mathematics, engineering and psychology. He frequently gives public talks and lectures at the local, national and international levels. Dr. Bartneck is an accomplished author with hundreds of scientific articles and books to his name. His work has been featured in the New Scientist, Scientific American, Popular Science, Wired, New York Times, The Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Economist.
————————
“What is a calculator?“
by Rata Ingram
You might know a calculator as that thing you reach for to perform a mathematical calculation, but they’re not just your trusty Casio FX-82s and TI-84-plusses, or that app on your smartphone. Rata will wind back the crank to take you on a potted history of computing devices, from abacuses to adding machines, Napier’s bones to nomograms, Consul the educated monkey to Curt’s mechanical marvel, as she develops somewhat of a taxonomy of calculation instruments in true show-and-tell style.
Rata Ingram is all about maths. She is co-founder and chair of the charity Mathateca: New Zealand’s Public Space for Mathematics (mathateca.nz) and runs recreational maths meetups for adults (Christchurch MathsJam, Oceania MathsJam Gathering). When she’s not solving maths puzzles, she’s creating them, promoting STEM in her role at Christchurch City Libraries. With a lifelong interest in how things work, she also deals with technological history at Ferrymead Heritage Park, from driving trams to restoring telephony equipment. Rata has been collecting calculators since she was in high school. She now has more than she can count.