Since the last Thursday of the month falls on Halloween Night proper, we are having our Halloween Nerd Nite on Tuesday the 29th of October. Come in costume as we will have a costume contest! Our 3 speakers for the evening will be covering freaky topics such as unnatural mangling of books for the sake of art, exhuming the rarest of books, and unlocking the energy hiding deep below our feet!
When: Tuesday, Oct 29th, at 7:30pm
(Doors & bar open at 7pm, with drinks available all night)
Where: Studio Theatre at Fringe Theatre Adventures
Books are magical and important and should be treated with respect — but sometimes they can be transformed into a whole other kind of art. Introducing the world of Altered Books…
Winston is a reader, writer, designer, book collector, bookseller, holistic librarian, and all around book nerd. When not in the bookish world, Winston can be found singing in choir, playing with Lego, and just trying to make the world a better place. But he also sometimes wrecks books for fun. You can find him online at butterfliesandaliens.com.
What makes a book rare? What are “incunabula,” and why are they so desirable to collectors? How should you handle rare materials – gloves or no gloves? Step into the wonderful world of rare books in this crash course on all things old, rare and bookish.
Natasha D’Amours is a Master of Library and Information Studies student at the University of Alberta. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Victoria, has worked in printing and bookbinding for several years, and is currently working at Bruce Peel Special Collections as a reading room supervisor and exhibition docent. As you can probably tell, she thinks that books are pretty neat.
The future of housing is captured in the word “sustainable”. Housing needs to be environmentally sustainable, socially sustainable, and financially sustainable. And at the heart of this future is the energy from the Earth, energy that is transferred using geothermal heat exchangers.
Yasushi Ohki is the executive director of the non-profit housing development called Green Violin Community Development Company. With an education in civil engineering and architecture, combined with a career in land development, Yasushi has just completed his fifth year advocating for housing and is about to embark on the next five year Mission to Demonstrate new housing forms.
Nerd Nite Edmonton is back for the Fall, and we’re eager to welcome you back. Join us to hear about video game reviews and why they suck, bike lanes in our cities, and video game history.
When: Thursday, Sept 26th, at 7:30pm
(Doors & bar open at 7pm, with drinks available all night)
Where: Backstage Theatre at Fringe Theatre Adventures
Nathaniel Romance-Senneville: Why Video Game Review Scores Suck
Before you may play a video game, you have to buy one. When there are more than 5 million video games to choose from, this becomes difficult without some research. A lot of us use video game scores to help us pick. In this (hopefully humorous) talk I’m going to talk about why I think those scores are bad at their job, or at the very least those scores are less valuable than we perceive them to be.
Nathaniel started playing video games around the age of four, and hasn’t been able to kick the addiction. No cross-country move, undergraduate degree or soul crushing jobs have gotten in the way of the playing of video games (He even got his partner addicted.) When moving (back) to Edmonton, the bus allowed three bags. He only brought the essentials: His desktop computer, his monitor, and other things he couldn’t remember. In his spare time, he sleeps and works a full-time job.
Karly Coleman: Co-Design and City Governance – Self and Others in a Dispute Over Bike Lanes
I examine how people engage socially with changes to the material infrastructure of the urban environment, and I specifically look at how people argue about bike lanes in Edmonton. I concentrate on how humans influence urban infrastructure and how that infrastructure influences human behaviour.
Karly grew up in small towns located in northeastern Saskatchewan and central Brazil, giving her an eye for exposing the taken-for-granted in people’s lives. She seamlessly blends practicality with humour and so returned to university to pursue her Ph.D. She’s interested in bikes, cats, cozy murder, creative non-fiction, phenomenology and history. When she’s not writing about bike lanes, life in general, and her life specifically, she’s renovating her home, quelling cat fights, or performing random acts of gardening.
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone focuses on a brief history of games as an emerging and evolving medium for art, writing, and play, and the alarming loss of game history that continues to grow. Games are being lost every day, and without concentrated advocacy for recording and access, many may be lost forever.
Nisha Patel is a Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Edmonton and a Canadian Poetry Slam Champion. A queer and disabled artist, Nisha is a recipient of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal and the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award. Her sophomore collection of poetry, A Fate Worse Than Death, engages in the necropolitics surrounding disability, and is out now with Arsenal Pulp Press.
Nerd Nite Edmonton #80 comes crashing into April with another stellar roster of speakers. Come learn about AI (Machine Learning), how people get recruited into cults, and birds (including our favourite: owls).
When: Thursday, April 25th, at 7:30pm
(Doors & bar open at 7:00 pm with drinks available all night!)
Where: Studio Theatre at Fringe Theatre Adventures
Matthew Dowling: First Sip of AI: An Introductory Brew to Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been around for a long time. Some of the ideas behind the so called Deep Learning models were invented in the late 1950s. It wasn’t until late 2022 though, when ChatGPT was released, that the public really started to consciously use AI instead of it being something hidden from view. In this talk I want to give an intuitive understanding of how ML and AI are different from regular computer programs and share some of my experiences with developing ML applications and playing with it over the last few years.
I am currently a Senior Lead ML Developer at AltaML, an Applied Machine Learning company based in Edmonton. I have a PhD in particle physics from the University of Alberta and have been working in the ML community for the past 6 years. I’ve been with AltaML since day 1 and as a result have worked on a large variety of ML problems in various industries ranging from Finance and Insurance to Industrial Operations. Most recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with Large Language Models (like GPT) and Generative AI.
Heather Hutchinson: The Siren Song Remains the Same: Cult Recruitment Tactics and Rhetoric
In spite of the advances of the digital age, cults remain as popular as ever. Does social media make their recruiting methods different? Are they more dangerous now because of the internet? Communications renegade Heather Hutchinson will tell you all. Or at least some.
Heather Hutchinson is a recent graduate of MacEwan’s Professional Communications program. She is fascinated by rhetoric, persuasiveness, cults, true crime, and enjoys playing the ukulele and yelling at people on Twitter.
Jana Teefy: Beaverhill Bird Observatory, MOTUS, and owls of Alberta
The Beaverhill Bird Observatory has over 40 years of migration monitoring data, which we collect through standardized bird banding practices. I’ll talk about our research, population trends over time, our MOTUS research. I’ll touch on a few owls of Alberta and the threats to their populations.
My name is Jana Teefy (Jay-na Tee-fee), self declared bird nerd and Head Biologist of the Beaverhill Bird Observatory. I have been with the observatory for 4 years. I have an Environmental Sciences diploma from Lakeland College with a major in Wildlife and Fisheries Conservation and was a veterinary nurse in my previous career.
