Top Picks for Science Week 8th- 15th Nov
Science Week Ireland is celebrating its 20th year. Here is our top picks:
Screening and discussion: The Human Scale
For the post screening discussion we will be joined by Dr Gerald Mills, Head of School, UCD Geography, Ania Rok, Social Innovator & Kieran Rose Senior Planner with DCC along with writer and journalist Frank McDonald moderating the discussion and audience Q&A.
The Human Scale questions our assumptions about modernity, exploring what happens when we put people into the center of our equations.
For 40 years the Danish architect Jan Gehl has systematically studied human behavior in cities. His starting point was an interest in people, more than buildings – in what he called Life Between Buildings. What made it exist? When was it destroyed? How could it be brought back? This lead to studies of how human beings use the streets, how they walk, see, rest, meet, interact etc. Jan Gehl also uses statistics, but the questions he asks are different. For instance: How many people pass this street throughout a 24 hour period? How many percent of those are pedestrians? How many are driving cars or bikes? How much of the street space are the various groups allowed to use? Is this street performing well for all its users?
Tue, 10th Nov, 2015, 18:30
@ Wood Quay Venue, Dublin City Council Civic Offices, Wood Quay, Dublin 8
Talk: Keeping Bees in the City with Eamon Magee
Across Ireland, people living in towns and cities are discovering the joys of beekeeping. It is a great way for people to connect to the natural world as well as helping to support an ailing bee population. It also provides you with delicious local honey! In this special Science Week event, The Ark and WillFredd Theatre are delighted to welcome Eamon Magee (President, Federation of Irish Beekeeper’s Association) to speak about Urban Beekeeping. Known across Ireland for his passion and experience in keeping bees, Eamon will present an interactive talk perfect for anyone who is interested in this fast-growing past-time.
Friday November 13th 18:00-19:00
@ The Ark, 11a Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2.
Free but Prebook via The Ark
And if Bees are your science Buzz ….
Screening of Vanishing of the Bees
Honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing across the planet, literally vanishing from their hives. Known as Colony Collapse Disorder, this phenomenon has brought beekeepers to crisis in an industry responsible for producing apples, broccoli, watermelon, onions, cherries and a hundred other fruits and vegetables. Commercial honeybee operations pollinate crops that make up one out of every three bites of food on our tables.
Vanishing of the Bees follows commercial beekeepers David Hackenberg and Dave Mendes as they strive to keep their bees healthy and fulfill pollination contracts across the U.S. The film explores the struggles they face as the two friends plead their case on Capital Hill and travel across the Pacific Ocean in the quest to protect their honeybees.
Filming across the US, in Europe, Australia and Asia, this documentary examines the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the greater meaning it holds about the relationship between mankind and mother earth. As scientists puzzle over the cause, organic beekeepers indicate alternative reasons for this tragic loss. Conflicting options abound and after years of research, a definitive answer has not been found to this harrowing mystery.
Sunday 15th November 14:00 (duration 87 mins)
@ National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin 9.
Info and tickets for Vanishing of the Bees are available at www.ucdscienceexpression.ie
Future Love: Love is All
Love is All takes us on a journey through the twentieth century, exploring love and courtship on screen in a century of unprecedented social upheaval. From the very first kisses ever caught on film, through the disruption of war, to the birth of youth culture, gay liberation and free love, we follow courting couples flirting at tea dances, kissing in the back of the movies, shacking up and fighting for the right to love. This is the celluloid story of love and courtship since the birth of the movie camera; told with spellbinding footage from the British Film Institute archive and Yorkshire Film Archive and many more! Directed by Kim Longinotto, edited by Ollie Huddleston and set to a stunning Richard Hawley soundtrack.
Friday 13th November 21:30 @ Odessa Club, 13 Dame Court, Dublin 2.
Info and tickets for Love is All are available at www.ucdscienceexpression.ie
Future Love: HER
Experts on sex and tech, kissing and Tinder will share their insights on the future of love at a special screening of the movie HER at Filmbase on Friday 13th November at 7.30pm. The film, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson, explores the relationship between a man and his smartphone. Our panel of experts will follow the screening with a discussion on what science can tell us about where we are going in our relationships and sex lives. What is constant when it comes to love and sex, and what is changing as a result of our love affair with technology? Can you really find true love on Tinder? What does a pinging phone in the bedroom do for our libido? What’s the chemistry of kissing and what does it tell us about where we have come from and where we are going?
Info and tickets for HER are available at www.ucdscienceexpression.ie
Who said science couldn’t be steamy?!
Smartphone Microscopes
If you’re in the Sligo area then check out the drop in Smartphone Microscope workshop at Sligo IT where you will get the opportunity to make you very own microscope to take home and explore the world around you.
Thursday 12th November 12:00 – 17:00
Free. For more information and for other events being held at Sligo IT see the Sligo IT Science Week Website
Story Machines
White Label present a series of talks, demonstrations, panel discussions, readings and performances exploring how we can use modern multimedia technology to invigorate theatre and performance art.
2015 is the centenary of birth of an influential Polish theatre maker Tadeusz Kantor, for whom actors were live “machines connected with another multitude of machines in a continuous flow”. Drawing from Bauhaus, post-Cubism, Socialist Realism, New Objectivity, ready-made, happening, etc, his works were like a machines whose operating mode was defined by an endless self-transformation. It involved endless repetitions, comebacks, replays, copies, variations, versions and reconstructions. The only obstacle for him was the imperfect body of an actor.
Today, with projections, holographic, robotic and virtual reality technology, we arguably have the capacity to fully realise Kantor’s vision on stage and integrate technology into storytelling. But are we successfully exploiting the potential at our fingertips? Or are we dragging our heels while the rest of Europe embraces the future?
Is there such a thing as too much technology? Can we strike a balance between the live human experience and programming theatre using memory machines? What are we scared of?
7th-8th November 2015
Daytime Events are in Wood Quay Venue
Evening events are in Steambox @ Irish Museum of Contemporary Art.
This event is presented with support from the Embassy of Poland in Dublin; Theatre Forum; The Festival of Curiosity; & Rough Magic & culture.pl
A full programme of events and workshops in this series and further details can be viewed at WhiteLabel
Bog of Allen Nature Centre
We live in a country with lots of bogland. Learn about the formation, history and ecology of Ireland’s beautiful peatlands. Gain some hands on experience in pond dipping and observe the diversity of invertebrate life living in bog pools. Build your own pond in a bottle.
Open days 9th November – 13th November 10:00 – 16:00
Bog of Allen Nature Centre, Lullymore, Rathangan, Co. Kildare
Screening and discussion: The Experimenter
Sunday 15th November 16:30 at the Irish Film Institute
A special screening of the Experimenter, a film about the chilling 1961 psychology experiment by Stanley Milgram. Join legendary broadcaster and science communicator Quentin Cooper and Dr. Paul D’Alton, President of the Psychological Society of Ireland for a post screening discussion and Q&A.
Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) designs a psychology experiment in which people think they’re delivering electric shocks to an affable stranger (Jim Gaffigan) strapped into a chair in another room. Subjects are told it’s about memory, but the experiment is really about conformity, conscience, and free will. Milgram is trying to come to terms with the Holocaust and to test people’s tendency to comply with authority. Milgram meets Sasha (Winona Ryder), a former dancer living in New York. Their courtship includes a visit to the Yale lab, where Milgram’s experiment has yielded disturbing results: 65 per cent of Milgram’s subjects deliver shocks that may be fatal, obeying polite commands from a lab-coated authority figure (John Palladino).
You could say we are puppets. But I believe that we are puppets with perception, with awareness. Sometimes we can see the strings. And perhaps our awareness is the first step in our liberation. — Stanley Milgram
Info and tickets for The Experimenter are available at www.ucdscienceexpression.ie
