What's on
March 8 to March 22
cjournal@alcor.concordia.ca
Computer whiz
Artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give a public lecture March 8, in Room 02.238 on the second floor of the EV building, corner of Guy and Ste. Catherine Sts.
Minsky, now 80, is a preeminent cognitive scientist. He founded MIT’s artificial intelligence laboratory and has written on AI and philosophy. The lecture starts at 6 p.m.
When Engineers met Artists
The current show at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966, was organized by the List Visual Arts Center at MIT.
It explores the collaborations between a group of engineers and artists of the avant-garde over nine evenings of performances at the Armory in New York City in October 1966. Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Labs and a founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), was the driving force behind this innovative project.
The show is relevant for its interdisciplinary approach, and especially appropriate for Concordia, with its integrated EV building and Hexagram research centre on digital art. It runs from March 8 to April 21. The vernissage is March 8 at 5:30 p.m. President and engineer Claude Lajeunesse and the curator, Catherine Morris, will be on hand.
Healthy Heart Project
Parents with children aged 10 to 15 are invited to participate in a research project looking at cardiovascular health.
If you meet the eligibility criteria and agree to participate, your family will answer questions about your exercise and eating habits. The researchers will measure blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index, and give you feedback about your and your child's heart health. Families will receive $40 for their participation.
For more information, please contact Jennifer J. McGrath, PhD, MPH, at the Pediatric Public Health Psychology Laboratory, 514-848-2424, ext. 5207.
Bioscience at the FOFA Gallery
LiveLifeLab, at the FOFA Gallery, is described as “a propositional performance and installation.”
Artists Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willet project the viewer into a future where designer organisms are generated on demand. They’re growing organisms modeled on the teratoma, an unusual cancerous growth containing multiple tissues like hair, skin, and nervous systems.
The FOFA is on the ground floor of the EV building. The show runs until March 23.
Unrepentant
The Center for Native Education, in collaboration with CKUT Radio McGill, will present a screening of Unrepentant, a tough look at “the deliberate and systematic extermination” of Canada’s aboriginal people through the Indian residential school system.
Co-writer and producer Kevin Annette will be on hand. Unrepentant won the best director award in 2006 at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival. The screening is on Friday March 16, in Room 535 of the Hall Building, starting at 7 p.m.
HIV/AIDS Lecture Series
LaVerne Monette of the Ontario Aboriginal AIDS Strategy will speak on “Ignorance, Indifference and Invisibility: The Aboriginal HIV/AIDS Epidemic” as part of the lecture series on March 15 in H-110 at 6 p.m.
India’s software boom
On March 16, Steven Appelbaum, Research Chair in Organizational Development, will present a talk by Ramkrishnan V. Tenkasi, Professor of Organizational Development and Change at Benedictine University, in Chicago.
“Where did India’s Capabilities in the Software Industry Come From? A Story of Large Scale Change” will be given in Room 302 of the Guy Metro Building from 2 to 4 p.m. It will be preceded by a morning session with MSc and PhD students.
Veteran of U.S. Supreme Court
The Concordia-HEC Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations will present a talk by Theodore Eisenberg, of Cornell University, on Friday, March 16, from 10 a.m. to noon in Room 403-2 of the Guy Metro Building.
He will present a paper written with Geoffrey Miller, “Do Juries Add Value? Evidence from an Empirical Study of Jury Trial Waiver Clauses in Large Corporate Contracts.” For more details, please contact Lorne Switzer, associate director of the Institute, at switz@jmsb.concordia.ca
Eisenberg clerked for the District of Columbia Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has done significant research on the governance of small public and private companies and in bankruptcy, civil rights and the death penalty.
Genocide in Guatemala
Marc Drouin spent long periods in Central America and Northern Canada, including four years in Guatemala as a human rights observer. He recently completed his MA in History at Concordia. His graduate research was based on first-person accounts of human rights violations perpetrated by Guatemalan security forces in the indigenous highlands in 1981 and 1982.
Interested in such issues as transitional justice and the prosecution of atrocity crimes in Latin America, he is now doing a doctorate at the Université de Montréal. He will give a workshop on March 9 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in Room LB-608 under the auspices of the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies under the title “To the Last Seed: Atrocity Crimes and the Genocidal Continuum in Guatemala, 1978-1984.”
Science College lecture on Arctic
On March 22 at 8 p.m. in the Oscar Peterson Concert Hall, John P. Smol, of Queen’s University, will give the annual lecture sponsored by Concordia’s Science College “Arctic Environments, Lake Mud and Climate Change: A Window on the Past and a View to the Future.”
A biologist, Smol holds the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change at Queen’s, and co-directs the Paleoecologica Environmental Assessment and Research Lab, PEARL, a group of over 20 students and scientists. In December 2004, he received the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal, given to Canada’s top scientist or engineer.