Ottawa Writers Festival Spring 2009 - Science and Big Ideas

There are lots of authors coming to the Spring Writers Festival, I am just highlighting the science ones below.  You can see the full programme at

http://www.writersfestival.org/events.html

You have to pay, except some events are free for Carleton students.

Wednesday April 22, 2009 - 7 PM - Earth Day - New Science Series: Washing the Water

Alanna Mitchell discusses Seasick: The Hidden Ecological Crisis of the Global Ocean;

Wayne Grady discusses The Great Lakes: The Natural History of a Changing Region

Thursday April 23, 2009 - 7 PM - The Big Idea: Carbon Shift

Join editor Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, and contributor William Marsden, author of Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care) for a conversation on their new book Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future.

Sunday April 26, 2009 - 2 PM - New Science Series: How Mathematics Orders Our Lives - with Jason I. Brown, hosted by Stephen Brockwell

Thursday April 30, 2009 - noon - Masterclass Series: Why Poetry Antimatters - Metaphor, Entanglement and Particle Poetics

Join two stellar poets for a team Masterclass on poetry. Jeramy Dodds, recently shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, and Matthew Tierney, author of The Hayflick Unit and Full speed through the morning dark, for an exploration of the intersection of science and poetry.

Saturday May 2, 2009 - 4 PM - New Science Series - Cyburbia: Consciousness, Communication and Community in the Digital Age

The way we live has apparently been transformed by new ways of communicating. But where did these trends start? And if they can change our behaviour, can they also change the way we think? In Cyburbia James Harkin describes how the architecture of our digital lives was built over seventy years.

I have also added these events to LibraryThing, you can see them e.g. attached to the Saint Brigid's venue:

http://www.librarything.com/venue/40511

It was a bit of a pain transcribing all this stuff - organisations need to get smarter about providing information in machine-readable formats.  I can't think of an easier standard format than calendars.  Jon Udell is trying to address some of this with his community calendar project.

Comments

[Jon Udell]

Would you, or someone you know, be interested in becoming a calendar curator for Ottawa? If so I would love to help.

[Kate Hunt]

Hi - just commenting that in fact _all_ Writers Festival events are free for Carleton students (the only exceptions this spring are the events presented in partnership with the Chamber Music Festival and BC Scene.) Carleton University is a major sponsor of ours, so it's our way of saying thank you.

Thanks for reposting our science-related events! Much appreciated.

Thanks, too, for the suggestion about creating machine-readable formats - I'd be interested in hearing suggestions for a solution for our site. I maintain the website but didn't design it. [email protected]

- Kate Hunt, Community Liaison