Barbara Whittaker, BCA Seniors Director
The new Discovery Café lecture series kicked off in September, with Carleton Professor Dr. Bob Burk leading a fascinating session called “Chemistry: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” We learned about the importance of chemistry in our daily lives and how sometimes a single chemical can be both beneficial and harmful.
In October, retired chemistry professor, Blackburn resident and Discovery Café founder Dr. John ApSimon shared with us “Tales from a Research Laboratory”, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at his amazing 40-year research career.
Discovery Café lectures are held from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM on the fourth Thursday of each month at the Blackburn Community Centre (190 Glen Park Drive). Admission is free and refreshments are provided.
Mark your calendar for the following dates, and watch the BCA Website and Facebook page, the BANAR, and posters around the community for more info about these upcoming Discovery Café sessions.
November 23, 2023: Detecting Fraud: A behind the-scenes look — Speaker: Robin Grosset, Chief Technology Officer, Mindbridge. Technology is advancing at a staggering pace. Fraudsters view each new advancement as an opportunity to exploit weaknesses in systems and are using increasingly sophisticated approaches to wreak havoc on organizations and individuals. In this session, Mr. Grosset will discuss how Ottawa-based Mindbridge, a well-respected and fast-growing financial fraud detection company, is helping companies find fraudulent activity and mitigate risk.
Thursday, January 25, 2024: Education, Society, and Generative AI — Speaker: Jim Davies, Professor at Carleton University`s Department of Cognitive Science, author, poet, game designer, internationally-produced playwright and host of the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain (http://www.mindingthebrainpodcast.com/). A number of artificial intelligence (AI) programs came out in the early 2020s that generate images (like Midjourney), music, and text (like ChatGPT). These generative AI programs surprised even long-time AI researchers with what they could do. How do they work? How will they affect education, creative work for humans, and society in general?
Thursday, February 22, 2024: Nuclear Family: Growing up in Ottawa at the beginning of the nuclear age — Speaker: Jean Van Loon, author, is a life-long resident of Ottawa. Her poems, stories and reviews have appeared in literary magazines across the country, most recently in the Queen’s Quarterly and (forthcoming) The New Quarterly. She is a graduate of Carleton, Queen’s, Humber Graduate School of Writing, and UBC’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Jean will read from her second poetry collection, Nuclear Family (McGill-Queen’s 2022), winner of the 2023 Ottawa Book Award for fiction. The book’s details of 1940s and 50s Ottawa and the role Canada played in the US nuclear development program may invite discussion of other people’s memories of the time. There will be time for discussion.
Additional 2024 dates: March 28, April 25, and May 23. Speakers TBD. If you have any topics you’d like to hear about, please send your suggestions to barbara@blackburnhamlet.ca.