ASTRA

Cyrano de Bergerac: How did the Bold Free-Thinker of the 17t Century become the Unhappy Long-Nosed Lover of the 19th Century?

Wednesday January 27, 2010, 4.00-5.20, Mackinnon 317

Donald Bruce joined the University of Guelph from the University of Alberta in 2006 to become the Dean of Arts. His main areas of research and teaching are nineteenth-century French Literature, Literary and Cultural Theory, and what the French call épistémocritique, that is the interrelationship between literature and different forms of knowledge, their representation, and their realization in discursive (or other) contexts. In particular, he was worked on the interface between scientific and non-scientific discourses (particularly literature) in the Nineteenth Century. With Prof. C. McWebb (University of Waterloo) he recently completed a journal issue of Texte (University of Toronto) on Épistemocritique.

Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life

Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History

December 1, 2009, 7:30pm

Science Complex Atrium

When Charles Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagle in the waning days of December, 1831, he was still a month away from his 23^rd birthday. But, though historians correctly emphasize that Darwin’s training as a naturalist had been minimal up to that point, nonetheless his work—with Robert Grant while in medical school (Edinburgh, 1825-1827) and as an undergraduate at Cambridge under the influence of John Stevens Henslow (1828-1831)—had exposed him to the rudiments of field collecting, microscope dissection, analysis of life histories (Grant), and the importance of variation (Henslow). Grant was an evolutionist—together with Darwin looking for phylogenetic connections between plants and animals; Darwin read Lamarck while in Edinburgh.

Darwin was testing—even  “experimenting” with—transmutation from the moment he collected fossil mammals at Bahia Blanca, Argentina in 1832. He wrote his first transmutationally-imbued essay (entitled February 1835) while in Valdivia, Chile—basing his thoughts on the replacement of extinct by living congeneric species primarily on his experiences at Bahia Blanca in 1832 and 1833. In the Fall of 1835, he visited the Galapagos, observing his predicted pattern of geographic replacement of congeneric species developed through his earlier observations in Patagonia and the Falkland Islands.

Darwin returned home, opening his “Transmutation Notebooks” in 1837, immediately seeing the “tree of life” as a simple prediction of the hypothesis of transmutation, and recording his discovery of natural selection in 1838 and 1839. With most of his theory in place, Darwin nonetheless refrained from publishing until forced to do so on receiving the fateful letter and manuscript from A.R. Wallace in 1858.

“Voluntary vaccination policies and vaccine scares as a free-rider problem: mathematical modelling approaches.”

November 18, 2009, 4-5.20 pm.

Rozanski Hall room 105

Chris Bauch, PhD is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Guelph. He is a specialist in mathematical models of infectious disease transmission (dynamic models), and has experience in a broad range of modeling techniques, including differential equations, agent-based computer simulations, spatial models, stochastic models, and network models.  Dr. Bauch is interested in using models to assess the impacts of vaccination and other control strategies, in the incorporation of human behavioral elements into transmission models, and in the economic evaluation of infectious disease interventions.  Recent projects include cost-effectiveness analysis of universal Hepatitis A vaccination in Canada, modeling parental vaccinating behavior for pediatric infectious diseases under a voluntary vaccination policy using game theory, and using mathematical models in cost-effectiveness analysis to inform the development of new measles vaccine technologies for use in lesser-developed countries.  He has worked extensively with epidemiologists, health economics, physicians, and public health researchers on various interdisciplinary collaborations.

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Please also save the dates and times for our Winter 2010 speakers:

Donald Bruce (School of Languages and Literatures) “Cyrano de Bergerac: How did the Bold Free Thinker of the 17th Century become the Unhappy Long-Nosed Lover of the 19th Century?” (4-5.20pm, January 27)

Fred Eidlin (Political Science) “The Method of Problems vs The Method of Topics.” (4-5.20pm, February 24)

John Cranfield (Food, Agricultural & Resource Economics) “Healthy, wealthy and tall(er): what heights tell us about the well-being of Canadians” (4-5.20pm, April 7)

Locations TBA. Please visit this blog (http://astra.uoguelph.ca) for further information.