The New Zealand Archaeological Association is working to increase public awareness and highlight the importance of protecting our archaeological heritage by promoting the work of New Zealand archaeologists both at home and abroad.

This will be the fourth New Zealand Archaeology Week. The event has been able to develop and grow due to the wonderful effort and input from the archaeological community, heritage organisations and tangata whenua.

Archaeology Week is going ahead this year as an online-only event. NZAA is working with a number of partners to develop and share content on our social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

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The New Zealand Archaeological Association is working to increase public awareness and highlight the importance of protecting our archaeological heritage by promoting the work of New Zealand archaeologists both at home and abroad.

This will be the fourth New Zealand Archaeology Week. The event has been able to develop and grow due to the wonderful effort and input from the archaeological community, heritage organisations and tangata whenua.

Archaeology Week is going ahead this year as an online-only event. NZAA is working with a number of partners to develop and share content on our social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

More information

The New Zealand Archaeological Association is working to increase public awareness and highlight the importance of protecting our archaeological heritage by promoting the work of New Zealand archaeologists both at home and abroad.

This will be the fourth New Zealand Archaeology Week. The event has been able to develop and grow due to the wonderful effort and input from the archaeological community, heritage organisations and tangata whenua.

Archaeology Week is going ahead this year as an online-only event. NZAA is working with a number of partners to develop and share content on our social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

More information

Are you tired of doing the same thing all the time? Looking for something different to do in town?

Why not head to Wellington Botanic Gardens and into Space Place to spend some time gazing up into the skies above, zooming through the Universe in the planetarium.

A live presentation takes you out to space and back home - just in time for a drink as you look around the interactive space displays.

The Cable Car runs until 10pm so you can enjoy drinks and unique experience before heading into town gazing at our city below.

Astronomy on Tap is the perfect way to spend a relaxing evening getting amongst the stars with a date, mate, or flying solo leaving your earthly troubles behind as you wander the stars through our extended Night Sky program. In the second hour we journey further into the universe through galaxies and nebula and deep sky objects.

So, spend the night with us getting to know your night skies or at least put stars in your eyes (yes, couldn't resist a pun)

Ticket price includes nibbles and one drink upon arrival. There is also a cash bar for after the show.

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In the first Liggins Institute public webinar, Professor Richard Mithen will consider the contrasting backstories of a few of New Zealand’s iconic foods, including kūtai (or greenshell mussels), kūmara and kiwi fruit. How might these everyday foods be helping our children to grow into healthy adults, and what role do they have in maintaining our cognitive health and mobility as we age?

And what about the foods that will make their way into our shopping trolleys in the future? Professor Mithen will consider what we might find as we attempt to adapt our agriculture to the changing climate and move towards a zero-carbon economy.

It has now been two decades since Bayesian parameter estimation routines were first introduced for studies in gravitational waves and cosmology. Bayesian approaches have become extremely important for these disciplines, their use is ubiquitous and helped to significantly push our knowledge of the universe and its history.

On 14 September 2015, Advanced LIGO made the breakthrough first detection of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by accelerating massive objects, predicted by Einstein in 1918 as a consequence of general relativity theory. Since then, Advanced LIGO/Virgo have announced the detection of many more binary star mergers.

Professor Meyer will review the development of the statistical methods that enabled the estimation of the waveform parameters, such as the masses of the black holes and their distance to earth. A major focus of current research has been on a more robust nonparametric noise characterization aiming at a simultaneous estimation of the noise spectral density and gravitational wave parameters. This is critical now for LIGO/Virgo but it might prove to be even more important for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission to be launched in 2034. If robust methods can be developed to handle LISA instrument and galactic confusion noise, LISA will let us go further than any alternative towards the detection of a primordial gravitational wave background, the remnant of the Big Bang.

Renate Meyer is a Professor in the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland. After obtaining an MSc and PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Aachen, Germany, she took up a lectureship at the University of Auckland in 1994. In 2018, she was awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship by the Royal Society of NZ Te Apārangi for research on noise characterization studies for laser-interferometric gravitational wave observatories and she is co-chair of the NZ Astrostatistics and General Relativity Group of the International LISA Consortium.

Renate has wide research interests in applied Bayesian inference and MCMC methods. She has been collaborating for many years with astrophysicists on the analysis of gravitational wave data. Her research areas comprise time series analysis with applications in astrophysics, state-space modelling in ecology, multivariate modelling using copulas, survival analysis in medical statistics, and stochastic volatility models for financial time series.

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*ONLINE* 

Details
This presentation will be focused on the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Act of 2017 and the role of the New Zealand Space Agency.

Speaker:
Natasha Wilson, Special Counsel, Buddle Findlay
Natasha is a Special Counsel at Buddle Findlay, and a member of Buddle Findlay’s public law team based in Wellington. She advises government departments, crown entities and State-owned enterprises, as well as private clients, on a range of public, regulatory, and commercial matters.

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For the first time in history on April 20th, oil prices went negative, so what does the future of energy look like now?

As part of our post COVID panel webinar series, The Sustainability Society is cohosting a session with the BusinessNZ Energy Council to discuss what the future of energy looks like for our country.

For the first time in history on April 20th, oil prices went negative.

New Zealand has seen cheaper prices at the pump as a result, but what does it mean for our energy future?

We generate more than 80% of our electricity demands from renewable sources yet our transportation fleet relies on imported oil.

Join Alan Brent (TSS committee member and Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems at Victoria University of Wellington) and our invited panelists including:

• Massimiliano Cervo, Future Energy Leader for the World Energy Council, and
• Gardiner Hill, Vice President of Carbon Management at BP

as we look at what the future may hold for energy security.

PROFESSOR SARAH RILEY

Critical Health Psychology, School of Psychology

In this talk, I discuss some of the elements of postfeminism, focusing in particular on its relationship with feminism, women’s sexuality, and cultural expectations to work on the self. Charting postfeminism from the rise of the Spice Girls to contemporary figures like Nikki Minaj and Little Mix, I talk about my research at the intersections of psychology, cultural and media studies, describing how a postfeminist sensibility informs young women’s understanding of themselves, their bodies, sexuality and politics.

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COVID-19 has resulted in unprecedented times internationally. We have invited three of our local experts who have been pivotal to the Southern Region response to COVID-19

Dr Susan Jack – Speaking on the overall epidemiology of our COVID-19 outbreak in NZ and the Southern and public health response, case management and monitoring in the community and contact tracing.

A/Prof James Ussher - Diagnostics and Vaccines – Providing a brief overview of the diagnostic response in NZ, in particular the SDHB, and the prospects for a vaccine.

Dr Jack Dummer - Preparing a COVID-19 Ward – Covering the fundamentals of managing COVID-19 patients on the medical wards, and the challenges raised by dealing with the infection itself and also the potential volume of patients.

The United Nations has charged NZ with infringing on children’s human rights when our surgeons do elective genital surgery on infants. The surgery is carried out on the basis of parental consent, on children born with variations of sex characteristics. To tackle the questions this raises, we bring together knowledge from legal, medical and psychosocial research. We investigate the concept of consent, asking: under what circumstances is it appropriate to invite parents to consider elective genital surgery on children? And, what counts as fully informed consent in this situation? This is a presentation of research in progress.

Join Associate Professor Katie Groom at this public webinar to find out why antenatal corticosteroids are so effective at improving outcomes for our most vulnerable babies.

Our webinars address questions that should be of particular interest to people in the public health and smokefree sectors, and others interested in public health policy.

For this first webinar in the series, we welcome two well-known researchers: Dr Lindsay Robertson and Dr Becky Freeman, who will present new evidence on how the tobacco industry is developing and marketing new nicotine products that attract and addict young people.

A number of exciting new predator control tools are currently in development and they could change predator control significantly for all of us.

From long life lures to highly accurate detection devices and species specific toxins — the future is looking bright.  Join Helen Blackie from Boffa Miskell to learn about the range of tools in the pipeline.

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ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR HONE MORRIS

SeniorTe Pūtahi-a-toi/School of Māori Knowledge

In the ever present climate of global warming, climate change and the growing awareness of the need to protect and respect our environment, I share a perspective of a connected geneaology. It’s inspired by a connection, a conceptual lens formulated by my ancestors to encourage us to view the environment as a living organism, breathing with moods and emotions similar to the human body. Papatūānuku, Mother Earth requires our attention!

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