Date: Wednesday, Oct 2
Time: 8pm
Location: High Noon Saloon (map)

The order of the night’s line-up will be announced on the Facebook event the day of the show.

The Virtues of Eating Shit

Summary: This talk will focus on the anatomical and physiological features that force animals to consume their own excrement. I will focus on some fun examples and attempt to answer the age-old question, “why does my dog keep eating shit?”

Jeremiah Yahn

Presenter Bio: I was born at a very young age and have continued ever since. While some maintain that my best feature is my cat, I would also agree. I enjoy houseplants, thunder, wedding DJ’s, and discussing whether or not he/she who smelt it did, in fact, delt it.

Truth, Lies and Slander: A Wikipedia Hackathon

Summary:Wikipedia is a top-10 most visited site on the internet. It’s also community edited: but how is content created, moderated, fact-checked and governed? In this live demo, I’ll inject Wikipedia with a wide variety of truth, lies, and everything in between. We can watch the internet respond in real time 🙂

Mark Coatsworth

Presenter Bio: Mark is a research staffer at the Center for High Throughput Computing at UW-Madison. He moved to Madison from Toronto in 2014 and indulges his spare time in photography, old time banjo, fast bicycles and editing Wikipedia. He’s an alumnus of Nerd Nite Toronto and super excited to bring his science experiments to an international audience

There are no trashy orangutans: towards conservation and coexistence in the Anthropocene

Summary: Orangutans are cute, fuzzy icons of threatened nature, frequently featured in documentaries and TV shows and trotted out by conservation organizations during funding campaigns. Despite all this attention, populations of these intelligent apes continue to decline. At the same time, new research indicates that orangutans may be more resilient than previously thought- for example, orangutans and humans have shared space for over 60,000 years, and now some orangutans are even living in industrial palm oil and forestry plantations! How does this complicate our dominant ideas and assumptions about who orangutans are, and what their relationships to humans is and should be? How should this change what we do to conserve them? These are questions that are relevant to conservation generally as we enter a new epoch of our own creation, the Anthropocene. Orangutans have a lot to teach us about human-wildlife coexistence, and how to accept certain realities of a human-dominated world while still fighting the good fight for nature.

Stephanie Spehar

Presenter Bio: Stephanie is a primatologist and biological anthropologist and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UW Oshkosh. She has chased monkeys (and apes! Which are similar to but different from monkeys! We primatologists are sticklers about taxonomy) across many continents, but currently focuses on orangutans in Indonesian Borneo. Her research attempts to understand how primates respond to different ecological conditions and to human impacts, with the goal of promoting human-wildlife coexistence. In her spare time (ha) she is also heavily involved in sustainability education and research on her campus, and in climate activism with Extinction Rebellion Madison. She is married and has two young daughters (and yes, her experience with primates and human evolution definitely informs her ideas about parenting. She is happy to talk your ear off about this if you’re into it).