Alice Richardson

What has more people than a netball team but fewer than a cricket team? The nine authors of "Sustainable Language Support Practices in Science Education"! The book was launched at the ANU Co-op Bookshop on Wednesday 14 December 2011. Three of the authors, Brett Lidbury, ALice Richardson and Felicia Zhang were joined there by the writer of the boook's foreword, Trevor Anderson of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Anecdotes of the inception of the book were shared, and the importance of its content to universities and secondary schools was expounded. We thoroughly recommend it!

I've been watching some excellent BBC documentaries about maths and stats recently, including

The Joy of Stats, a one-hour general show presented by Hans Rosling.

The Story of Mathematics, 4 one-hour history shows presented by Marcus du Sautoy.

Here's a really cool-sounding project, that I read about in the newsletter of the Royal Statistical Society. Mathematics to the Limit is the working title of a proposaed museum / exploratorium of mathematics in the UK. An initial fund-raising event is planned for 26 January in London involving Marcus du Sautoy, Chris Budd and Charles Clarke. Contact Margaret Brown (margaret.brown@ kcl.ac.uk). I hope it is very successful!

I attended one day of the AMATA conference at the Shine Dome on 11 October.
The data handling and analysis talks raised lots of interesting questions for the new research cluster at the University of Canbera, IMADI, to consider. AMATA stands for Australasian Microarray and Associatd Technologies Association. IMADI stands for Information mdelling and Data Interpretation.

The Alternatives to Animal Research through Bioinformatics group (AARB) held its first full grop meeting on Friday 16 September. The group's website is http://jcsmr.anu.edu.au/research/genome-biology/alternatives-to-animal-research-through-bioinformatics.
Two current PhD students and one just-completed Masters student spoke about their projects and I gave a talk entitled Plans for Pattern Recognition. Wish us luck as we continue to grow, attract students and spread the good word about in silico experiments as opposed to in vivo!

no capital letters for a few weeks – left wrist broken in an ice skating accident!
 

I contributed a chapter on the use of clickers in a first statistics course to this book. Click here to access the website for the book.

Pi Day is celebrated in the Southern Hemisphere on July 22 (i.e. 22/7, a well-known approximation to the value of pi). In the Faculty of ISE I organised a talk by John Rayner, Adjunct Professor in the Faculty and member of the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at ANU. He spoke about the history of measuring the value of pi, and even offered attendess the chance to estimate the value themselves by Buffon's needle method. About 30 people attendedd the lively present5atin, including an eight-year old who was able to recite pi to 102 decimal places! Morning tea was pi-themed too, incluidng pine nuts, meat pies and pineapple. The event was advertised in the Canberra Times and Andrea Close interviewed John on 666 ABC on the morning of the talk.

The University of the Sunshine Coast runs an Open Learning and Teaching Grant Program. Three statistics lecturers, from USC, UC and USQ won a $6000 grant to research the use of Votapedia in statistics lectures. We met for three days in July to discuss results, write papers and apply for funds to further the research. I also gave a talk on "experiences using clickers in a first statistics course".

The Australian Society for Medical Research ran a New Investigator Forum at ANU on Thursday 9 June. One of my PhD students, Guifang Shang, presented a poster on "Correlation and prediction between hepatitis B DNA and other pathology data in Shenzhen, China using data mining".