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Think TED talks with beer. Discovery Channel meets Drunk History.

Be there AND be square!

Speakers

"Google Knows You Better Than Your Mum: The A to Z of How We Search"
by Michaela Laubscher

Ever wondered why two people typing the exact same thing into Google get completely different results? Michaela takes the audience on an A to Z tour of search behaviour — the psychology, data, and quirks behind what we search for and why — with a few live, interactive searches to prove her points.

Michaela Laubscher has spent the better part of two decades inside the search engines most people only think about when something goes wrong. She's the Organic Search Lead at Adenium, runs her own consultancy Altitude Search, and teaches SEO Strategy at NZIE — meaning she's spent thousands of hours explaining to very confused humans why Google does what it does. She also founded the Search Marketing Network NZ, mostly so she'd have people to talk shop with who don't glaze over at the word "algorithm."

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"Soft Tissue, Hard Evidence?"
by Dr Pav Devananthan

The dead tell no tales, but what of their organs? Pav will share how he spent his PhD professionally squishing and twisting organ tissues to investigate whether changes in their stiffness could help forensic investigators determine how long someone has been dead.

Dr Pav Devananthan is a researcher and senior teaching assistant at the University of Canterbury. His PhD investigated whether the stiffness of organs could help estimate time since death, requiring him to handle more brains, livers, and kidneys than most people encounter in a lifetime. Somehow, this was both perfectly legal and a legitimate contribution to forensic science.

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"It’s all in the (phonetic) detail: what small variations in speech sounds tell us about languages and their speakers"
by Dr Kirsten Culhane

There are lots of small variations in speech sounds that listeners are not necessarily aware of. In this talk, Kirsten will dive into what acoustic variation tells us about what is going on in the minds of speakers and how languages change over time.

Dr Kirsten Culhane is a postdoctoral researcher at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour. She studies how acoustic variation in speech sounds, especially from lesser studied languages, informs us about language structure.

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Contact the host of Nerd Nite ChCh #44: Searching for Hidden Clues and Acoustic Cues