Commerce student Matheus Yeo is helping to create art from statistics for the 2012 Sydney Festival. 

As part of his Sydney Festival internship, Matheus analyses everything from customer databases to independent surveys, creating meaningful snippets of information for festival-goers that is published via the Sydney Festival dashboard. The dashboard compiles this amazing array of data into cool infographics and interactive apps, that are constantly updated.

The work has “some relation to statistics and a strong connection to economic principles, but also involves more ‘heart’ than typical statistical roles” he said.

Matheus is part of a dedicated group of Sydney students, staff and alumni working on the Festival. Visit our Sydney Festival website for more information.

In a new development for 2012, University academics will bring a smile to the faces of audiences in the Famous Spiegeltent stage in Sydney's Hyde Park as part of the 'Bright Club'.

Over three consecutive Wednesdays, academics who study areas as diverse as American literature, the breathing habits of insects, consumer marketing and medieval demons will reflect on the funny side of their research and provide nourishment for the mind in an evening where comedy and brains collide.

In the last week of the University’s semester, Bright Club host, TV and radio presenter – and University of Sydney law graduate – James O'Loghlin (pictured) came to the University’s Seymour Centre to meet the participants and offer them some tips on taking the step from the lecture theatre to the stand-up stage.

Check out tonight’s performers!

Need a computer on campus over the break?

Access Labs located within University libraries are available during library opening hours. Fisher Library Access Lab is currently closed for renovation, but alternative computing facilities are available in the Law Library and Wentworth Learning Hub.

In coming months, the Link Access Lab will be permanently closed and replaced with a Learning Hub in the Peter Nichol Russel (PNR) building, which is scheduled to open at the beginning of Semester 1, 2012.

Visit the Student IT website for Access Lab operating hours and staff availability. For information about the Learning Network and new student facilities, please visit the Campus Infrastructure and Services website.

Your 2011 Student Campus Card and travel concession (if eligible) is valid till 31 March 2012.

If you successfully pre-enrolled, you will receive your 2012 Student Campus Card via registered post to your correspondence address by the start of semester.

Remember - If you receive a collection card in your mailbox, go to the post office to collect the card within the nominated timeframe.

Researchers from the School of Molecular Bioscience are seeking people concerned about their take-away food eating habits.

The study will investigate peoples’ attitudes and behaviours towards their take-away food eating habits. To be eligible, you must be working full-time or part-time and aged 18 to 35 years old.

Participation involves completing a questionnaire and participating in a focus group interview about your attitudes, beliefs and behaviours towards buying and eating take-away foods. This should take approximately one hour and you’ll be reimbursed for your time and travel.

Contact Amelia Cook on 9351 4672 for more information.

2011 Access Card discounts are valid until O-Week 2012, starting 29 February, and are accepted at all University of Sydney Union on-campus outlets and partners.

2012 USU membership will be available from O-Week (date may change on decision by the University of Sydney Union Board of Directors).

Four Egyptian muezzins from the mosques of Cairo bring us this remarkable documentary theatre work.

Their livelihoods singing the daily calls to prayer are threatened by a government decision to replace them, and Cairo’s cacophonous soundscape, with a centralised radio version.

The muezzins share their stories, their fervour and their differences in this multimedia insight into the complexities of contemporary Egypt.

Germany’s influential theatre collective Rimini Protokoll works with real people and situations, smashing boundaries between journalism, performance and political action. An outstanding example of their intensely exploratory process, Radio Muezzin has been applauded across Europe.

Performed in Arabic with English supertitles.

Event details
Where: Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, corner City Road and Cleveland Street, Chippendale
When: 8.30pm, 16 January, and 18 to 21 January; 4pm, 21 January
Cost: $45, concession $40

Part of Sydney Festival 2012. Visit the Seymour Centre website for more information.

Once again the award-winning duo crash through all things sensible, with a mad take on the brave new world of cyberspace, that interweb thingo, myface, spacebook and fart-ificial intelligence.

Raucous, slapstick, thoroughly entertaining and interactive, The Listies make adults giggle and kids shriek and squirm. Now the boys go geek, stepping into the virtual World of Wool-craft and Pong computer games, PowerPoint, water pistols and LOLz from the very edge.

It’s the end of sanitised nice kids’ entertainment as we know it!

Event details
When: 10am and 12.30pm until Friday 13 January
Where: York Theatre, Seymour Centre, corner City Road and Cleveland St, Chippendable
Cost: $18

Part of Sydney Festival 2012. Visit the Seymour Centre website for more information

Two musicians take up more than 20 instruments to present Mike Oldfield’s cult classic Tubular Bells in a unique musical – and sometimes acrobatic – performance.

Oldfield’s beautiful and sprawling progressive Celtic-folk-rock opus shot to number one in charts around the world in 1973-74, throwing the young composer into the international spotlight and kick-starting Richard Branson’s Virgin music empire.

Now multi-instrumentalists Daniel Holdsworth and Aidan Roberts have arranged the entire score of Tubular Bells to be played live by just two blokes, bringing the influential masterpiece to life in all its multi-layered madness and subtle beauty.

Event details
Where: Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, corner City Road and Cleveland Street, Chippendale
When: 8.30pm, 10 to 15 January; 5pm, 14 to 15 January
Cost: $30

Part of Sydney Festival 2012. Visit the Seymour Centre website for more information.

Youtopia is an exhibition of the models, prototypes and digital designs from the University’s Master of Architecture students, capturing 30 outrageously theatrical visions.

Australia’s most promising young architectural minds were challenged to design new performance spaces for three Sydney Festival venues: Festival Garden in Hyde Park, the historic Quadrangle at the University of Sydney and the massive Turbine Hall on Cockatoo Island.

Imagine light clouds twinkling to your step in the Quadrangle, a ceiling of shifting musical chairs in the Turbine Hall or the Festival Garden’s totally immersive kaleidoscopic space of reflective multi-coned mirrors.

Event details
When: 11am to 5pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays, 12 to 26 January
Where: Tin Sheds Gallery, Darlington Campus
Cost: Free

Part of Sydney Festival 2012. See more information.