The Bascom Palmer Aesthetic Center will hold a special skin care beauty event for all employees, their families, and friends on Wednesday, December 1 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, third-floor, on the Miller School of Medicine campus. All skin care products will be 40 percent off. Latisse eyelash solution will be offered for $99, and injectable treatments, including fillers and Botox/Dysport, will be 20 percent off. Additional rebates will be available on selected fillers and Dysport. For treatment appointments, call 305-243-FACE.

Cattle Herder's Hat, collected between 1960-1973. Gift of Professor and Mrs. Robert R. Ferens.

Some never before seen works are on exhibit as part of “Useable Art: African Aesthetics in Daily Life from the UM Lowe Art Museum.” Most African art serves a function—spiritual if not utilitarian, or often both. This exhibition consists of objects that provide some purpose of daily living that can be relatively easily recognized by non-Africans. They can also be appreciated for the appeal of their forms, the beauty of their patterns, and the quality of craftsmanship.

The works are on view through Sunday, January 16, 2011, with the curator’s lecture also taking place on January 16 at 2 pm at the Lowe.

The Lowe’s extensive holdings of African art include not only ceremonial masks and ritual figures but also many objects made for use in daily life. This exhibition will showcase a selection of the finest containers, textiles, tools, home furnishings, and other useful objects—very few of which have ever been displayed.

“Usable Art” is organized by the Lowe Art Museum and is sponsored in part by The State of Florida and the African Art Endowment.

The Lowe Art Museum is located on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus at 1301 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables. Gallery and Museum Store hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday 12 to 4 p.m.; Closed Monday. Regular Admission (not including special events) is $10; $5 for seniors and non-UM students; free for Lowe Art Museum members, University of Miami students, faculty and staff, and children under 12. For more information, call 305-284-3535 or visit www.lowemuseum.org.

The University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences will take part in Art Miami with student works to be displayed at the premier fair, which takes place from December 1 to 5.

“This is our second year participating at the art fair and displaying student work there,” said Lise Drost, professor and chair of UM’s Department of Art and Art History. “We recognize the importance of showcasing new talent as does Art Miami. It has led to sales of student work and other show opportunities for them.”

Art Miami takes place in the Miami Midtown Arts District with thousands of collectors, dealers, curators, and artists. Distinguished for its diversity and quality, it showcases the best in modern and contemporary art from 100 international art galleries and prominent art institutions.

For more information, call 305-284-2542 or e-mail [email protected].

The Instructional Advancement Center will host a MATLAB presentation on Wednesday, December 1 in the Richter Library, Room 344.

Session I, Data Analysis, will be held from 8:45 to 11:30 a.m. and will cover: accessing data from many sources, including different file formats; visualizing and analyzing data; sharing results; creating reports; building and deploying GUI-based applications; and parallel computing.

Session II, Data Acquisition and Import, from 1:15 to 3:30 p.m., will cover: supported file types; importing data from Excel; connectivity to databases; sequence analysis; connectivity to different data sources; microarray and mass spectrometry; advanced topics-graph theory, gene ontology, and machine learning; modeling and simulating biochemical pathways; and advanced analysis tasks such as parameter estimation and sensitivity analysis.

The MATLAB event will be hosted by Saket Kharsikar of MathWorks and Bill Vilberg of the Instructional Advancement Center. To register, visit www.iacmiami.org.

Ying Li, assistant scientist in the Department of Ophthalmology at the Miller School of Medicine, will present “Automatic Algorithm for Montage of OCT Fundus Images—Suture of Retinal Images” on Wednesday, December 1 at 12 p.m. at the McKnight Vision Research Center, first-floor conference room. For more information, contact Jeanne Raymond at 305-482-4541 or [email protected].