What's On at UWA

"The Irish Catholic Community and the State in the 19th Century: Setting the Scene"

Professor Oliver Rafferty SJ, the 2012 St Thomas More College Chair of Jesuit Studies, will present the first in a series of six lectures on nineteenth century Irish history.

The Chair of Jesuit Studies is jointly recognised by the the University of Western Australia and the University of Notre Dame Australia, and aims to bring a leading academic from the worldwide Jesuit community to Perth each year.

Professor Rafferty is visiting from Heythrop College, University of London, where he specialises in Irish and Ecclesiastical history. He will present the remaining five seminars in the same locations, and at the same time, on Fridays 17th and 24th August, and Fridays 7th, 14th, and 21st September.

Glowing plants, drug-delivering artificial cells, smell-changing bacteria, propelling mouse tissues… Today, new kinds of biological designs are increasingly gaining public awareness and shifting biological imagination towards new horizons. Next to scientists and engineers, do-it-yourself biologists are claiming crucial roles as the hackers, artists, designers, cultural theorists, and entrepreneurs of the biophilic era. As Synthetic Biology is becoming the go-to-discipline to those who are interested in the biochemical design space, engineering principles become the driving force behind designed biologies.

But what do we mean by “design” when we talk about biological design?

In this two-part talk, Orkan Telhan will trace the long history of biological design rather quickly through a series of designed and commercialized biological artifacts and offer a more discursive view on the evolution of the biologically designable beyond specific disciplinary agendas. Secondly, Telhan will reflect on the outcomes of his research residency at SymbioticA and briefly discuss his current project on “Biosynthesis and the Futures of Sandalwood.”

Current SymbioticA resident Orkan Telhan is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and researcher whose investigations focus on the design of interrogative objects, interfaces, and media, engaging with critical issues in social, cultural, and environmental responsibility. Telhan is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts - Emerging Design Practices at University of Pennsylvania, School of Design. Telhan is working towards his PhD in Design and Computation at MIT School of Architecture and Planning. He was part of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory. He studied Media Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo and theories of media and representation, visual studies and graphic design at Bilkent University, Ankara. Telhan's individual and collaborative work has been exhibited in a number of venues including Ars Electronica, ISEA, LABoral, Archilab, Architectural Association, Architectural League/ NYC, and the MIT Museum.

The Class of 1992 will be celebrating their 20th Year Medical School Reunion at The University Club on Saturday the 11th of August 2012 from 7pm to 11pm. This affair will be a cocktail event with tickets costing $100 per person.

UWA opens up the whole campus to the public.

Come and find out about the courses on offer, career options, scholarship opportunities, our valuable research, community programs and facilities.

There's also residential college tours, hands-on activities, live music and entertainment, and plenty of fun activities for the whole family.

As part of National Science Week, the Science Library is once again hosting the SCINEMA Film Festival

Two collections of short films on selected topics will be screened in the Science Library Foyer during Open Day, and they are as follows:

11:00am - 12:45pm - ‘A Climate for change’

12:50pm - 3:00pm - ‘Space & Astronomy’

Entry to enjoy these two collections of films is free, so come along and enjoy!

The overall aim of Professor Harding research programme is to focus on how the timing and duration of social exposures are related to ethnic differences in health and health related behaviours over the life course. Professor Harding established the first large scale cohort study of ethnic minority children in the UK, designed to examine the contribution of social, biological and economic influences on health. The Determinants in Adolescent Social well-being and Health (DASH) study has created a unique longitudinal social-epidemiological resource that can be used to examine ethnic specific effects, particularly in relation to the effects of deprivation and family life on cardiovascular, mental and respiratory health. About 6,000 children aged 11-13y took part in the baseline survey in 2002/3, 80% of whom are ethnic minorities.

For Blue Stockings Week this year (13-17 August), the Berndt Museum is presenting a panel discussion on the important role of women within the UWA Cultural Precinct. Blue Stockings Week is a commemoration of the Blue Stockings Society, an 18th century club for 'clever ladies and their gentlemen friends'. The club encouraged women to discuss intellectual topics over a cup of tea, thereby bucking the trend of succumbing to the frivolous topics and endeavours expected of women during that time. The name emerged from the habit of dressing down during the club's meetings, whereby the women wore blue woolen legwear, as opposed to the silk stockings traditional to evening meetings.

The panel will consist of Emeritus Professor Margaret Seares AO, Professor Sandy Toussaint and Curator Lee Kinsella.

A public lecture and performance by Julianne Baird, Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University and Internationally Acclaimed Early Music Scholar-Performer.

What can we learn from Shakespeare’s use of music and from musical references in his plays? In this lecture-performance, renowned soprano Julianne Baird will discuss and perform music from Elizabethan and Jacobean times conceived for performance in the plays of the great Bard. William Shakespeare alludes to or includes the texts of well over 160 songs in his plays.

Music in Shakespeare’s time ran the gamut of lute songs by the famous contrapuntalist, John Dowland, madrigals and fa la’s (ballets) by Morely and, of course, the great polyphonies and verse anthems by William Byrd. But extant Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre music is much more simple and vivid, often almost ballad-like in style and the playwright seems to have had a genuine fondness for honest English popular and traditional songs. The poignancy of having Desdemona sing the Willow Song in her fatal hour shows his full commitment to music’s emotional power.

The audience of Shakespeare’s time would have expected each drama to have included at least one song per play, (with the exception of tragedies which usually contained only the heraldic and militaristic sounds of trumpets and drums.)

Not only are the musical references far more numerous, but Shakespeare defied this orthodoxy and wrote poetry for the tragedies which movingly uses musical reference as dramatic device.

Among the Elizabethan pieces performed at the lecture-recital will be “The Willow Song”, “Farewell Dear Heart” “O Mistriss Mine”, and “Ah Robyn, Gentil Robyn.” A number of pieces written for the Jacobean revivals of Shakespeare’s plays composers John Wilson and Robert Johnson will also be discussed and performed.

Cost: free, however RSVP is essential to [email protected] or 6488 1340.

French-British Rivalry in the Southern Oceans

Australia was very nearly a nation divided, like Canada, with two languages and cultures, nevertheless Australian history books neglected these early chapters of our nation’s history for almost two centuries.

In a strategic battle with her rival across the English Channel in the 18th and early 19th centuries, France sent numerous scientific and commercial expeditions to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, attempting to solve the mysteries of the legendary Terra Australis Incognita, and hoping to locate suitable ports for commercial ventures below the Equator. However, because of shipwreck or illness, many French captains and officers perished, and could not report their exciting discoveries directly to their King or Emperor. With the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and its subsequent mayhem meant that France was not politically or financially stable enough to develop colonies in the southern oceans until the mid 19th century.

Therefore France, despite having claimed the western side of this country, and making many thousands of important scientific discoveries in this region, eventually withdrew from Australia, allowing the British carte blanche to develop this nation and effectively block the French from both Australia and New Zealand.

Noelene Bloomfield, BA (Hons), MA, CertT, Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, who is currently a Research Fellow in European Languages and Studies at The University of Western Australia, taught French in NSW before lecturing at the University of Oregon in the USA in the 1960s. She then joined the staff of French Studies at The University of Western Australia, from 1968 till 2002.

Noelene has published a textbook entitled Voyage de Découverte and produced a DVD and a CD-ROM on the extensive French exploration in Australian waters. She also created an exhibition entitled A French Australia? Almost!, which was displayed in Australia and overseas, including a French version currently touring in France. Last year Noelene co-authored a book on the first 100 years of the Alliance Française association in Perth, Western Australia. Her forthcoming book, entitled Almost a French Australia: French-British Rivalry in the Southern Oceans, will be released by Halstead Press in September this year.

Free parking is available via Entrance 1, Car Park No.3.

If glass door is unmanned, please enter via spiral staircase to 1st floor, then go down the stairs to the ground floor meeting room.

Refreshments 7:00pm, Presentation at 7:30pm

Member: Free, Non Members $5 donation

The Graduate School of Education invites you to participate in this inaugural Seminar Series.

With a focus on sharing personal insights into timely and relevant topics in education research, these seminars will engage participants in a lively discussion of some of the pressing issues affecting Australia’s academics, schools and society today.

Speakers and topics for 2012

15 August

Winthrop Professor Grady Venville

“Choosing science comes more from the heart than from the brain (or the pocket)”: A retrospective study of why scientists chose to study science.”

26 September

Winthrop Professor Stephen Houghton

“Are the seeds of antisociality and psychopathic traits sown early in life?”

10 October

Winthrop Professor and Chapple Chair David Andrich

“Sliding Doors in Academe: Idiosyncrasies of autobiography and controversy in psychometrics”

31 October

Winthrop Professor and Faculty Dean Helen Wildy

“NAPLAN Data: Improving student learning OR doing the work of the Devil?”

14 November

Winthrop Professor Thomas O’Donoghue

The primary school’s invasion of the privacy of the child: Unmasking the potential of some current practices

Venue Details

RSVP to Ms. Alyce Green, Administrative Assistant, GSE [email protected]

Abstracts and additional details will be distributed closer to the event date.

Regulation of the utility industries is relatively new in Western Australia. The Economic Regulation Authority was established to licence, monitor and set customer protection standards across the utility industries, particularly water, gas and electricity. In addition, the Authority determines arrangements for access to key gas, electricity and rail assets in Western Australia. The presentation will cover the work of the Authority with particular emphasis on the licensing, monitoring and customer protection functions of the Authority, how they operate and opportunities for the private sector in these industries.

There will be a particular focus on the Water Sector.

Bio,

Paul has had 25 years experience at Senior and Senior Executive levels in the Public Sector with extensive experience in :

* the development of high level government policy;

* the negotiation of State/Commonwealth Agreements;

* advice to senior levels of government;

* public administration and regulation.

He was responsible for major State wide reforms in purchasing and contracting of services for Government in the human services industry involving over 600 contracts totalling $42m.

He was previously Executive Director of the Office of Water Regulation in Western Australia, responsible for the establishment of a state wide licensing regime for Water Service Providers and reported to Government on the operations and performance of the water industry. Paul is currently Executive Director of the Economic Regulation Authority.

The Authority was established in 2004 as an independent entity to regulate the Water, Gas, Electricity and Rail industries in Western Australia. Its functions include licensing, monitoring and setting customer protection standards of utility service providers as well as determining access arrangements to infrastructure in the electricity, gas and rail industries. In addition to these roles the Authority can be requested to provide independent advice to Government.

PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

****All Welcome****

A public lecture by Dale Jamieson, Director of Environmental Studies, New York University.

Climate change presents us with problems of utmost complexity. In particular, climate change poses the largest-scale and most difficult collective action problem that humanity has ever faced. Considerations ranging from our biological nature to facts about our political institutions all bear on the explanation of why we have failed to act.In the face of such problems, two broad families of considerations are sometimes effective in motivating action. Economics can sometimes succeed in showing that particular solutions appeal to our interests. Ethics can sometimes show that particular responses accord with our moral ideals. Economics is severely limited in demonstrating that aggressive responses to climate change are in our interests because it is permeated with ethical considerations. Our hope for motivating action on climate change must therefore to a great extent turn on ethical concerns.

In this lecture Dr Jamieson will explain why this hope largely has been disappointed. Just as the problems of climate change overwhelm our cognitive and affective systems, and our ability to do reliable economic calculations, so they also swamp the machinery of morality, at least as it currently manifests in our moral consciousness.

The choice we face is whether to remain complacent in the face climate change, or undertake the challenge of revising our morality.

Cost: Free, RSVP your attendance to [email protected] .

This lecture is a part of the Institute of Advanced Studies 2012 lecture series ‘Global Transformation and Public Ethics’. This series of free public lectures aims to stimulate considered debate about urgent issues in public ethics and policy as well as reflecting on ways we can improve public discourse about such issues.

Unfortunately this event has been cancelled.



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We propose an approximation to the moments of a spatial point process of Gibbs type. In the examples studied, the approximation is accurate, and fast to compute. This has important implications for data analysis and statistical inference for spatial data.[This is joint work with Gopalan Nair] All are welcome to attend the seminar No RSVP required.

A public lecture by Sally Young, Associate Professor and Reader, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.

For those who work in the news media, power is usually viewed as something that happens outside of the walls of their media organisation. “We scrutinise power,” journalists and news media organisations frequently proclaim, but there is a strange failure to recognise that the media, as a collective, are just as influential (and arguably, much more so) than the hundreds of individual politicians sitting in parliaments across Australia. And, while politicians are elected, regularly scrutinised by journalists (and others) and held to account at the ballot box at elections, none of these mechanisms apply to media organisations or to their reporters.

In Australia today, we know quite a lot about politicians and how they govern but we still know worryingly little about the media and how they operate. In this lecture, Dr Young will argue that this is an urgent problem and that, of all the much-lamented problems with media reporting, the biggest is that the media do a poor job of scrutinising and reporting on their own role. She will look at this in terms of an interesting paradox. How is it that news journalism in Australia is said to currently be in ‘crisis’ - with declining revenues/ratings, job losses and a broken business model – yet, as a collective, the Australian media remain so powerful?

Cost: This is a free public lecture, RSVP to [email protected].

This week's introit is a preview of the "Earthquake" Mass by Antoine Brumel, a full performance of which will take place on September 13th at St George's, and again alongside Louis Vierne's Symphony No 6 for organ, September 23rd at St Patrick’s Basilica Fremantle.

Introit: Brumel Agnus Dei (from Et ecce terrae motus)

Responses: Rose

Canticles: Pinel Magnificat

Gregorian Chant Nunc Dimittis for Candlemas

Anthem: J. S. Bach Jesu, joy of man’s desiring

Hymn: Praise to the Holiest in the Height

This talk will explore the varied, surprising, and persistent afterlife of the Middle Ages in Australian culture. As the late eighteenth century was the foundational period of British settlement in the Australian colonies, High Enlightenment ideals have had an indisputable impact on Australian public life. Yet the story is not so simple. A growing recognition of the greater complexity of colonial Australia’s relationship with the European past has led to a more nuanced account of its distinctive engagement with a cultural legacy stretching back to the medieval period. A picture is now emerging of a colonial culture in which medievalism — the creative modern response to the Middle Ages and adaptation of medieval concepts — has existed as a major aesthetic and cultural presence in Australian literature, architecture, political ceremony, theatre,art, and even sport. This thriving but often unacknowledged subculture, with its preoccupations with either romance and chivalry and folklore, or irrationality, disorder, and Gothic gloom, has been far more formative of settler Australia’s cultural identity than has been recognized. Looking at examples from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this talk will explore just some of the large body of medievalism Australia has produced, and will discuss some of the ways we can understand its highly localized interpretations of medieval motifs, narrative forms, legends, and personages.

The conference explores cultural appropriations in, by and of the medieval and early modern world, across a range of disciplines. The three main sub-themes are: 1. the appropriation of earlier cultures by the medieval or early modern world; 2. cultural exchanges and frontier encounters within the medieval and early modern world; and 3. the reception or appropriation of the medieval or early modern by later periods. Those interested can register online at http://www.pmrg.arts.uwa.edu.au/2012_conference or pay at the door.

"The Catholic Church and the Union"

Professor Oliver Rafferty SJ, the 2012 St Thomas More College Chair of Jesuit Studies, will present the second in a series of six lectures on nineteenth century Irish history.

The Chair of Jesuit Studies is jointly recognised by the the University of Western Australia and the University of Notre Dame Australia, and aims to bring a leading academic from the worldwide Jesuit community to Perth each year.

Professor Rafferty is visiting from Heythrop College, University of London, where he specialises in Irish and Ecclesiastical history. He will present the remaining four seminars in the same locations, and at the same time, on Friday 24th August, and Fridays 7th, 14th, and 21st September.