What's On at UWA

One of the best strategies for long-term management and potential in situ remediation of bauxite residue held in storage facilities globally is through vegetation establishment (often termed phytostabilisation). Sustainable vegetation growth on bauxite processing residues involves the reconstruction of an entire ecosystem and is dependent on the development of functional communities both above- and below-ground.

There are many constraints to plant growth on bauxite residues that must be overcome; including poor physical structure, high alkalinity, sodicity and salinity coupled with a lack of organic matter, mineral nutrients and microorganisms. However, there are significant knowledge gaps concerning below-ground microbial community development, which is necessary to drive microbially-mediated organic matter turnover and nutrient cycling for long-term rehabilitation success.

This talk will focus on research findings regarding microbial community succession and the identification of microbial constraints to rehabilitation of bauxite residue storage areas in Western Australia.

Short Biography:

Natasha has a background in Environmental Microbiology and graduated from The University of Western Australia with a PhD in 2003. After a post-doctoral position at Cardiff University in Wales, she returned to the UWA to join the Soil Biology and Molecular Ecology Group nearly 10 years ago.

During this time she focussed on her research efforts in the field of restoration ecology and predominantly on rehabilitation systems associated with bauxite mining and refining, which is a significant industry in Western Australia.

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

****All Welcome****

This seminar will explore current developments in offshore petroleum safety regulation.

Professor John Paterson will discuss developments in the UK and EU and their implications for global safety regulation. Professor Paterson is a leading expert on the regulation of safety in offshore petroleum. He is the author of Behind the Mask: Regulating Health and Safety in Britain's Offshore Oil and Gas Industry. He will be joined by Professor John Chandler and Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz and a panel of industry experts.

“Pure junkyard genius.” Sydney Morning Herald

Get up-close in the intimate Dolphin Theatre to enjoy wacky contraptions, gutsy clowning, eccentric circus and puppetry in a quirky story of finding one’s place.

Jens shows how even the simplest tasks can be so much more fun if you make it really complicated!

If you like your LEGO or love to make crazy machines, Squaring The Wheel won’t just be fun, it’ll be an inspiration!

“A comical visual feast which simply has to be seen to be believed.” Artshub ****

2013 Adelaide Fringe Award Best Presentation for Children

Best for children aged 5 and over.

Tickets available from ticketsWA.com

16s and under: $20, Adults $25

Groups of 4 or more, Adults go for $20.

SCHOOL BOOKINGS: Call the Enquiry Line 08 6488 2440 (noon-4pm, weekdays) or email [email protected] to get significant ticket savings for children and free teacher tickets for every 10 children.

Join Simone Lazaroo on the release of her new novel, Lost River, at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery on Friday 4 July 2014 at 5.30pm.

Lazaroo will speak about the themes of dislocation, love and loss, and the connections between Australian and South-East Asian lives that she continues to explore in her writing. Book sales and signing will follow.

Simone Lazaroo is a three-time winner of the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Fiction. Lost River is her fifth novel.

This event is FREE to attend courtesy of UWA Publishing and the UWA Cultural Precinct. RSVP required.

“Pure junkyard genius.” Sydney Morning Herald

Get up-close in the intimate Dolphin Theatre to enjoy wacky contraptions, gutsy clowning, eccentric circus and puppetry in a quirky story of finding one’s place.

Jens shows how even the simplest tasks can be so much more fun if you make it really complicated!

If you like your LEGO or love to make crazy machines, Squaring The Wheel won’t just be fun, it’ll be an inspiration!

“A comical visual feast which simply has to be seen to be believed.” Artshub ****

2013 Adelaide Fringe Award Best Presentation for Children

Best for children aged 5 and over.

Tickets available from ticketsWA.com

16s and under: $20, Adults $25

Groups of 4 or more, Adults go for $20.

SCHOOL BOOKINGS: Call the Enquiry Line 08 6488 2440 (noon-4pm, weekdays) or email [email protected] to get significant ticket savings for children and free teacher tickets for every 10 children.

“Pure junkyard genius.” Sydney Morning Herald

Get up-close in the intimate Dolphin Theatre to enjoy wacky contraptions, gutsy clowning, eccentric circus and puppetry in a quirky story of finding one’s place.

Jens shows how even the simplest tasks can be so much more fun if you make it really complicated!

If you like your LEGO or love to make crazy machines, Squaring The Wheel won’t just be fun, it’ll be an inspiration!

“A comical visual feast which simply has to be seen to be believed.” Artshub ****

2013 Adelaide Fringe Award Best Presentation for Children

Best for children aged 5 and over.

Tickets available from ticketsWA.com

16s and under: $20, Adults $25

Groups of 4 or more, Adults go for $20.

SCHOOL BOOKINGS: Call the Enquiry Line 08 6488 2440 (noon-4pm, weekdays) or email [email protected] to get significant ticket savings for children and free teacher tickets for every 10 children.

The Prospective Students Office invites future students and their families to join us on a guided tour of UWA's stunning Crawley campus.

You will have the opportunity to explore our beautiful grounds and heritage buildings while learning more about the University, our courses and admission requirements.

The tour runs for about an hour, and ends at the Admissions Centre and Prospective Students Office, where you will be able to collect course information booklets and other brochures.

This tour will be held during the first week of the July school holidays.

Online registrations will open in early February via the website mentioned below.

Please note: tours are not intended for the general public.

A public lecture by Congrong Dai, Fudan University, Shanghai and Chinese translator of 'Finnegans Wake'.

A fertile ground is needed for a work to be translated and accepted in the target culture, which entails an in depth understanding of the cultural and ideological background of the translated work. The purpose of this talk is to discuss the linguistic and textual challenges involved in the translation of 'Finnegans Wake' into a distinct language and culture, i.e. contemporary Mandarin Chinese. The linguistic innovation and the narrative experimentation in 'Finnegans Wake' were largely unknown to the literary tradition in contemporary China, which made it hard to be understood and accepted fully by the Chinese audience. However, such works, when translated, could help disseminate new ideas and advance the understanding of the foreign culture by the target culture, this is the case of the Chinese translation of 'Finnegans Wake'.

The Chinese translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses 20 years ago, just like the translation of 'Finnegans Wake', was first regarded as difficult and obscure for the target audience, however it ultimately became a best-seller. The translation of Ulysses helped Chinese readers to develop an understanding and appreciation of Irish culture, as well as inspiring a group of Chinese scholars and writers an insight into Irish culture. The enhancement of understanding of the Irish culture in China, as facilitated by the Chinese translation of 'Finnegans Wake' draws upon successful earlier translations. Experimental literary translation can bring down the barriers between different peoples and advances the communication between them.

Cost: Free, but RSVP required to http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/conf/asiascapes

David Hawkes (former ABC Broadcaster) will give a talk titled 'Surviving on Air'

Members:Free. Non-Members $5 donation

The Cardiovascular Research group at the School of Sport Science, Exercise Health at UWA are primarily interested in the beneficial effects of exercise and physical activity on cardiovascular health.

In peripheral arteries, it is known that episodic increases in blood flow induced by exercise are responsible for improvement in arterial function and health. Regular exercise also induces recurrent increases in brain blood flow, however it is unknown whether cerebrovascular benefits as a result of exercise training (improved cognitive function, decreased risk of stroke, dementia), particularly in the elderly, is due to the same action of repeated increases in blood flow through the arteries in the brain.

This is now a major point of interest for our research group. This talk will focus on recent studies from our laboratory that have investigated the effect of water immersion at rest and during exercise on brain blood flow and cardiovascular variables.

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

****All Welcome****

News media often portray Canadian Muslim youth as alienated from society and prone to radicalisation. This lecture focuses on a more complex reality of alienation and engagement, seen through the lens of perceptions of political participation. Using qualitative interview data from 30 Muslim youth in the Greater Toronto Area and London, Ontario, the findings demonstrate a similar pattern to other Canadian youth with respect to political participation, but surprisingly with very high participation rates in the voluntary sector.

Katherine Bullock is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto at Mississauga. She sits on the boards of The Tessellate Institute and the North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies. She is also President of Compass Books, dedicated to publishing top-quality books about Islam and Muslims in English. Her teaching focus is political Islam and her research focuses on Muslims in Canada, debates on the veil, and media representations of Islam and Muslims. Originally from Perth, she lives in Oakville, Canada with her husband and children. She embraced Islam in 1994.

In the past months there have been several claims about the declining figures in the public transport patronage. This seminar envisages analysing public transport trends over the last decade using Perth Transport Authority (PTA) datasets. Through this analysis, the aim is to determine the validity of the assertion that train patronage is declining. The results were published in the first “PATREC Perspective” in June 2014.

Firstly, the success story of bus, train and ferry patronage in metropolitan Perth is considered. The figures are compared to other Australian metropolitan regions and, in addition, are shown in the most dis-aggregated scale available (per individual train line). In addition, a correlation is made between population change and patronage expansion, showing that in the metropolitan region of Perth train patronage has been dependant on population growth.

Secondly, a particular analysis is devoted to the drop in train patronage in 2013, in general and on specific train lines. This drop was mainly caused by the shutdowns of parts of the network for a few days due to the sinking of the Fremantle line at Perth Central Station in both mid-July and early August 2013. Our main conclusion in this analysis is that passengers seem to have returned to the train after the disruption, contrary to several alarmist views that were raised in the public arena.

Some research orientations are offered at the end of the seminar as a way of engaging in further discussion. One of the suggestions is that the 2014 datasets need to be monitored carefully, so we may better understand whether the levels of the railway system patronage decrease, remain stable or if they accordingly perform to the previous years’ figures from 2008 to 2012.

Bio,

Valerià Paül is currently a Research Development Officer at the Planning and Transport Research Centre (PATREC) and Assistant Professor at The University of Western Australia.

Graduated in Geography (University of Barcelona, 2001), with Honours, University of Barcelona Special Award for Bachelor Studies (2002) and 1st National End of University Studies Award (2002), conferred by the Spanish Ministry of Education.

Did his PhD (2006), University of Barcelona Special Award for Doctoral Studies (2007). Doctoral thesis title: The Planning of Metropolitan Agricultural Spaces. Strategies, Management and Land-Use Conflicts in the Barcelona Region. He has benefited from research periods at six universities: Zululand (South Africa) in 2002; Western Australia (Australia) in 2003; Toulouse-2 (France) in 2005; Girona (Spain) in 2009; and Curtin (Australia) in 2010; Toulouse-2 (France) in 2012.

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

****All Welcome****

Professor Knight has published over 110 papers and 4300+ citations and a H-index = 36, and is focused on his research interests of pulmonary pharmacology and pathology and how they impact on airway and lung function.

The Pop West research project will analyse a range of popular media–film, music, radio, television, storytelling, maps and novels–to explore how different political formations come to popularise and understand their own wests.

The Pop West Project began in late 2013 when researchers from The University of Western Australia and the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney began discussing the role that popular culture plays in our understanding of political geography. In 2014, the newly-established Perth USAsia Centre provided seed-funding to propel this exciting new research inquiry.

On Thursday 24 and Friday 25 July, UWA will host a series of panel papers and lectures on the issue of how political geographies are mediated by the popular imagination. The symposium offers a special triangulation of Australian, Chinese and American wests, suggesting that the west is a migrating geographic and cultural concept.

The Pop West Symposium is open to the public. If you'd like to attend the opening lecture (Thursday 24 July) or the Symposium (Friday 25 July), please RSVP by emailing [email protected]

The Institute of Advanced Studies is pleased to be a co-sponsor of a series of events as part of the 'Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul' exhibition, presented by the WA Museum.

This lecture by Professor William Maley, AM FASSA, Professor and Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University is the first of this series.

Afghanistan has long been famous for its rich material culture, a product of its history as a crossroads of diverse civilisations. Its diverse cultural norms have also long been recognised by researchers, although perhaps less by those responsible for popular images of what Afghanistan is like. What is arguably less appreciated is that it is currently undergoing a phase of very rapid sociocultural change, casting doubt on some of the simple verities that have often underpinned such images.

In this lecture, Professor William Maley will explore how forces of globalisation are generating patterns of modernisation very different from the ideologically-driven modernisation promoted by Marxist activists after the April 1978 communist coup, and will argue that these are likely to be the most durable legacy of the years since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001.

Dr William Maley has served as a Visiting Professor at the Russian Diplomatic Academy, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Refugee Studies Programme at Oxford University. He is a member of the Australian Chapter of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP). A regular visitor to Afghanistan, he is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co., 2006), and The Afghanistan Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; 2009); co-authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), and Political Order in Post-Communist Afghanistan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992).

Attendees at this lecture will receive a discount voucher for admission to the exhibition.

COST: FREE, but RSVP essential to http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/afghanistan

Winthrop Professor Ted Snell, Director of the UWA Cultural Precinct, invites you to the Dr Harold Schenberg Art Centre, UWA for the opening of three new exhibitions - HERE&NOW14, Glitter: Pat Larter vs Lola Ryan and Wildflower Dreaming.

To attend, RSVP via email ([email protected]) or 6488 3707. Light refreshments will be served. For more information on the exhibitions, visit the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery website - www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au

On 22 July, Indonesia's national election commission announced Joko Widodo as the winner of the 2014 presidential election. He defeated former army general Prabowo Subianto by a slim margin of about 8.4 million votes. The Perth USAsia Centre is proud to host an expert panel to discuss the result of the election and the outlook for politics and foreign policy in Southeast Asia's largest democracy.

Expert panellists include:

Winthrop Professor Krishna Sen, The University of Western Australia

Winthrop Professor Krishna Sen, an internationally recognised scholar of contemporary Indonesian and media studies commenced her appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia in January 2009. She has held teaching and research positions at Murdoch and Curtin Universities, and was the Executive Director for Humanities and Creative Arts at the Australian Research Council in Canberra, just prior to taking up her position at UWA. Krishna is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (FAHA), a Member of the Hawke Research Institute Advisory Board, and President and Chair of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH). She serves on the editorial boards of several national and international journals.

Associate Professor David Bourchier, The University of Western Australia

David Bourchier's main interest is in the politics of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He has taught courses on Asian politics and Indonesian language at Flinders University, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Murdoch University. Since 1998 he has been at UWA where he has taught in courses including Contemporary Indonesia , Identity and Politics in Asia and Democratisation in Asia as well as Intermediate, Advanced and Specialist level Indonesian.

David has written on many aspects of Indonesian society and politics, with publications on law, labour, ideology, human rights and the military. Recent publications include "Habibie's Interregnum: Reformasi, Elections, Regionalism and the Struggle for Power" in Chris Manning and Peter van Diermen (eds) Indonesia in Transition: Social Aspects of Reformasi and Crisis (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2000: 15-38); "Conservative Political Ideology In Indonesia: A Fourth Wave?" in Lloyd Grayson and Luke Shannon (eds) Indonesia Today: Challenges of History (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2001); and, together with Hamish McDonald, Desmond Ball, James Dunn, Gerry van Klinken, Douglas Kammen and Richard Tanter, Masters of Terror: Indonesia's Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999 (Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No.145, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 2002). He has also recently completed a major textbook on Indonesian politics, with Vedi Hadiz, titled Indonesian Society and Politics: A Reader (Routledge-Curzon, London and New York, 2003).

Professor Vedi Hadiz, Murdoch University

Vedi Hadiz is a Professor of Asian Societies and Politics at Murdoch University and is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He received his PhD at Murdoch University in 1996 where he was a Research Fellow. In 2000, he became an Associate Professor in Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He is currently conducting research on State, Class and Islamic Populism.

His most recent book is Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (Stanford University Press 2010). He is also the author of Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia (Routledge 1997), and (with Richard Robison) Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets (Routledge Curzon 2004), as well as editor or co-editor of several books, including Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia (Routledge 2006). My articles have appeared in journals such as Development and Change, Journal of Development Studies, Pacific Review, Pacific Affairs, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Democratization, Critical Asian Studies, Indonesia, New Political Economy, and Historical Materialism.

The panel will be moderated by Gordon Flake, CEO of the Perth USAsia Centre.

Please RSVP to [email protected]

A public lecture by Peter Jones, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University College London.

There are growing societal concerns about the health of our seas and increasing interest in the potential of marine protected areas (MPAs) to help address these concerns. However, whilst MPAs are firmly established in theory, they are much less firmly established in reality, as too few MPAs have been designated and many of these lack effectiveness in achieving their conservation objectives. Against this background, this presentation will explore the argument that the key to the resilience is diversity, both of species in ecosystems and incentives in governance systems. It will draw on the findings of 20 marine protected area (MPA) case studies from around the world, employing a novel governance analysis framework to address some key questions: How can top-down and bottom-up approaches to MPA governance be combined? What does this mean, in reality, in different contexts? How can we develop and implement governance approaches that are both effective in achieving conservation objectives and equitable in fairly sharing associated costs and benefits?

The many issues that these questions raise will be explored, as will options for addressing them.

Cost: Free, but RSVP essential to www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/jones

Dr. Meso is a Research Fellow at the Institut de Neurosciences de La Timone, a Laboratory of the CNRS in Marseille, France, which he joined in 2011. He is part of a small team of researchers who probe the mechanisms underlying visual function (specifically dynamics and probabilistic computations) empirically and theoretically in human and non-human primates. He combines an expertise in Psychophysics with eye movement recordings to ask questions about visual motion processing and links the mathematical and computational analysis of the data to the construction of theoretical models of neural processing. Dr. Meso initially studied Physics (BSc, Imperial College London) and Medical Physics (MSc, UCL) before shifting to Visual Neuroscience, combining psychophysics with modelling to study visual motion integration (PhD, Royal Holloway), where his key published contributions outlined the role of edges and other features in perceived speed estimates and transparency perception. Following his PhD, he joined a leading psychophysics lab at McGill University where he published work using psychophysical sensitivity to characterise unseen hierarchical cortical neural mechanisms mainly processing so called second order visual motion stimulation. He continues to study the role of cortical hierarchy in visual processing in his current role, with a largely multi-disciplinary approach in collaborations with Psychologists, Biologists, Engineers and Mathematicians in France and internationally. The interests and collaborations more recently look at the common attributes of dorsal and ventral stream hierarchical processing, thus extending beyond motion processing to symmetry and shape sensitivity.

Abstract:

Perceptual multi-stability occurs when a sensory input has multiple interpretations and the resolution of this ambiguity by the brain results in dynamic shifting between these alternatives. This phenomenon has largely been studied using bi-stable stimuli such as binocular rivalry, ambiguous figures and motion plaids, which alternate between two alternatives in the form ABABA. As such, switches have been proposed to be driven by neural noise and adaptation - served by mutual inhibition between the representations of the alternatives. In our work, we seek to further characterise the role of these driving mechanisms using a tri-stable barberpole motion stimulus in which the presence of three alternatives, ABC, means that at each perceptual transition, two choices are possible instead of only one, so we can study the changing probabilities of the different classes of transitions across parametric manipulations. In addition, the perceptual space of perceived direction in which this competition occurs is a continuous one which permits us to use smooth eye movements as a dynamic probe of instantaneous perceived direction. This probe in turn can be well modelled by the dynamical systems mathematical framework, which allows one to extract key signatures of the dynamics. We discuss how we use the patterns of participant responses and the fluctuations within the eye movements to dissociate the roles of noise and adaptation inferring with the help of modelling the relative contributions of each, which depend on the strength of the input.

A remarkable skill that is often taken for granted is the ability of the human cognitive system to distinguish between multiple simultaneously active speakers. In fact, in 1953 a challenge was proposed to the engineering community:

"How do we recognise what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time? On what logical basis could one design a machine for carrying out such an operation?".

Blind source separation (BSS) is one such approach to solve this problem, where BSS is the recovery of original source signals from a given set of mixed observations with minimal a priori information on the environment. There are numerous methods to BSS, from those with a highly statistical basis to those motivated by the human auditory system.

In particular, the auditory phenomenon of masking, where components in the perceived speech mixtures with lower energy are suppressed whilst the higher energy components are emphasised, has been of interest to researchers of BSS. This phenomenon has been realised within the time-frequency masking approach to BSS, and this concept of masking for source separation has emerged into its own field of research.

This seminar explores the clustering-based approach for estimation of such separation masks. We present a comparison between different clustering algorithms and investigate their suitabilities in a range of simulated and real-world environments. Furthermore, the majority of BSS methods assume that the number of sources is known to the system. As such, we also consider the automatic detection of the number of sources by introducing some novel clustering-based approaches to the problem.

Short bio:

Ingrid graduated from UWA in 2009 with a Bachelor of Engineering and went on to study a PhD with the Signal and Information Processing Group of UWA. She competed a research internship at Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Corporation in Kyoto, where she worked under the supervision of Dr. Tomohiro Nakatani in the Signal Processing Research Group of the Media Information Laboratory. Ingrid submitted her PhD thesis recently in 2014, where the focus of her thesis was on the clustering-based approaches to blind source separation and source number estimation. She is currently at the Centre for research experience, and she is working in the field of directional analysis for ocean waves.

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

****All Welcome****