What's On at UWA

In this Power of Music Seminar, Lindsay Vickery, Lecturer in Composition and Technology, WAAPA, ECU will be presenting a seminar entitled 'The Screened Score' an investigation of the compositional process.

Pathways to Social Innovation

Stan & Jean Perron Visiting Professor Tina Dacin, E. Marie Shantz Professor of Strategy and Organisational Behaviour Queen's School of Business, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is the Director of the Queen's School of Business Centre for Responsible Leadership and Area Coordinator of the Organisational Behaviour group at the school. She is also a member of the University Senate at Queen's University and Chair of the Principal's Innovation Fund Committee.

Social innovation has become an increasingly powerful vehicle in addressing today’s social needs. From launching new courses to the emergence of design principles and incubators, students and practitioners are seeking to understand how to leverage and accelerate social innovation to address a wide range of issues, including sustainability, poverty, education, citizen engagement and healthy communities.

During the lecture you’ll discover:

- What is social innovation and why is it important?

- What is the role of space in animating social innovation? In other words, how do you take an idea and bring it to life?

- What are the key elements of successful social innovation?

Unfortunately this event has been cancelled.

This week's seminar by Dr Boswell Wing has now been cancelled due to unforeseen events.

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Dr Boswell Wing from Earth and Planetary Sciences, McGill University will introduce the S MIF proxy for pO2 and describe the gross constraints that it provides on atmospheric anoxia through Earth history. Canonical wisdom holds that Earth’s history of atmospheric oxygen is essentially binary. The secular evolution of oxygen partial pressure (pO2) is inferred from records of reduced detrital minerals, oxidized paleosols, banded iron formation, and more recently, mass-independent fractionation (MIF) of sulfur isotopes; all point to a significant increase in pO2 at &#8776;2.4 Ga. The most quantitative constraint on this timeline comes with the loss of S MIF, which requires pO2 <10-5 present atmospheric levels for its production and preservation. To date, it has been widely assumed that this threshold was never crossed in the Archean and that Archean-like levels of atmospheric O2 never returned after the Paleoproterozoic ‘great oxidation event’. Dr Boswell Wing will present a pair of case studies – one from mid-Archean strata associated with voluminous volcanic eruptions and one from ca. 635 Ma rocks associated with a low-latitude glaciation – that call into question a simple binary interpretation of atmospheric anoxia.

UWA Be with Buddha Society has organised a Japanese Music concert in efforts to raise funds for Japan disaster relief.

Kimono Flautist “Momochiyo” will share with us the hopeful spirit of Japan through her music, culture and memories, and Perth’s Taiko Drum group “Kaze No Ko” will thrill us with the deep resounding rhythms of multiple Taiko drums.

Please tell your friends & relatives, and come join us in this compassionate cause.

Adults $25, Students & pensioners $15, Children (under Year 7) $10. (Tickets at the door.) All proceeds will be donated to Japan’s “Save the Children”.

“Prayer” - Music for Japan earthquake disaster relief

Friday 6th May 2011, 7.30 – 9.30 pm, UWA, Social Sciences Lecture Theatre

Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is Australia’s most common, life threatening recessive genetic condition. 1 in 25 people are carriers of the CF gene. There is no cure. Support people living with cystic fibrosis by purchasing 65 Roses Day merchandise, visit our stall at lunchtime on Tuesday 10th and 17th May or visit www.cysticfibrosis.org.au

Adam Wigley, PhD Candidate, Schools of Music and Psychology, UWA presents his innovative research investigating ways in which music learning impacts on literacy skills in young children. Part of the Power of Music Seminar series.

The word educate is derived from educare (Latin), meaning to draw out, to bring out potential. Educational systems, the world over, are based on thrusting knowledge onto students, instead of drawing it out of them. As a result, students become well informed on one or more subjects. Such education renders a student intelligent, but when it comes to handling life’s challenges and making the right choices, mere intelligence will not guarantee the best result. This fact is exemplified by the problems of obesity, addictions, stress and depression among highly intelligent people. These talks, held over two nights, will investigate how we can solve many of life’s problems by simply understanding and implementing the value of education, which is to build and strengthen one’s inner personality. When an individual’s character is developed, he or she becomes well equipped to make responsible choices and face life’s challenges with ease.

Diaries written by two great-great uncles as they sailed from Liverpool to Melbourne in 1854, together with a copy of the Daily Sick Book and Synopsis written by their father, Dr John Patchell, on a journey, as the ship’s surgeon, from Dublin to Sydney in 1839 provided Joan Robins with a wealth of information as she researched her family history. She will use extracts from these documents to describe life at sea under sail for migrants travelling to Australia in the mid eighteen hundreds.

Diaries written by two great-great uncles as they sailed from Liverpool to Melbourne in 1854, together with a copy of the Daily Sick Book and Synopsis written by their father, Dr John Patchell, on a journey, as the ship’s surgeon, from Dublin to Sydney in 1839 provided Joan Robins with a wealth of information as she researched her family history. She will use extracts from these documents to describe life at sea under sail for migrants travelling to Australia in the mid eighteen hundreds.

About the Speaker

Joan Robins has a BA and a DipEd from UWA. Spending most of her working life at UWA, firstly in teaching and later in administration, she was the recipient of a Twenty-five Year Service Award and a Chancellor’s Medal. In retirement, she completed and self-published a history of the Patchell family. Bitten by the genealogy bug, she is now working on another line of ancestors.

Parking is available in Myer Street and Park Way, accessible from Fairway

Members: Free Non Members: $5 donation

When hearing the term ‘mental health’, most people think of mental illness. A growing body of research demonstrates the ability of individuals to improve their mental health through a range of simple behaviours, but it is difficult to get people to engage with mental health as a topic and undertake proactive preventive behaviours because of the stigma associated with mental illness.

This presentation will outline recent advances in mental health promotion and describe a study that investigated the barriers and motivators relevant to behaviours that can enhance mental health.

Recommendations are provided for individuals wanting to maximise their mental health and for public policy makers seeking to promote mental health at the population level.

**** All Welcome ***

Intelligence is acquired knowledge of a particular subject or subjects. But being knowledgeable in no way renders your intellect clear to think, reason and decide on matters pertaining to life. A person could be highly intelligent, yet impractical in day to day living. For example, a scientist may be brilliant with respect to science, but could possess a weak intellect, incapable of controlling his own mind. This weakness could result in him being short-tempered, stressed, an alcoholic, depressed, etcetera. Therefore, the value of education lies in developing and strengthening one's inner personality to be able to handle life's challenges with ease.

The Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences will be hosting an evening for secondary students interested in the Doctor of Medicine (MD) course. Year 12 students who are interested in the MD are encouraged to attend. Parents and teachers welcome. Booking not required.

Dr Suzanne Wijsman presents a recital including works by Faure and Martinu.

Professor Amin Saikal, Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University will be giving a public lecture on Thursday May 12th,2011 at The University of Western Australia. He will discuss issues surrounding The Arab's third awakening and Osama's passing and what it means for the Muslim World as well as Australia.

Western Australia could soon be home to the biggest international science investment in Australia’s history. This would arrive in the form of a new Advanced Gravitational Wave Observatory, valued at about $300 Million. The observatory would combine the most precise mirrors and the largest vacuum ever created, and laser beams that might blow up the death star! The observatory, called LIGO-Australia is planned to be installed near Gingin, one hour’s drive north of Perth. LIGO-Australia will be the most sensitive measuring instrument ever created, able to measure gravitational “sounds” from black holes and the birth of the universe. The sounds, which in reality are ripples in space and time, are a billion times softer than the softest sound detectable by the human ear. The Gravitational Observatory offers an exciting opportunity for Australian industry. Vacuum pipe construction and innovative geothermal cooling technology will provide WA companies with an advantage in international markets. Some of the most sophisticated digital control systems ever created will boost industrial control technology. Data analysis will use teraflop graphics processors, which are being developed in collaboration with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project. Refreshments will be available after the talk. Ms Alannah MacTiernan will introduce the Speaker. Ms MacTiernan was MLA representing Armadale from 1996 to 2010, and Minister for Planning and Infrastructure overseeing a number of major rail and road infrastructure projects. She has had a long interest in science

This week’s Colloquium will take a slightly different format from the usual. Instead of one presenter, we will have 4 members of a team present (Carmen Lawrence, Steven Smith, John Cook, and myself) who are the principals behind the project “Shaping Tomorrow’s World” at www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org This new website www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org is dedicated to discussion of the challenges that are facing us — from food insecurity to climate change — and potential solutions based on scientific evidence and scholarly analysis. The site was designed and implemented by Wendy and John Cook of www.skepticalscience.com. Seed funding for the platform was provided by UWA’s Pro VC for Research, although it is now maintained entirely on a volunteer basis. On Friday, we will initiate the round table by briefly presenting all our activities to date, ranging from RTR to iTunes to theconversation.edu.au and now Shaping Tomorrow’s World. John Cook will be attending from Brisbane via Skype. After our brief presentations, we will be opening the discussion to involve everybody on the floor.

The “Chinese Bridge” Chinese Proficiency Competition is an annual international Chinese Mandarin speaking and performance competition. The competition is organised by the Office of the Chinese Language Council International (‘Hanban’, Beijing). The theme for this year is ‘Bridge of Friendship, Resonance of Passion’. This year the competition is in its tenth year and the Australian Finals will be held at the Confucius Institute at The University of Western Australia, Perth.

The winners of the Finals will go to China later in the year to take part in the Grand Finals which will be filmed by Hunan TV and broadcast in prime time to an audience of tens of millions. There are also many great prizes including language scholarships, travel opportunities in China and good consolation prizes for everyone who puts in an effort.

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery will be the first venue in a national tour to exhibit the Art Gallery of South Australia’s exhibition ‘Desert Country’, following its successful season in Adelaide.

‘Desert Country’ charts the evolution and diversity of Australia’s most influential art movement, revealing the extraordinary development of the Australian desert painting movement and the flourishing cross-cultural relationships between Aboriginal artists working in the desert regions of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Through its dynamic paintings, ‘Desert Country’ showcases the enormous diversity of desert art, including the ground-breaking canvases of the Papunya Tula and Western Desert Mob artists to the latest stunning works to emerge from the APY Lands.

Among the highlights are the profoundly powerful works by Pitjantjatjara artists, mapping the devastated lands that they were forced to vacate during the atomic bomb and rocket testing of the 1950s.

All the works on display in ‘Desert Country’ are drawn entirely from the extensive holdings of Aboriginal art from the Art Gallery of South Australia, and more than a third of the paintings are new acquisitions, being shown for the first time publicly.

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery has an extensive public program of events to accompany ‘Desert Country’, including a special performance to celebrate NAIDOC Week in July— Austrian-based classical Mandelbrot Duo team up with Western Australian Indigenous performer Richard Walley for the premiere of a new work for violin, cello and didgeridoo especially commissioned for the UWA WINTERArts Festival 2011 and to coincide with NAIDOC week. Please see the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery events calendar for further details.

Nici Cumpston is Associate Curator of Australian Paintings, Sculpture and Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. In this talk she will discuss her role as curator of the Desert Country exhibition, and will provide insight into the remarkable group of artists and artworks presented in this show. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet the curator and learn more about the internationally acclaimed Australian desert painting movement.

On Monday, 17 May 2010 UWA graduate Pat Hollingworth reached the summit of Mt Everest (8850m). His team took five days to make the final ascent and another two and a half days to return to the relative safety of Everest Base Camp. It was really only once he was back in Base Camp that he started thinking about what he had achieved; climbing the world’s highest mountain.

Cost: $50 for SSEH Alumni and $55 for others

To register please email Rachel Cook ([email protected])- RSVP by Wednesday 11th May 2011.