What's On at UWA

Geologists and geophysicists have to deal with a wide range of data sets and image types acquired from a variety of sources. This talk will give an overview of the image analysis and visualization work being conducted in the Centre for Exploration Targeting.

Image processing topics will include automated detection of linear structures and circular porphyry features in aeromagnetic data, identification of regions of structural complexity, and mapping of outcrop imagery.

Visualisation topics will include presentation of high dynamic range images, use of effective (and ineffective)colourmaps, and visualization of tensor data. Also presented will be a number of image blending tools that we have been developing as a means of integrating information from multiple images or for interactively exploring image parameters such as scale.

Short Bio,

Peter Kovesi is a Research Professor in the Center for Exploration Targeting at UWA. He has been with CET since 2010. Prior to this he had earlier careers in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and in the School of Mechanical Engineering at UWA. His research interests are in computer vision and visualisation.

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

****All Welcome****

The Business School is hosting an information evening for its Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) programs.

We invite you to attend the upcoming information evening which will give you the opportunity to learn about the programs on offer, to discuss your study options, meet Business School staff and have all your questions answered before applying for your chosen MBA course.

The event starts at 5.30pm with the following format

5.30-6.00pm: Meet the current students and professors 6.00-7.00pm: Presentation 7.00-7.30pm: Individual question time

Register now to attend http://www.business.uwa.edu.au/school/news/infoevenings/register

Join curators Ted Snell and Sally Quin for an informative tour of the exhibition ORIENTing on Saturday 15 June 2pm at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

ORIENTing presents a rare opportunity to see important works by Ian Fairweather from public and private collections in Western Australia and runs from May 4, 2013 until 13 July 2013.

This event is FREE to attend. Please RSVP to [email protected] or 6488 3707

This exhibition tour is part of the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery public program. Visit the gallery website for more information and similar events.

Dr Sophie Davison is a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at the Clinical Research Centre, North Metropolitan Area Mental Health Service in Perth WA and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences at The University of Western Australia. Her research interests are the mental health of prisoners. She completed her basic training and advanced forensic psychiatric training at The Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College in London, UK. She has worked in a number of settings including Broadmoor High Secure Hospital, the community and in men and women’s prisons. She has published on the topic of women’s mental health, drug addicts in police custody, offenders with personality disorder, prisoner mental health and the mental health of detainees under anti-terror legislation. She was previously Co-Director of the Mental Health Teaching Unit at the King’s College London. She is currently chair of the RANZCP Forensic Faculty WA Branch committee

Prisoner populations have poor physical and mental health. This has wide public health implications. Women offenders have particular needs which are often over looked in the research literature and in clinical practice because of their relatively small number in relation to men who offend. I will report on our research which aimed to determine the nature and extent of mental health and substance misuse problems in WA reception prisoners as well as detailing their health, clinical, social and functional needs. We have just completed data collection on the women and I will report on the preliminary data from this part of the study.

Why do people owe political and legal obligations to each other? Why, for example, can I be prevented from punching you or burning your house down? Political and legal thinkers generally agree on the nature of the answer to this question, even if they disagree on the details. The answer focusses on the state and the community. But in this talk, I argue that this answer is wrong. What is more, I will suggest that you already know it is wrong, or at least that you knew it was wrong before you were programmed to think otherwise. We will also discover that many other people knew this, though most of them have been dead quite a while. The talk will suggest a better way to understand the political, the legal (especially private law) and our own relations with other people.

Allan Beever is a professor of law at the University of South Australia. He has previously held positions at the Universities of Southampton, Durham and Auckland, and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg. He has also held a visiting position at the University of Ottawa. He has won numerous awards for his research including, in 2007, the runner-up for the Birks prize by the Society of Legal Scholars for the best legal scholarship that year in the United Kingdom for his book Rediscovering the Law of Negligence.

Professor Beever has a rare command of both deep legal theory combined with a depth of knowledge of many cases, His recent articles include ‘Barclay v Penberthy and the Collapse of the High Court’s Tort Jurisprudence’ and ‘Kant on the Law of Marriage’. Date & Time: Tuesday 18 June from 6-7.30pm Venue: UWA Law School, Masters Seminar Room (Room G30 in Law Link Building)

Join members of the Judiciary, Bar, Legal Practice and the Academy for this seminar. Wine and cheese will be served.

The Agency in Movement symposium employs a variety of disciplines to explore the complex relations between movement and vitality. Motion is observed by attaching a frame of reference to a “body” and measuring its change in position relative to another reference frame. Therefore, movement is relative, means ever changing and is perceived as visceral and “alive”. The Symposium will include invited speakers from diverse disciplines (art, performance, biology, biophysics, biomechanics, and philosophy) who will explore and interrogate the conceptual and technical relations between life (biological or artificial), movement and perceptions of "vitality”, with the hope that some interesting meeting points and/or negations will emerge.

The symposium stems from an Australian Research Council project exploring the use of skeletal muscle tissue which is grown, stimulated and activated in a techno-scientific surrogate “body”. This moving twitching (semi) living material evokes, makes unease, and asks, in sensorial and theoretical means about issues of aliveness and agency. The project is concerned with onto-ethico-epistemological (Barad 2010) questions about life and the affect created through the phenomenon of movement.

We will be probing into the (sometimes) uneasy and undefined areas of shifting perceptions of life, heralded by developments in the life sciences and applied technologies, coupled with the introduction of engineering principles into life sciences. In the light of ‘new materialism’, ‘agential realism’ and when life is becoming a raw material to be engineered, we will examine the position and role of movement as agency.

Speakers include: Monika Bakke, a philosopher who interrogates cross species and non-human communication at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.; Andrew Pelling leads the Laboratory for Biophysical Manipulation at the University of Ottawa, which experiment with in vitro muscle cells and with artists. Elizabeth Stephens, a science historian from the Centre for the History of European Discourses. Elizabeth will analyse some historical discourses and understandings in relation to vitalism. Tony Bakker and Gavin Pinniger, Muscle Physiology, the University of Western Australia. Stuart Hodgetts, a biologist from UWA will contribute to the understanding of the neuromuscular interface. Chris Salter, the Director of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research, whose artistic research explore the performative, focusing on dynamic and temporal processes over static objects and representations. Jennifer Johung, will contribute her perspective on performance and agency in art (Art History, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee). Oron Catts, SymbioticA’s Director, will discuss the demonstrable in science and the arts. Gabrielle Decamous, will look at semi-living material as a device in undermining the polarized understanding of the world (Kyushu University, Japan). Miranda Grounds of UWA provide her extensive knowledge in the cell biology aspects of skeletal muscles. Ionat Zurr will explore an artistically grown and induced semi living movement which attempt to reintroduce a sense of agency. Stelarc, an Australia artist and Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmith University UK, will be reflecting on these issues in the closing panel.

There will be something for everyone at this year’s Wine Show by the Bay as we help celebrate The University of Western Australia’s Centenary year.

Enjoy a fabulous day sampling a wide variety of local, interstate and international wines, expand your palate at a series of master classes hosted by experts at the top of their game, tantalise your tastebuds at a series of cooking demonstrations presented by some familiar faces in the culinary scene, enjoy the high life at the Chandon lunch in the Club Restaurant hosted by Moët Hennessy or enjoy a rustic Long Table picnic lunch in the Club Colonnade.

General Admission

Entry to Wine Show by the Bay is $20 for Members and guests. Price includes entry to the tasting fair featuring over 40 exhibitors, and a monogrammed tasting glass.

LIWA invites you to a free seminar on: "New approaches to prevent airway inflammation in early CF lung disease – from mummies to MetaGex" by Clin/Prof Stephen Stick, Head, Department of Respiratory Medicine, Princess Margaret Hospital for Children; School of Paediatrics and Child Health, UWA. A light lunch will be served from 12.00pm with a 12.30pm – 1.30pm presentation.

Join DMA candidate Karen-Elizabeth Sekararum on Monday 24 June 2013 - 5pm in the Tunley Lecture Theatre, School of Music, UWA

An Exploration of English Language Sung Poetry as presented in the Recital Srimaya's FAll from the Demon's Circle

DMA Lecture-Demonstration

Sharks, Camera, Action! is a forum and a mini film festival, focused on sharks and their relatives, which aims to encourage, inspire, and educate the general public about the important role that these animals play in our oceans. Our goal is to facilitate communication about sharks and their relatives by screening marine research and conservation films, from around the world.

Globally sharks are being overfished at levels never before seen in human history, and lack of proper management is pushing many species to the brink of extinction. Substantial attention is now focused on identifying the most at risk species and implementing effective conservation and management plans. Join us to hear from researchers and conservationists from around the world to learn about why we should be afraid for sharks not of sharks.

Shark Expert Panel: Associate Professor Nathan Hart, UWA School of Animal Biology, Oceans Institute and Neuroecology Group; Winthrop Professor and WA Premier’s Research Fellow Shaun Collin, UWA School of Animal Biology, Oceans Institute and Neuroecology Group; Professor Erika Techera, Dean, Faculty of Law, UWA; Tim Nicol, Conservation Council of Western Australia.

Convenor: Ryan Kempster, Marine Neuroecologist, Oceans Institute, With assistance from: Channing Egeberg, Caroline Kerr, Carl Schmidt and Jessica Mountford.

Cost: Free, but RSVP essential. Book online: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/sharks

Language attitudes are inextricably linked to linguistic variation and deeply tied up to groups of people and what is believed about them. The study of people’s beliefs about language, including evaluations and discriminations of language variety, falls in the area of sociolinguistics known as folk linguistics (Preston 2002).

This talk explores folk linguistic accounts by speakers of Anglo-Celtic Australian English, Argentinian River Plate Spanish and foreign language learners of Spanish in Australia. The different attitudinal positions noted in the data are discussed vis-à-vis Preston’s (2002: 64) notions of ‘correctness’, ‘ordinary language’, ‘dialects’ and ‘errors’. Understanding language attitudes can help us make sense of who we are and how we are evaluated by others. This seminar seeks to make a contribution to this understanding.

About Dr Celeste Rodriguez Louro

Celeste Rodriguez Louro joined UWA Linguistics as Assistant Professor in 2011, after completing a PhD in Linguistics at Melbourne University in December 2009. Trained in Argentina, the USA and Australia, she specialises in language variation and change in English and Spanish. Dr Rodriguez Louro’s research has been consistently funded internally and externally since 2002. This support has resulted in a growing publication record, including two recent publications on discourse-pragmatic aspects of Perth English–a variety previously undocumented in the sociolinguistics literature–and the first-ever Corpus of English in Australia.

She has been invited to contribute her innovative research to international volumes, has presented her work at more than 30 peer-reviewed conferences, and has been invited to present her research to audiences in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Spain and the USA. Dr Rodriguez Louro has a strong record of international collaborations and has led several panels and workshops on language variation and change.

Solidly linked to her teaching, Dr Rodriguez Louro’s research program has been enriched by contributions from Honours students, research assistants, and PhD candidates. She has received nominations for her Honours supervision and undergraduate teaching and has been nominated for a 2012 Young Investigator Award. Dr Rodriguez Louro has acted as reviewer to several world- renowned journals and publishing houses, has developed a strong record of media appearances, and is committed to foregrounding to the general public the importance of understanding language in society.

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

****All Welcome****

Lake Baikal has a unique natural heritage. There is no other water body similar to this huge fresh-water reservoir whose maximum depth exceeds 1 mile (1,600 m). The lake contains about 20% of the world’s unfrozen freshwater; more than that held in all of the Great Lakes of North America.

  The area of Lake Baikal is similar to that of countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, and the bottom-sediment thickness is more than 8 km.  The lake is more than 25 million years old.

These features and other aspects of the hydrology, meteorology, hydrobiology, and paleoclimates wll be discussed in this presentation, using information from the Limnological Institute of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

  A particular focus will be on the bottom sediments and enumeration of strains of oil-degrading bacteria collected from the numerous bottom bitumen mounds of Lake Baikal. These and some other features of the lake, I will try to discuss in my presentation. 

Short Bio,

Alexander Likhoshvay,   from Russia which is located near the oldest and deepest lake on Earth - Lake Baikal and graduated Irkutsk State University in 2007 with MSc in Chemistry (“Integrated chemical and microbiological study of sediments from South basin of Lake Baikal”) and had been working in Limnological Institute SB RAS (Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Science).

Alexander,has successfully defended his PhD thesis on December 2011, With a topic of “Ecology of bacteria of the genus Rhodococcus from deep-water bitumen mounds of Lake Baikal”.

He and his wife hold a PR visa & came to Australia in January, 2013 located in Perth . Currently he is a visitor at CWR.

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

****All Welcome****

A public lecture by Eric Dursteler, Associate Professor History Department, Brigham Young University.

One of the central credos of food studies is Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous aphorism, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” What Brillat-Savarin sensed intuitively, modern scholars have verified: because of the biological imperative of daily consumption, food inheres in a uniquely intimate way in collective and individual identities. Food also marks religion, where it functions as symbol, as subject of petition, and as a form of communion.

Given the significance of food in religious practice and identity, what impact does conversion have on an individual’s foodways? What changes accompany, or are expected to accompany, conversion? The experience of the Morisco minority in early modern Spain represents a suggestive case-study of the complex ways in which food informed religious and communal identity, and how the sincerity of religious change associated with conversion was measured in part by changes in food practices.

This lecture is supported by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

As part of the WinterARTS Festival and in celebration of the magnificent exhibition ORIENTing on show at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, join Western Australian guitarist Christine Yeong for an intimate performance and evening viewing of works. Yeong, brings her passionate, energetic, and unique style of classical guitar playing to the stage with an exciting program featuring Spanish, Latin American, English, and Australian compositions, as well as her own arrangements.

Generally, interactive and electronic artworks are conceptualised as essentially immaterial. That is, the digital artwork is a pure abstraction that lacks the physical properties that literally ground an artwork in the empirical world. In contrast, this paper maps the effects of interactivity in an electronic artwork as beholden to a whole range of material actors. This distributed effect is explained in terms of Actor-Network Theory. The combined outcome is that the supposed immateriality of digital artworks is in fact reconstituted with a kind of relational and informational materiality. Composed of, if not dependent on, the heterogeneous nature of a whole host of actors that sustains an artwork from production into exhibition and interaction. The events observed and experienced in many interactions involving the artwork suggest that materiality is present at every stage. The implication then is that wherever actors, cognition and materiality meet, a mutually catalysing and constituting relationship is likely to develop. Consequently, when an actor interacts with the artwork, there is a shift in relational matter and hence the way it is expressed in information materiality. Thus, meaning is co-enacted in relation with the affordances in place. This cumulative generation of meaning points to a distributed and collective expression of cognition that constantly blurs the distinctions between intention and material affordance in interactive artworks. Therefore, the description that follows demonstrates that meaning, cognition and action arise together with the modal weight of materials in interaction that then shapes the nature of the electronic and interactive artwork.

Dr Mark Cypher received a PhD in 2011 from the University of Western Australia and is currently a Senior Lecturer and Program Chair for Interactive Digital Design and Games Art and Design at Murdoch University - Western Australia. His art and design practice reflects an ongoing engagement with the practice and discourse of interactivity particularly in relation to actor-network theory. His artwork has featured in over 16 international exhibitions including, 404 International Festival of Electronic Arts (Argentina), Salon International De Art Digital (Cuba), Siggraph 2006 (USA), FILE - Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica ( Brazil), NewForms06 (Canada), BEAP -Biennial of Electronic Art (Australia), Haptic 07 (Canada), Bios4, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Spain), ISEA 2011 (Istanbul), Transitio_MX (Mexico) and Electrofringe (Australia).

As part of WINTERarts at UWA, join us for a family focus day at the Berdt Museum to celebrate our new exhibition Little Paintings, Big Stories: Gossip Songs of Western Arnhem Land. There will be storytelling, performance, a special talk by Dr John Stanton and hands-on activities in the Gallery. For a full program of events visit www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au. Free event, all are welcome.

Educational and recreationally based program for Years 4 -6. Daily from 7.45 - 5.00 pm including breakfast, lunch, morning and afternoon tea, all activities and high mentor to child ratio. $80 per child/day casual or $75 per child/day for 3 or more in one week. Great program and lots of fun.

By Professor Kenneth R. Chapman, Director, Asthma and Airway Centre of the University Health Network; President, Canadian Network for Asthma Care; Director, Canadian Registry for Alpha1 Anti-trypsin Deficiency. 12 noon for light lunch, 12.30pm – 1.30pm presentation

The conference will see law students from around Australia, New Zealand and the broader Asia-Pacific battle it out in the international championships of six prestigious legal competitions. His Honour Chief Justice French of the High Court of Australia will be the keynote speaker at the Closing Gala of this year's ALSA Conference on Monday 15 July. His Honour will also preside over the Grand Final of the Championship Moot to be held earlier that day.

Suzanne Welborn will discuss her personal journey through seven decades of enormous cultural, sexual and economic changes in the lives of Australian women, as a journalist in Perth and London, a wife and mother and as a historian including the way puzzles of her childhood influenced her writing of history.

About the Speaker

Graduate 1958 BA UWA

Journalist West Australian 1960-62

Woman Writer for the Melbourne Herald Cable Service 1962-64, London

Graduate 1981 MA UWA

Books by Susan Welborn:

Lords of Death: a People, a Place, a Legend (1982), (winner WA non-fiction award) republished as Bush Heroes: a People, a Place, a Legend (2002)

Swan:the History of a Brewery (1987)

Sandgropers Solicitors & Silks (1998)

Freehills A History of Australia's First National Law Firm (2011) shortlisted for the Ashurst Business Literature Prize (2011) in Sydney

Members: free Non Members: $5 donation