What's On at UWA

Gillian will speak about the Campus landscape history, then guide a walk to relevant parts of the Campus. Crawley Campus is notable as a place of exceptional cultural heritage significance, rich in the history of landscape development and buildings integrated in an exceptional manner. Gillian Lilleyman is a landscape historian of note and knowledge of this special place is extensive. Gillian is a co-author of 'A Landscape for Learning: A History of the Grounds of The University of Western Australia and a contributor to the forthcoming centennial history of the University.

LIWA invites you to a free seminar on: "Tumour suppressor activity of microRNA-7 and microRNA-331-3p" by Dr Keith Giles, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Western Australian Institute for Medical Research (WAIMR). Time: 12 noon for light lunch with 12.30pm – 1.30pm presentation.

This 2012 Ian Constable Lecture will be given by Matt Brown, Professor of Immunogenetics & Director, Diamantina Institute University of Queensland.

Genetics is a relatively recent discipline of medical practice and research. The field has always promised much in terms of the insights into causes of disease, and its use to predict disease risk, but only in recent years has it looked likely to deliver on that potential. Genetics may now enable medicine to move from therapy to disease prevention, and is providing fascinating insights as to how human diseases arise. There is much to be done to prepare us for the genetics era - and to protect us from it. However the potential of this one field to radically improve the health of our community makes these worthwhile tasks.

The annual Ian Constable lecture is presented by the Lion's Eye Institute and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA.

Free. RSVP via: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/2012-ijclecture

You are invited to join us at the first national melanoma conference hosted by the Scott Kirkbride Melonoma Research Centre.

This is an exciting time for research discoveries and treatment advances. The conference program brings together the world’s leading melanoma researchers to talk about the very latest in; • Melanoma clinical trials and outcomes • Molecular signalling pathways • Radiology therapy breakthroughs and palliative treatments • Biomarker discovery and , • Pathology and epidemiology studies

Distinguished guest speakers include:

Professor Charles Balch (Johns Hopkins Clinical Research Network) Professor Boris Bastian (UCSF)

Professor John Thompson (Melanoma Institute Australia) Professor Grant McArthur (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre) Professor Graham Mann (MIA, University of Sydney) Professor Nick Hayward (Queensland Institute for Medical Research)

The Seminar: It is generally thought that lung growth follows a trajectory such that an early life deficit in lung function is maintained throughout life. This has important implications for the development of chronic lung disease whereby early life impairments in lung growth may decrease the threshold for the development of respiratory symptoms, while increasing the susceptibility to insults that exacerbate disease. As such it is critical that we understand the environmental factors that impair (or promote) lung growth in early life in order to inform public health initiatives that will improve long term lung health in the community. This presentation will discuss the importance of in utero and early life environmental exposures in modulating lung development and the susceptibility to chronic lung disease using two case studies: 1) arsenic exposure via drinking water in utero and 2) vitamin D. While arsenic and vitamin D work in opposing directions, with arsenic having a negative impact on lung development and vitamin D having a positive impact, they are both associated with chronic lung disease in later life and can be modified through public health interventions. The impact of these exposures on lung development will be discussed in light of our recent studies using mouse models.

The Speaker: Associate Professor Graeme Zosky is a Principal Investigator and Head of the Lung Growth and Environmental Health Group at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. He has a PhD in Zoology from U.W.A. (2003) and a Masters in Biostatistics from the University of Sydney (2010). His research focuses on the role of early life exposures in the development of chronic lung disease later in life. He is also an international leader in the design and application of novel techniques for assessing lung mechanics in laboratory animals.

Groups and Combinatorics Seminar

Arun Ram (University of Melbourne)

will speak on

Clifford theory and Hecke algebras

at 1pm on Tuesday the 23rd of October in MLR2

Abstract: The usual Clifford theory describes the irreducible representations of group G in terms of those of a normal subgroup. Generalizing, Clifford theory constructs the irreducible representations of semidirect product rings and invariant rings. In this work with Z. Daugherty we use Clifford theory to index the irreducible representations of two pole Hecke algebras and relate this indexing to a labeling coming from statistical mechanics (following work of de Gier and Nichols) and to a geometric labeling (coming from K-theory of Steinberg varieties following Kazhdan-Lusztig). Despite the maths-physics and geometric motivations for the project, in the talk I shall assume only that the audience is familiar with the notions of groups, rings, and modules.

All welcome

An Inquiring Minds Lecture by Associate Professor David Glance Director, UWA Centre for Software Practice.

The availability of free online university courses from the world’s most prestigious institutions threatens to bring about radical change in the way the world accesses education. The first course offered by Stanford University in this way attracted 160,000 students. For the first time, anyone with an internet connection in any part of the world can take a university course and receive a credit for it. With this access comes the possibility of millions of people who could only dream of taking courses at Harvard or MIT being able further their education and with it the range of possibilities in their lives. Critics however have been quick to raise objections: it has been done before and failed; online courses will provide no support for students who struggle; universities will give up once they discover they can’t make money from the process; and how do you verify that someone actually did the course? From an Australian perspective, there are questions of how our universities will respond to the MOOCs which are largely coming from the United States. Will the world really benefit from a US focussed view? Can Australia bring something unique to the world in both its expertise and culture? Using examples from a course that the speaker actually completed “Introduction to Sociology”, David Glance will discuss what a MOOC is, how it is run and how it is different from previous distance learning and online courses. There is no doubt that this is a huge change in the education landscape and Associate Professor Glance believes that Australia does and will have something to contribute to that change.

Cost: Free, but reservation essential. Book a seat (unreserved): http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/david-glance

The beauty of electrochemistry at liquid-liquid interfaces is that it enables the detection of ions or ionisable species by ion-transfer reactions. As a result, problems associated with the detection of analytes by oxidation/reduction reactions at solid electrodes can be surmounted. These problems may include an inability to easily oxidise/reduce the target analyte(s), the simultaneous oxidation/reduction of interferences, or electrode fouling by reaction products. Proteins are extremely important analytical targets because of their roles in regulating biological processes and the fact that diseases often result in changes in protein behaviour. Such altered protein behaviour leads to these biomacromolecules becoming markers or indicators of that disease, so-called biomarkers. Not all proteins are redox-active and even redox-active proteins cannot always be easily detected by oxidation or reduction at a metal or carbon electrode. For this reason, the electrochemical behaviour and electrochemical detection of proteins via ion-transfer reactions at the interface between two immiscible electrolyte solutions (ITIES) has been of growing interest. This presentation will discuss the main idea that electrochemistry at liquid-liquid interfaces enables the detection of ions via non-redox reactions, which may be applied to detection of proteins. Recent progress towards achievement of nanomolar detection of proteins as well as formation and characteristics of nanoscale liquid-liquid interfaces will be presented.

The branch of limnology often referred to as ‘Tropical’ limnology is represented by lake studies as diverse as those from alpine, high elevation lakes in Papua New Guinea to athallasic saline lakes located in tropical desert climes.

Thus it can be argued that the internal variability in the limnological characteristics of tropical lakes may well be as great as that found between tropical lakes and temperate and sub-temperate lakes. We will discuss the properties that are assumed when we discuss ‘tropical’ limnology and whether the assumption of their jurisprudence or ‘special’ characteristics is sound. These will include:

- Water Temperature and Density

- Gas solubilities and their implications

- Nutrient cycling and primary production

- Metabolic rates

Bio:

Kevin Boland obtained his Ph.D. from James Cook University. He spent many years as Principal Scientist (Water Quality) with the Northern Territory Government and for the past 17 years has been the Managing Director of Tropical Water Solutions Pty. Ltd., a small, specialist company working in the field of tropical limnology and water quality management.

He has studied tropical limnology for 35 years and is internationally recognised as a leader in this field. He has been involved in studies that encompass most of the lakes located in tropical North Australia and many in South-east Asia and further abroad. His insight into tropical lakes includes both the technical and social issues that affect contemporary attitudes to lakes of the tropical belt.

In recent years Kevin has observed a renewal of respect for the value of tropical lakes not only as resources but also as a source for social cohesion within indigenous and non-indigenous communities. In his words paraphrased from Ivan Illyich ‘ We now talk about H2O and water as separate entities and are starting to understand their interactions and future roles for communities and social well-being’.

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

****All Welcome****

Sue Fletcher completed her first degree at the University of Zimbabwe (when the country still had a functional education system) and a PhD at UWA. She is a Principal Research Fellow working with Steve Wilton on developing antisense therapies for inherited disorders at the Centre for Neuromuscular and Neurological Disorders, University of Western Australia. The Wilton laboratory is located within the Australian Neuromuscular Research Institute, which is also the home of Muscular Dystrophy Western Australia. This group pioneered antisense oligomer induced exon skipping to overcome dystrophin mutations, and have developed antisense oligos for every dystrophin exon, except the first and last. Although not all dystrophin mutations are amenable to exon skipping intervention, and the potential improvements will depend upon the nature and location of the mutation, oligomer strategies should be developed for all, not just those with common mutations. The group are now exploring ways to overcome DMD-causing non-deletion mutations, including duplications and extending the technology to other inherited neuromuscular disorders, including spinal muscular atrophy.

PebblePad is a proprietary e-portfolio system. It has been designed with the learner at the centre of the system. It provides scaffolding to help users create records of learnin, achievement and aspiration, and has a reflective structure underpinning all of its core elements. PebblePad supports personal learning whilst providing a powerful suite of tools to improve learning in institutional contexts.

Be transported away from the everyday with our exciting line-up of Thursday 1.10pm, free lunchtime concerts. This year's revamped Lunchtime Concert series features the best of our students in solo and small ensemble performance.

My research shows that the chemical mimicry crucial to sexual deception is responsible for reproductive isolation and potentially even speciation. I also show through mating system analysis and studies of wasp behaviour that this strategy is a superbly adaptive solution to the problem flowers face of simultaneously attracting pollinators before persuading them to leave quickly.

Lakes are now considered as significant greenhouse gas (GHG) conduits to the atmosphere. Small and shallow aquatic systems in particular such as ponds and wetlands can represent large GHG emitters as they generally contain high nutrients and organic carbon and have a small volume to area ratio, which does not allow methane oxidation to mitigate GHG production efficiently. The increasing abundance of small ponds associated to permafrost thawing in arctic regions and of wastewater treatment ponds (WWTP) as the human population grow makes these two systems particularly relevant for GHG studies.

Permafrost soils store half of the global below ground organic carbon stock, which is now being mobilized as peat soils thaw and erode. Part of the mobilized carbon is emitted, stored or transformed by ponds and wetlands before it makes its way to the coastal ocean. Permafrost thaw ponds can last from days to millennia, depending on latitude, local geomorphology, ongoing erosion, precipitation regimes, and plant colonization. They are generally large emitters of GHG, with great variations in CH4 fluxes. For example, on Bylot Island (73°N), fluxes varied from -0.1 to 0.9 gC m-2 d-1 for CO2, and from 0.03 to 76 mgC m-2 d-1 for dissolved CH4 (summer 2005 to 2011; N=150). Moreover, CH4 escaping through ebullition was shown to represent up to 95% of total emissions. In addition to the availability of nutrients and the lability of organic carbon, the thermal stratification, the light availability and the type of microbial communities will largely influence the direction and rate of emissions. These factors are being investigated in the Canadian Arctic and subarctic regions.

On their side, WWTP have plenty of organic carbon and nutrients, and sometimes they have toxic cyanobacterial blooms and irregular sludge settling, potentially lowering their treatment efficiency. Although algal blooms use CO2, it is not clear whether they act as mitigating agents (C sink) if the accumulated biomass represents an organic input to pond sediments where CH4 is anaerobically produced. A preliminary study on WWTP in Quebec and WA indicates that these systems are very large CO2 and CH4 emitters (for CO2, up to 20 gC m-2 d-1 measured in Quebec ponds, and for CH4, up to 310 mgC m-2 d-1 measured in WA ponds, excluding ebullition). Diurnal variations in GHG emissions and CH4 ebullition still need to be closely investigated in these systems. A series of WWTP are presently being sampled in southern WA in close collaboration with A. Ghadouani team and Water Corp.

Abstract

Coastal reefs are ubiquitous features of Australia's coastline, yet their hydrodynamics (waves, currents and water levels) are still poorly understood relative to other coastal environments such as beaches. Along Australia’s coast, the large regional-scale gradients in incident wave energy and tidal forcing interact with the complex morphology of both tropical and temperate reef structures, resulting in extremely complex and variable circulation patterns throughout these systems. Understanding these fundamental physical processes is ultimately the foundation for assessing numerous ecological processes within reef ecosystems, the movement of sediments through the coastal zone, and the longer-term morphological development of our reef-protected coastlines. This seminar will summarize ongoing and future research efforts designed to help elucidate and accurately predict the complex physical processes operating within a broad class of reef environments (both wave- and tide-dominated), through a number of regional field programs and the development and application of new numerical modelling approaches. The improved process-understanding of coastal hydrodynamics developed through this effort is leading to significant advances in our ability to predict the impacts of extreme events (e.g., storms and tsunamis), sea level rise, and other environmental changes to reef-protected coastal regions, both within Australia and globally.

Biography

Lowe received his PhD in coastal oceanography in 2005 from Stanford University. After completing postdoctoral research and lecturing position at Stanford, he commenced at UWA in 2007 with support from an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. In 2008, Lowe moved to the School of Earth and Environment to establish teaching and research programs in the area of coastal processes within physical geography. Lowe applies his background in nearshore oceanography to study a range of physical and coupled biological processes in the coastal zone using a combination of field work and numerical modelling. His research has, in particular, helped to advance our understanding of how oceanic and meteorological forcing drive hydrodynamic and biophysical processes within a range of tropical coastal environments such as coral reefs. Currently Lowe serves as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans (the leading multidisciplinary oceanographic journal) for topics related to tropical coastal oceanography and reef dynamics. In 2012, Lowe received a four-year Australian Council Future Fellowship to further expand his research on both tropical and temperate reef processes across Western Australia, with focus including the wave-dominated systems along Perth and at Ningaloo Reef, as well as within the unexplored tide-dominated reef systems along the Pilbara and Kimberley coasts.

A public forum with Professors Geoffrey Blainey AC and Geoffrey Bolton AO, presented by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and Faculty of Arts.

The discussion will be chaired by renowned Australian journalist and broadcaster, Geraldine Doogue.

Two of Australia’s most eminent historians, Professors Geoff Bolton and Geoff Blainey, long-time sparring partners, discuss Perth’s increasing significance on the national scene. Today Western Australia’s booming economy bankrolls the nation. Are there parallels with the past? Were there similar trends during the Western Australian gold boom of the 1890s, when the population of the colony quadrupled and thousands of the unemployed, professionals and labourers alike, fled depressed conditions in the eastern colonies. In the 1890s the vast majority of new West Australians were male. Is this the case today? And what does it mean for the future? By 2050 will Western Australia’s natural resources — its iron ore and natural gas — have generated such vast increases in population and wealth that the economic centre of the nation will have shifted west? Or will our riches have all run out?

ABSTRACT This paper studies changes in the linkages between domestic inflation for individual OECD countries and corresponding country-specific global inflation series, with the latter calculated as trade-weighted averages of inflation in each country's trading partners. The analysis employs an iterative procedure which tests for breaks in regression coefficients and the residual variance, taking account of outliers. In a dynamic model where monthly domestic consumer price inflation depends on country-specific global inflation, breaks are found in both coefficients and variances for all countries examined, using a sample period of 1970 to 2010. In particular, positive and typically strengthening contemporaneous relationships are found between domestic and global inflation, for both the aggregate and the components of core, energy and food inflation. For a number of European countries and also Canada, increased co-movement operates through core inflation, with food and energy sometimes important, with the latter group including the US.

Abstract: The oceans, bounded by the atmosphere, lithosphere and shore, and covering 70% of the Earth's surface remain a poorly understood component of the Earth system. The changing climate, ocean circulation and chemistry, and depletion of ocean life are increasing at an alarming rate, largely a consequence of human activities. It is imperative to improve public understanding of the changes, consequences and possible future options, and to develop responsive informed public policies. A more quantified scientific database is required not achieved from a century of investigations using buoys, battery operated instruments and ship-based investigations. Advent of the first cabled ocean observatories (e.g. in Canada (NEPTUNE Canada, VENUS), US (OOI, MARS), Japan (DONET), China, Taiwan (MACHO), and European Union (EMSO)) demonstrates challenges, benefits, opportunities and added values for ocean science and commercial applications. Introducing abundant power and high bandwidth communications into diverse ocean environments allows: discrimination between short and long-term events, interactive experiments, real-time data/imagery, and complex multidisciplinary teams interrogating vast interoperable databases over decades. Cabled observatories will transform ocean sciences, with a progressive wiring of the oceans. NEPTUNE Canada completed installation of the subsea infrastructure with over 100 instruments in 2009-10, establishing the world's first regional cabled observatory (northeast Pacific; 800km backbone cable, with five nodes on the coast, continental slope, abyssal plain, and ocean-spreading ridge (100-2660m)). Principal scientific themes are: plate tectonic processes and earthquake-tsunami dynamics; seabed fluid fluxes and gas hydrates; ocean/climate dynamics and biotic effects; deep-sea ecosystem dynamics; engineering/computational research. New knowledge, scientific interpretations, and policy applications are addressing: ocean/climate change, ocean acidification, mitigating natural hazards, non-renewable and renewable natural resources. Socio-economic benefits include: resource/hazard/environmental management, sovereignty, security, transportation, data services, and public policy.

Bio: Chris Barnes is Professor Emeritus in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, and was Director of NEPTUNE Canada (2001-11), the world's first regional cabled ocean observatory network. For the previous decade, he served as Director of both the Centre for Earth and Ocean Research and the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He has a PhD in Geology from the University of Ottawa. He served as Chair of Earth Sciences both at the University of Waterloo, Ontario (1975-81) and at Memorial University of Newfoundland (1981-87); from 1987-89, he was the Director General of the Sedimentary and Marine Branch of the Geological Survey of Canada. He has served as President of the Geological Association of Canada, the Canadian Geoscience Council, and the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada; and as a commissioner of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, as a member of the International Ocean Drilling Program, and on the Science Advisory Committees of EuroSITES, two Spanish ocean observatories, and Canada's Ocean Tracking Network. Fellowship has been awarded in the Royal Society of Canada and the National Academy of Sciences, Cordoba, Argentina. In 1996, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.

1.30pm Murray Smith - Generalising the clique-Coclique bound

2.00pm Aaron Maynard - Extending Burnside's theorem to the infinite case

2.30pm Benjamin Breadsell - Dynamics of a fishing pole

Controversy continues to surround national student assessment in Australia. However, I argue that testing is neither good nor bad: the devil lies in what people – teachers, school, systems and even parents – do about the tests and the data they generate. I report the experiences of principals, teachers and curriculum consultants in one educational authority to describe how responsibility for interrogating, interpreting and applying data has gradually shifted from an external top-down approach to an internal bottom-up model in a planned, sustained and centrally supported manner, during the past eight years.