What's On at UWA

This workshop will discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the different items in the SPOT questionnaire, look at how to interpret ones report and explore strategies that could be utilised to improve these areas of teaching and discuss a range of tips and strategies to collect feedback other than the institutional approaches already in use at UWA.

The Seminar: Cyril will present data of the first field study looking at how energy balance and foraging efficiency vary as a function of various socio-ecological factors (dominance rank, group size, reproductive state, habitat etc.) in a folivorous/herbivorous primate. Energy balance of individual females in a wild population of mountain gorillas in Rwanda was measured using observational data of food intake and travel distances as well as measurements of urinary C-peptide concentrations. He also tentatively explores how gorillas respond to and cope with toxins in their diet.

The Speaker: Cyril completed his PhD degree in biological anthropology in 2009 at the University of Zurich/Switzerland, supervised by Prof. Carel van Schaik. His research was aimed at understanding the evolutionary determinants of multilevel societies in primates and included 20 months of observations of wild snub-nosed monkeys in China, complemented with comparative cross-species analyses. Subsequently he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig/Germany and conducted a field study on the feeding ecology of mountain gorillas in Rwanda between 2009 and 2010 in collaboration with the Karisoke Research Center. In April 2011, he took up a position as an Assistant Professor in the School of Anatomy, Physiology & Human Biology, UWA.

His primary research interests include the evolution of primate sociality and the mechanisms that maintain social cohesion. His particular interests revolve around the evolution of “super-” or “ultra-sociality” which describes cases in which individuals of different social units interact and collaborate to varying degrees and in some cases form higher-level groupings such as multilevel societies. He is currently involved in ongoing projects on snub-nosed monkeys in China.

International Health experts will be speaking about the benefits of cognitve and physical exercise across the life course. Topics covered include- o Physical activity as a 'product': Time to sell it like Coke? o Exercise and Cognitive Function o Children and Exercise o Exercise to reduce falls in older people- what works, and barriers and facilitators to engaging older people in exercise

Clint Bracknell - Songs from the South: The Wirlomin Project and Southern Noongar Song

Aboriginal people, language and song inform a rich sense of place in Australia. Wirlomin Noongar people from the southwest are in the process of claiming, consolidating, enhancing and sharing their endangered cultural heritage. In this context, I will examine the value of community-driven Aboriginal language revitalisation and the potential function of local Aboriginal song idioms in broader cultural sustainability activities.

Makoto Takao - Glocal Emotion: Performative Practices of Jesuit Conversion in Early Modern Japan

This thesis will explore Jesuit conversion policy in Japan during the Christian Century (1540-1650). It will specifically analyse the means by which performative practices were employed as a way of fostering faith through the use of music, drama, and visual arts. These modes of communication embody inherent emotive potency, and the measure of their success can be best identified as degrees of affectivity amongst the converted.

The Co-op UWA May Clearance Sale from Wednesday May 1st

Clearance stock of fiction, non-fiction and academic reference titles at $10, $5.95, $5 and $2. Co-op members also receive Member discount off Sale Prices.

Last shipment of grey, navy and black UWA Hoodies on sale @ $39.95

Monitoring of the ice shelf and sub-ice shelf ocean temperatures represents an important component towards understanding ice sheet stability and the potential for rapid sea level rise.Continuous monitoring is challenging due to difficult surface access, the difficulties to penetrate through the ice shelf, and the need for the long term operation of non-recoverable sensors.

During November 2011, two instrumented moorings were installed through the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica at Windless Bight to develop rapid, light-weight drilling and near-continuous fiber-optic temperature monitoring methods. A combination of ice coring for the upper portion of each shelf borehole, followed by a hot-point drill for penetration into the ocean, was employed.

The boreholes provided temporary access to the ice-shelf cavity, into which Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) fiber-optic cables and conventional pressure/temperature transducers were installed. The DTS moorings provided near-continuous in time and depth (1-m interval) observations of ice and ocean temperatures to a depth of almost 800 m beneath the ice-shelf surface. Data received via telemetry to date document the presence of near-freezing waters throughout the cavity during November through January, followed by the influx warmer Ross Sea surface waters reaching approximately 150 m beneath the ice-shelf base during February and March. The cyclic return to isothermal conditions was complete by May.

In this talk, we begin with an overview of DTS physics, followed by a detailed look at the installation methods, instrument package design, mooring cable design,power supply and challenges that arose during the year long deployment.

Following a brief discussion of the data processing tools need to achieve high resolution, we present an analysis of entrance and exit of warm sub-shelf waters and their sources. We close with examples of several related DTS experiments in snow dynamics, aquatic ecosystem restoration and soil moisture monitoring, as well as an overview of the US National Science Foundation's community user facility for DTS.

About the speaker

Dr Scott Tyler is a Foundation Professor of Hydrogeology at the University of Nevada, Reno with appointments in the Department of Geologic Sciences and Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is the director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Transformative Environmental Monitoring Programs; a community instrument facility for DTS.

He is past editor of Water Resources Research, former chair of the Geologic Society of America’s Hydrogeology Division and incoming chairman of the board for the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences.

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

****All Welcome****

A public lecture by Professor Paul Hills, The Courtauld Institute of Art.

If, as the linguist John Lyons has argued, individual colours as distinct from colour as a whole, ‘are the product of the lexical and grammatical structure of particular languages’, the question I wish to raise with reference to Venetian art and culture of the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is how language directs attention by rendering particular named tints salient in consciousness. How did language divide up the manifold experience of colour in the city, and of the artefacts and artistic representations produced in it? In what ways did the lexicon and grammatical usage of colour terms change or expand in the period between about 1480 and 1580, and what does this imply about patterns of discrimination? And what can the Venetian evidence tell us about which comes first, lexical invention or diversification in manufactures such as polychrome silks. What in short is the relation between the materials of colour, their use in representations such as oil painting, and linguistic practices?

Paul Hills is well known for his publications on light and colour in Italian Renaissance art. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York; at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies; and at the Royal College of Art. In 2003 Hills was appointed Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at the Courtauld, and took up a permanent post there in 2004. In July 2012 he was appointed Emeritus Professor.

Cost: Free, but RSVP essential via http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/hills

Free 50min Concert every Thursday during Semester at 1:10pm

What is the relationship between Higher Education and Social Justice? Is there one? Does Higher Education promote social justice in society or, rather, does it create social injustice? These troubling questions are the ones we attempt to address in our recent publication ‘Social Justice and Higher Education’ (Baillie et al, 2012, Engineering and Social Justice, London). We decided to explore these questions in more detail by interviewing a range of educators from all over the world about their views on this topic. As we chose not to define what we meant by social justice the conversations were very rich and diverse, prompting many insights into the working experience of the respondents. We did not conduct these interviews as a traditional researcher might. The project became more of a long, ongoing conversation and the resulting, illustrated book, is authored by us all, including the artist whose interpretations of our conversations added extra depth and insight. The responses ranged from the belief that HE can enhance social justice in society to the view that HE is inherently based on unjust principles and alternatives are needed now. This seminar will share some of these views to provoke broader discussion about changes in the role of HE in society.

PLEASE BE ADVISED: - THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

In contemporary South Korean society, appearances matter. The sheer scale of the practice as well as the types of plastic surgeries suggests that South Korea, like many other postindustrial nations of the world, is now part of a wider global makeover culture that is driven by the constant need to improve and maintain one’s physical appearance. In South Korea, the discourses that seek to justify the practice go beyond pointing to positive psychological effects of a successful surgery, and present it as an object of investment where the ‘right’ appearance is increasingly seen to correspond to social capital. The career-related rewards for engaging with successful cosmetic surgical results are certainly far from hypothetical. Yet in the context of South Korean popular media discourses, these discourses are not simply grounded in Western individualism, but are also necessitated by the affective, intersubjective gaze of a social group (whether it be the family or other group that the subject identifies with) which promotes a view that the individual subject’s body is also representative of the collective body of that group. Reflecting this, the narrative logic deployed in popular media and in TV makeover programmes assert that cosmetic surgery is not evidence of vanity, but quite the contrary, a positive proof of willingness to invest in self in consideration of others. Within this context, somatic subjectivity obtained through engagement with surgery is seen as an expression of moral self, rather than suggesting lack thereof. Through an analysis of the narrative logic deployed in a South Korean cosmetic surgery makeover programme Let Me In, this paper will analyse how popular discourses of cosmetic surgery present beauty as an index of social inclusion through pathologising non-standard appearance as evidence of moral deficiency . Cosmetic surgery, on the other hand, is presented as a solution to the discursively created problem of social exclusion that allows surgically enhanced beauty to emerge not as a sign of vanity but as evidence of desirable moral attitude, which is quite literally embodied/imbedded in the images of the subject’s healed, postoperative body. I conclude by suggesting that these cultural discourses of cosmetic surgery, which seek to normalise artificially enhanced bodies, cannot be taken simply as signs of ‘Westernisation’, but as a symptom of a much wider process of shifts in emerging epistemological discourses of how self is understood in relation to the other in contemporary South Korean society.

Metacirculants were introduced by Alspach and Parsons in 1982 and have been a rich source of various topics since then, including the Hamiltonian path problem of vertex-transitive graphs. A metacirculant has a vertex-transitive metacyclic subgroup of automorphisms, and a long-standing curious question in the area is if the converse statement is true, namely, whether a graph with a vertex-transitive metacyclic automorphism group is a metacirculant. We shall answer this question in the negative.

Special talk during Honey Week 2013

Scott Stephens of ABC Religion and Ethics will speak on "The Missing Middle: How we lost our sense of the Good (and our sense of God along with it)." This is one of several events commemorating C.S.Lewis and his impact. One of 2013 UWA CHaplain's International Lecture series.

An Institute of Advanced Studies Short Course Professor Peter W.B. Phillips,Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan.

In a time of fiscal restraint and economic slowdown, governments around the world are looking to technological innovation as one solution to their problems. National and regional governments in Australia, Canada, the EU and US have all targeted a portion of their stimulus efforts to sustain or accelerate investments in new technologies. The difficulty has been deciding how much to invest, where to invest and what specific applications should be supported. Traditional evaluation tools offer partial answers at best.

This Short Course is designed for both practitioners and researchers interested in policy, program and project evaluation. The course will be grounded in the evaluation literature in the policy field, to set objective goals for the evaluation process. The course will then examine the choices and decision criteria for both ex ante and ex post evaluations. Participants from university researchers, postgraduate students (including honours) as well as from industry, government and NGOs are encouraged to attend. Over the course of the day participants will be encouraged to test their own interests (e.g. specific policies, programs or projects) against the various evaluation theories to determine which method(s) would offer the greatest insight.

Cost: Free, but registration is essential and places are limited. To register a place visit: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/masterclass/phillips

Louise Devenish (DMA candidate)

“This presentation will outline some of the public health challenges facing Australia, discuss the role of advocacy, and describe campaigns that have helped to change policy, behaviour and public health in Australia”.

Brief bio.

Mike Daube is Professor of Health Policy at Curtin University, where he is Director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute and the McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth. Before moving to Curtin in 2005 he was Director General of Health for Western Australia and Chair of the National Public Health Partnership.

He has been active nationally and internationally as a campaigner on public health issues, and has led a range of innovative public health programs. His current roles include President of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health and Co-Chair of the National Alliance for Action on Alcohol. He was Chair of the Australian Government’s Expert Committee that recommended tobacco plain packaging and other components of the program now in place. He has published widely, has been a consultant for WHO, international health organisations and governments in more than thirty countries, and has received numerous awards for his work including recently the American Cancer Society’s Luther Terry Distinguished Career Award.

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

****All Welcome****

The Seminar: Advances in scanning geometries, detectors and computer vision are providing increasing detail in medical imaging, including dynamic 3-dimensional (3D) rendering allowing the user to view 3D structures of interest on a monitor. However, the interface between computer vision and pattern recognition by the brain has limitations. For example, when examining tactile objects rapid changes in orientation in respect to a light source provides multiple images for the visual cortex to ‘render’ for pattern recognition. The capacity to handle an object also provides tactile information. These limitations to computer vision are well known and considerable effort is being directed at developing virtual reality systems where the operator is immersed in the computer image in attempt to provide enhanced perception. These systems are cumbersome, slow and expensive. An alternative is to construct an accurate tactile model of the structures of interest. This is now possible with the development of rapid protypying systems where volumes rendered from 3D medical images can be processed into tactile models. Models are portable, can be sterilised, and mechanically altered. These attributes make them most useful as surgical aides providing detailed diagnostic anatomical information, as a means to assist with surgical navigation and trialling surgical procedures. For these reasons the Cranio-Maxillo-Facial unit at Princess Margaret Hospital obtained a rapid prototyping technology since 2002. This technology coupled with 3D surface scanners, reverse engineering software and haptic virtual clay tools provides a comprehensive surgical planning facility. This facility is now providing planning support for complex craniofacial reconstructive procedures for both paediatric and adult patients. This presentation will outline some of the in-house developments and workflows employed from diagnostic imaging, virtual surgical planning through to intra-operative navigation illustrated by case studies.

The Speaker: Mark is a graduate of the School of Anatomy and Human Biology obtaining BSc (Hons) and MSc by research. His primary research focus is bone biology with particular emphasis on craniofacial dental-skeletal dynamics. For the past decade he has been establishing computer assisted surgical planning facility in the Cranio-Maxillo-Facial and Cleft Lip &Palate Units at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children. This facility is equipped with a range of 3-dimensional scanners; laser and optical stereophotogrammetry systems; haptic devices; 3D printer and polygon editing facilities. In consultation with oral-maxillo-facial and plastic & reconstructive surgeons Mark has developed workflows utilising these technologies to provide a comprehensive surgical planning facility that can render and fuse 3D medical images of different modalities to reverse engineer a 3D virtual patient, produce anatomical models, plan surgeries, design and manufacture patient specific surgical navigational aids. Most recently this facility has been developing spatially dense geometric morphometric synthesis of 3D faces that now can provide a statistical 3D rendering of normalisation of patient faces to be incorporated into the virtual patient environment to assist surgical planning.

Free 50min Concert every Thursday during Semester at 1:10pm

from the wheatbelt to the Murchison in the path of Surveyor Robert Austin’s 1854 expedition.

An Inquiring Minds Lecture by Stephen Hopper, Winthrop Professor of Biodiversity,The University of Western Australia.

In this talk, Professor Hopper will present a modern journey taken from the central wheatbelt to the Murchison goldfields in the path of Surveyor Robert Austin’s 1854 expedition. The team comprised staff from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Kings Park and Botanic Garden, a consultant landscape ecologist and a Noongar elder.

Cost: Free, but RSVP essential.

To register a place visit http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/stephen-hopper