What's On at UWA

Organizations need to know how to motivate and engage their employees in a healthy fashion (i.e., preserving or enhancing their well-being). A large number of organizations send their managers to leadership training, even though we know surprisingly little about its impact on employee motivation, performance, and well-being. We developed the Motivational Leadership Training Program, based on existing and popular training programs, to examine the mediational role of work motivation in the relationship between leadership training and changes in employee performance and well-being. Grounded in the theory of full-range leadership and self-determination theory, the program was tested through a quasi-experimental design including pre/post-tests to evaluate its impact on subordinate motivation, performance, and well-being. Preliminary results showed little improvement in leadership style and in employee motivation following training, though some moderators were found. However, it is clear from longitudinal multilevel path modeling that the leadership style adopted by managers had a strong influence on their employees’ work motivation.

Stephen Benfall: The Music of John Exton: An investigation into the factors that shaped his compositions in the years 1972 - 1979.

Naomi Smout: Reflections on performing 20th cenury Argentine Piano music

This two day workshop will be structured into discrete modules along the following lines and will be presented in an interactive manner, by both UWA and external presenters:

• UWA IP Policies and Processes

• IP and IP Protection

• Assessing Commercial Potential

• Commercialisation Models and Leveraging your IP

• Agreements - Why are they Important?

• Case Studies

• Break-out session “What’s the Commercial Potential of my Research?”

TARGET PARTICIPANTS The workshop is aimed at UWA postgraduate research students who are keen to learn more about research commercialisation.

COSTS The Office of Industry and Innovation will cover the costs of the workshop, meals and accommodation. Please note that a cancellation fee of $100 may apply for non-attendees.

TIMING AND LOCATION The ‘Developing Commercialisation Skills Workshop’ will be held on 18 and 19 September 2013 at the Club Capricorn Resort and Conference Centre, Two Rocks Road, Yanchep.

NOMINATIONS Students will need to obtain approval from their supervisor and Head of School. The number of participants is capped at 30.

REGISTRATION Complete the registration form available from Rosanna Marchesani ([email protected]) or on the OII website (see link below) and submit by Friday 19 July 2013 to Rosanna Marchesani, OII UWA M462.

Understanding the drivers of phytoplankton composition and abundance is important for the management of water quality in reservoirs. In the Republic of Singapore, the construction of coastal barrages in recent years has seen several low-lying estuaries converted into shallow reservoirs to secure water supply. However, research on these types of systems has been limited to date.

Marina Reservoir became operational in 2008 following the completed construction of a barrage that separates the former Marina Estuary from the Singapore Strait. Subsequent to a two year adjustment phase during which saline water from the former estuary was flushed from the reservoir, the nutrient concentrations in this shallow reservoir stabilised and the downstream waters became dominated by nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria.

However, in the upstream regions of the reservoir, which are more influenced by inflow waters, the phytoplankton composition is dominated by green algae and diatoms. The CWR field team surveyed Marina reservoir in February 2012, which was a period of low inflow. Results from these measurements will be presented to demonstrate the relationship between inflows and short-term changes in phytoplankton composition and abundance.

In particular, by using fluorescent spectral data and principal component analysis (PCA) to measure phytoplankton composition at fine spatial scales, it will be shown that the distributions of different phytoplankton assemblages in the reservoir are closely related to transitions between inflow waters and reservoir waters.

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

****All Welcome****

When making assessments, questions such as the following are often not examined: What is the difference between an exceptionally good piece of assessment and a poor piece of assessment? Over and above testing, what have students learned and retained, and what should assessment offer the students? How often and in what form should assessment take place? What is the relationship between feedback and assessment? When and how often should formative and summative assessment be utilised? What role does well-designed assessment have in minimising the potential for plagiarism? These and other crucial elements of good assessment will be examined in this workshop, for the purposes of critiquing (for better or worse) actual assessment.

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

Mini International Rock Art Symposium

We are pleased to announce the following speakers:

Dr Sam Challis, Rock Art Research Institute, South Africa "Rock art, interaction and creolization on the South African colonial frontier"

Dr Catherine Namono, Rock Art Research Institute, South Africa "Understanding Meaning in the Pygmy rock art of Central Africa"

Dr Fernando Berrojalbiz, UNAM, Mexico "La Cueva De Las Mulas and the Tepehuans of Northern Mexico: new times, new messages and new landscapes"

Abstract: In general, it is illegal for businesses who are in competition with one another to jointly negotiate with suppliers or customers. However, in some jurisdictions, farmers are exempt from these rules and can form 'collective selling groups' to negotiate with processors.

There are two types of farmer seller group. In the US, seller groups are able to act like cartels, and restrict members' output. In the EU and Australia, seller groups have limits on their size and are not allowed to restrict output. However, they can jointly bargain on behalf of members.

This paper considers the economic effects of collective selling by farmers under EU and Australian law. We develop a simple model involving imperfect competition between processors to buy farmers' output and allow farmers to form a seller group, subject to a legally imposed constraint on size. We show how collective selling effects the market outcome for both members of the seller group and for 'outsiders'. In particular, we show that collective selling by some farmers can either benefit or harm farmers who remain outside the seller group, depending on the interaction between processors and spot markets for farmers' output. We also analyse the welfare implications of collective selling.

During the last twenty years, over one hundred citizen’s voluntary organisations have travelled back and forth from Japan to desertifying areas in Northern China to plant trees. The arrival of these groups in Northern China in the 1990s coincided with increased international engagement by Japanese citizens’ organisations, and by the proliferation of organizations specifically dedicated to addressing global environmental problems. Japanese observers have claimed that environmental good-works such as ryokuka katsudo (literally, ‘greenification activities’) by Japanese citizens in China can have a softening influence on Japan-China relations, in addition to their positive environmental impact. To better understand the above claim, between April and June 2013 I participated in ryokuka katsudo with three Japanese non-profit groups (in Shanxi province and Inner Mongolia) and interviewed leaders and participants from Japanese environmental (mostly ryokuka) citizens organisations responding to China’s desertification, Sino-Japanese civil society experts in Tokyo, and officials from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) based in Beijing. In this presentation I will draw on material from these interviews as well as my book- and internet-based research to distinguish ‘transnational’ and ‘national’ aspects of Japanese environmental outreach in China (outlining the problems and achievements of Japanese citizen’s environmental groups there in terms of these two general categories), in order to help to both explain and question its potential role in Japan-China relations.

Abstract:

This is just a survey talk of various ways to construct all of the known finite generalised quadrangles starting with a group and a configuration of subgroups of that group. In particular, the speaker will give a summary of where one of the "retreat" problems is at.

If you want to explore the commercialisation opportunities for your research, we can help.

Come along to the Office of Industry and Innovation’s free postgraduate full-day workshop and find out more.

The objectives of the workshop are to provide UWA postgraduate students a good understanding of intellectual property and commercialisation practices as they relate to university-based research. The workshop will feature both UWA and external presenters.

The day will be structured into discrete modules along the following lines and will be presented in an interactive manner:

. Introduction to Technology Transfer

. Pathways to Commercialisation

. Intellectual property and Patents

. Research at UWA - the Importance of Postgraduate Research

. Invention Disclosures Explained

. Workshop style case studies

The Workshop is free for UWA postgraduate students. Lunch and refreshments will also be provided.

RSVPs are essential by Friday 14 September 2013 to Rosanna Marchesani, [email protected], or 6488 7172.

The Lung Institute of WA invites you to a free seminar on: "Role of gene networks in asthma" by Dr Anthony Bosco, Immunology & Genomics, Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. A light lunch will be served from 12.00pm with a 12.30pm – 1.30pm presentation.

Focused visual attention is a mechanism by which relevant visual information is selectively prioritised for further processing. Given this vital role, focused attention is essential for the efficient visual perception of a world that is not only richly varied, but also continually changing. Great strides have been made in understanding the shifting of focused attention from one object or location to another, but relatively little is known about an independent and equally critical component of attentional control – attentional focusing.

The term attentional focusing refers to the fact that the focus of attention flexibly expands and contracts in spatial extent to encompass larger or smaller objects or regions of space. Despite the relative lack of research on focusing, it profoundly affects many aspects of visual perception and has substantial ramifications for cognition. In this seminar, I will present data on three inter-related aspects of attentional focusing: the spatiotemporal dynamics of focusing, object representations and their role in focusing, and the consequences of focusing on visual processing.

Chris Budhan: Jazz, education and the music business

Akshay Venkatesh (Stanford) Mahler Lecturer and IAS Professor-at-Large

will speak on

The Cohen-Lenstra heuristics: from arithmetic to topology and back again.

at 11am in the Science Library Access Grid room.



I will discuss some models of what a "random abelian group" is, and some conjectures (the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics of the title) about how they show up in number theory. I'll then discuss the function field setting and a proof of these heuristics, with Ellenberg and Westerland. The proof is an example of a link between analytic number theory and certain classes of results in algebraic topology ("homological stability").

The DOW owns and operates an extensive network of monitoring bores and gauging stations throughout Western Australia and also holds copious amounts of data collected on a project-by-project basis. Each year the Department services around 3,000 water data requests through a process which is entirely manual. Stakeholders typically wait a minimum of 10 business days for their data.

In 2009 it was estimated that the annual value of commercial projects for which DOW’s water data was used was $1.092 billion. With funding from the Royalties for Regions Program – the DOW has developed a web-based WIR (Water Information Reporting) portal.

WIR is a free service aimed at water professionals which allows the self-service of water data from DOW’s WIN and Hydstra databases - for the State of Western Australia. WIR encompasses more than 115,000 sites and over 60 million measurements. The WIR portal uses a spatial interface for selecting sites of interest and provides the water data requested in minutes of request.

Lindsay will demonstrate WIR operation at the session. WIR will be launched sometime in September or October 2013 and attendees to the session will be able to register their interest with the presenter, who will notify them by e-mail when WIR is available for use.



About the speaker

Lindsay Preece is a Chartered Accountant with more than 30 years experience in the public and private sectors. In government Lindsay has worked for 13 agencies and most recently held key positions at the Department of Planning and at the Department of Water. At Planning, Lindsay was the Secretary to the Western Australian Planning Commission. Currently Lindsay leads Water Information and Modelling within the Department of Water. Lindsay’s Top 20 customers include Commonwealth, State and Local Governments, Universities and their students, Mining Companies, Land Use Planners, Engineering, Environmental and Water Consultants. He represents Western Australia on a number of national committees – most recently providing technical input into the development of the Australian Water Accounting Standard and the exposure draft Australian Water Accounting Assurance standard (for public comment).

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

****All Welcome****

The 2013 Mahler Lecture by Akshay Venkatesh, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University.

Surprisingly, there have been fundamental new discoveries about prime numbers in the last decade, most recently by Yitang Zhang a few months ago. In this lecture, Professor Venkatesh will survey some of our understanding of prime numbers in a nontechnical fashion, starting with the “music of the primes” - the strange oscillations between regions where primes are more common and more scarce - and concluding with a discussion of Zhang’s discovery: prime numbers must occasionally come very close to one another.

Cost: Free, but RSVP essential to http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/akshay-venkatesh

The Seminar: Aging is accompanied by a decline in the homeostatic and regenerative capacity of all tissues and organs and it is generally associated with a decline in stem cell function. Muscle aging, in particular, is characterized by the reduction of tissue mass and function, which are particularly prominent in individuals undergoing sarcopenia. The age-associated muscle wasting is also associated with a decline in regenerative ability and a reduction in resident muscle stem cell (satellite cell) number and function. Specifically, our goals are: 1- To gain insight into the mechanisms regulating satellite cell behavior during physiological aging and muscle regeneration. 2- To investigate pathways that may lead to maintenance or loss of muscle mass in the adult. We will discuss our recent findings on both research lines.

The Speaker: Pura Muñoz-Cánoves studied Pharmacology in the University of Valencia. She obtained her PhD in 1990 for work carried out at The Scripps Research Institute, and did postdoctoral work at the University of California-San Diego and The Scripps Research Institute, and in 1994 she joined the Cancer Research Institute in Barcelona as a postdoc, becoming an independent group leader in 1997. In 2002 her group moved to the Centre de Regulació Genòmica in Barcelona, and she became a senior scientist in 2006 in that Institution. In late 2008 she moved to the Pompeu Fabra University after becoming an ICREA Research Professor. At present, she is a Cell Biology and ICREA Professor at the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University. Her research focuses on the mechanisms regulating skeletal muscle regeneration and growth both in physiological and in pathological conditions. Muscle fiber degeneration and loss of muscle mass occurs in multiple settings, including cancer, cachexia, neuromuscular disorders (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy –DMD) and during aging, remaining a key factor contributing to morbidity. Understanding the molecular pathways that regulate muscle stem cell-dependent regeneration and gain/loss of muscle mass is therefore crucial for treating muscle wasting-associated disorders, and a major goal of the laboratory.

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

Featuring musicians and dancers from the Indonesian Institute of Arts, Denpasar

A public lecture Ed Jocelyn, Director of Red Rock Treks & Expeditions.

This public lecture draws on five years' personal experience in developing environmentally and culturally sensitive tourism programs in Yunnan Province, Southwest China. Prefering to work with local communities rather than commercial and government agencies, and spending extended periods in fragile mountain environments, obliges one to confront the scale and pace of environmental and cultural destruction in China today. This lecture seeks to explore the forces driving that destruction and, more importantly, consider the potential role of commercially oriented, grassroots-based initiatives as a counter to the prevailing sense of inevitability. The dominant model of “conservation” in China sees the natural environment as static, preferring to deny access to areas of natural beauty and preserve cultures as museum pieces and officially validated “performances”. By contrast, this talk posits a dynamic model in which tourism plays a key role in the revalorization of natural and cultural resources. Rather than commodifying esoteric cultural artefacts for sale to outsiders, this model proposes focussing on the outward-looking, exchange-oriented aspects of traditional cultures as the key points of development.

Cost: Free but RSVP required - http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/jocelyn