What's On at UWA

The Monty Hall problem is a probability puzzle based on an American television game show. Some generalisations of the original problem are considered here: - The probability distribution is generalised from equal likelihood to an arbitrary known prior distribution, with the number of doors changed to a general n. - Optimal decision rule among a class of randomised strategies is derived. - The behaviour of the host and its consequences are taken into account. - Variations and further generalisations are considered.

These workshops will provide staff with the opportunity to further explore the themes following on from the Teaching Excellence Conference.

There will be informative, practical and collaborative sessions on: Calibration Process for assessment of learning standards;The Higher Educational Academy (HEA) Fellowship Scheme;Setting the foundations for a successful Community of Practice (CoP);Echo 360 and LinkedIn Learning

Studies show that cultural beliefs and practices influence how individuals make sense of illness and manage chronic disease. By examining Javanese women’s experiences with type 2 diabetes, this study locates communication about health in the realm of identities, norms and values, relationships and social structures that constitute and constrain health experiences. Rasa provides resources for Javanese women to coconstruct their experience with diabetes and to develop ways of managing the disease and maintaining their well-being. Their narratives revealed that rasa is a form of inner-self training that serves as a guide in dealing with life disruptions, such as illness, in four different layers. These levels are in continuum, reflecting the women’s constant negotiation and search for insights related to their identity and roles in both family and society. In the process of searching for insights, Javanese women use rasa to: 1) make sense of whether or not an individual can still perform her daily activities, 2) control one’s ability to maintain and balance roles, 3) modulate desire or motivation, and 4) guide the process of finding fit in managing type 2 diabetes.

Speaker: Kyle Rosa (University of Western Australia)

Title: Bounds for Semiprimitive Permutation Groups

Time and place: 4pm Friday 2 Nov 2018, Weatherburn LT

Abstract: Semiprimitive groups are permutation groups for which every normal subgroup is either transitive, semiregular, or both. These groups naturally generalise primitive and quasiprimitive groups, and inherit many of their structural properties. I will present the results from my master's thesis, in which I establish bounds on quantities such as order, element degree, and base size.

For abstracts and titles of seminars (upcoming and past), see http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~glasby/GroupsAndCombinatoricsSeminar/S18.html

It's important for researchers to understand their rights before entering into publishing agreements. This session, run by UWA's Copyright Librarian, will explore the rights that researchers have as authors, and will highlight some of the common publisher agreement terms to be aware of.

The Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, University of Ghana (DAHS) was established in 1951. It is now a member of the World Universities Network WUN). We have a Museum of Archaeology and the Leventis Digital Resource Centre to support our teaching and research. My talk will focus on the key undergraduate and graduate programmes of the Department and the various strategies we use in the training of more than one thousand undergraduate and 25 graduate students. I will also discuss our various field research projects over the past 15 years. While acknowledging the challenges faced by our department and for archaeological research in Ghana, the talk will showcase the opportunities for UWA archaeologists, anthropologists and heritage experts to partner with us.

Ally Workshops are open to any staff member or student who wishes to better understand the issues and needs of LBGTIQA+ staff and students, and is considering becoming an Ally.

This workshop aims to raise awareness of the life experience, issues and needs of LGBTIQA+ staff and students, with a particular focus on lived experiences in work or study on campus. Participants who complete the workshop can elect to become part of the Ally Network and help contribute to a visibly supportive culture on campus.

By the end of the workshop, participants will:

- Develop a better understanding of LBTIQA+ people, issues, and cultures

- Reflect upon their own behavior, sensitivities, and understanding in relation to LBGTIQA+ people

- Explore the process of becoming an Ally, and

- Become familiar with practical issues concerning the Ally Network, how it functions, and the role of an Ally

This workshop includes group and individual exercises, video clips, role plays, panel of members from the LGBTIQA+ community.

Please register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/uwa-ally-training-tickets-50582338135

This workshop will enable you to organise and populate your online profiles so you can you can quickly collect metrics for your application, and make the best impression possible when assessors look you up.

A public lecture by Jane Barratt, Secretary General of the International Federation on Ageing (IFA).

In our rapidly ageing world, loneliness is quickly becoming a public health crisis with significant consequences that will impact every Australian in one way or another. Improved life expectancy often brings with it the loss of family and friends, not to mention the loss of a purpose in community. Findings from the UK government commission on loneliness in 2017 showed for the first time the extent of this often-invisible yet growing social stain.

More than 9 million people in the UK often or always feel lonely, and some 200,000 older people in Britain had not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month. Loneliness does not discriminate by age, gender, community, background or wealth and most often has a negative impact on a person’s mental and physical health including increased risk of depression, anxiety and dementia, high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems.

Living in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization has not diminished rates of loneliness, for example, in the United States they have doubled since the 1980s. In Japan elder loneliness is a recognised phenomenon that has led a great number of older people—especially widows—to engage in petty theft so they can go to jail; economic difficulties being a factor, but more than anything, they do this to have someone with whom to talk and ultimately to avoid a ‘solitary death.’

Older people are not a homogeneous group but rather a growing diverse population with rich life experiences that shape the way they think and respond to loss and loneliness. This lecture will provide a glimpse into the way different countries are responding to the social situation of loneliness towards a healthier ageing population. As much as we would like to think that there is an easy answer, it goes far beyond offering someone a cup of tea.

This year's Australian Institute of Physics WA Postgraduate Student Conference will be held at the University of Western Australia on Thursday the 15th of November.

This event is open to all WA students researching in physics or physics-related subjects and is the perfect opportunity for them to meet their peers from across the state and present their research in a friendly environment.

Register by 25th October 2018.

UWA researchers are invited to participate in a Q&A Session with ARC General assessors to learn about what they are looking for when reviewing an application and how they approach the review process.

The aim of this course is to introduce you to basic statistics. It will cover descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations); data exploration; basic categorical data analysis; simple linear regression and basic analysis of variance (ANOVA). The statistical package SPSS will be used to illustrate the ideas demonstrated. The course will be held in a computer laboratory allowing participants to immediately apply the material covered through a series of practical examples.

Enroll at: http://www.cas.maths.uwa.edu.au/courses/intro-stats/

Profiles in the UWA Profiles and Research Repository are now the sole, authorised public profiles for UWA staff. They enable access to comprehensive and up to date information about UWA academic research, teaching activities, professional expertise and outputs. Find out about the features of the Repository and ensure your profile is working for you.

This talk will examine why the experience of singlehood differs in the three cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo. Professor Nakano will argue that as the state has stepped back from control over the intimate spaces of family life, families have become the primary medium through which singlehood is encouraged and supported as well as discouraged and curbed. In contrast to arguments that the rise of singlehood in Asia reflects growing individualism, she will argue that family structures and values powerfully shape single women’s happiness, well-being and sources of meaning in the three cities under study.

This lecture is presented by UWA’s Institute for Advanced Studies, the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions and the Forrest Foundation and is part of a suite of events, including the symposium 'Emotions and Intimacy in Asian Migration, Past and Present' on Friday 23 November 2018.

Facilitated by experienced Learning Designers, this one-day workshop is a great practical opportunity for new and current teaching staff at UWA to experience the unit design process.

You and your colleagues can participate in a number of sequential collaborative tasks which will allow you to explore ideas for student-centred learning as well as map out and plan the face-to-face and online elements for the unit you want to specifically focus on for this workshop.

The workshop begins at 9:30am sharp and finishes at 4:30pm. There is an expectation that participants will be present for the full day. Please answer as many of the questions at the point of registration. This extremely valuable information will be used to coordinate the best team to assist you at this workshop and during follow-up opportunities.

Tea, coffee and a light lunch will be provided.

To get the most out of this workshop we highly recommend the following:

A Unit Coordinator for the unit must attend. Unit Coordinators are encouraged to invite as many of their unit team members as possible. Please ensure all participants register. Unit Coordinators must bring agreed unit learning outcomes and the current unit outline of the chosen unit. It is important to bring your own laptop or mobile device for online development.

UWA researchers are invited to participate in a Q&A Session with ARC Detailed assessors to learn about what they are looking for when reviewing an application and how they approach the review process.

In this talk, we introduce some basics of nonlocal equations, with some applications in mind coming from physics and material sciences. In particular, the equation taken into account comes from a model, developed by Rudolf Peierls and Frank Nabarro, that describes the edge dislocation of atoms in an ideal crystal. Moreover, we present the construction of multibump, heteroclinic, homoclinic and chaotic trajectories, providing a symbolic dynamics in this framework.

Facilitated by experienced Learning Designers, this one-day workshop is a great practical opportunity for new and current teaching staff at UWA to experience the unit design process.

You and your colleagues can participate in a number of sequential collaborative tasks which will allow you to explore ideas for student-centred learning as well as map out and plan the face-to-face and online elements for the unit you want to specifically focus on for this workshop.

The workshop begins at 9:30am sharp and finishes at 4:30pm. There is an expectation that participants will be present for the full day. Please answer as many of the questions at the point of registration. This extremely valuable information will be used to coordinate the best team to assist you at this workshop and during follow-up opportunities.

Tea, coffee and a light lunch will be provided.

To get the most out of this workshop we highly recommend the following:

A Unit Coordinator for the unit must attend. Unit Coordinators are encouraged to invite as many of their unit team members as possible. Please ensure all participants register. Unit Coordinators must bring agreed unit learning outcomes and the current unit outline of the chosen unit. It is important to bring your own laptop or mobile device for online development.

A public lecture by Professor Olivier Vanderhaeghe, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse 3 and Adjunct Director of the Géosciences Environnement Toulouse (GET) laboratory and 2018 UWA Robert and Maude Gledden Senior Visiting Fellow.

Mountain belts have always intrigued human beings and were first looked with defiance as the home of the gods. They appeared as gigantic and resisting the assaults of the natural elements even though it was already understood in Ancient Greece that erosion could potentially play a major role in their destruction. More recently, it was realized that mountain belts are not so resistant and that they instead hide a hot and tender heart at the source of their decline. Indeed, the exhumed roots of orogenic belts is made of migmatites and granites, former partially molten rocks and magmas, respectively, that display a geological record attesting for an intimate link between partial melting, orogenic evolution and crustal differentiation from the rise of mountain belts to their collapse.

This lecture will present the evolution of ideas regarding the orogenic cycle and discuss the significance of examples taken through the Alpine belt s.l. from the Western Alps to the Aegean domain, through the Tibetan plateau. It will also propose some perspectives for future research on the deep roots of mountain belts.

Olivier Vanderhaeghe is a field geologist with additional expertise in structural geology, petrology, geochemistry, geochronology, tectonics, and geodynamics.

R is a free and extremely powerful language and software environment for statistical computing, data analysis, and graphics. This course is designed for those who have no experience with R, but have a basic understanding of statistics. Those without this knowledge are encouraged to attend the Introductory Statistics course first.

Enroll at: http://www.cas.maths.uwa.edu.au/courses/rbasics