What's On at UWA

Over the past four decades an abundance of research has been dedicated towards delineating the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin explicit facial expression recognition. We have a considerably poorer understanding of the manner in which we use the information depicted in facial expressions to guide our subsequent behaviour. Developing our understanding of the processes that underlie the way in which facial expressions influence behaviour is particularly important, given that individuals in many clinical conditions show the co-existence of abnormal social behaviour and facial expression recognition impairments. This talk will discuss recent research that has explored how we use facial expressions to guide decisions relevant to our social behaviour, in this case, judging how approachable another person is – and the impact that context and social anxiety have on these judgements. Finally, this talk will also discuss new research examining how facial expressions influence an individual’s confidence and task performance, which has important implications for understanding behaviour in employment and educational settings.

Person Perception Seminars - ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition & its Disorders

The course is designed for people with knowledge of basic statistics who want to learn more about regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA).

The course is hosted by the Centre for Applied Statistics and we offer discounted rate fees to UWA Graduate Research Students.

Fee information is available on our website cas.maths.uwa.edu.au. Please register online.

The Annual Lecture is the highlight of the year for the UWA Historical Society and Convocation and we are delighted to welcome Winthrop Professor Cheryl Praeger to the podium to reflect upon her years on Campus and subsequent experiences and achievements.

Mathematician Cheryl Praeger has served the University of Western Australia as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Professor since 1976. She leads a flourishing research group in pure mathematics and is in the top one per cent of highly cited mathematicians in the world.

Attendance is free.

The course is designed for people with knowledge of basic statistics who want to learn more about how to analyse binary or survival data.

The course is hosted by the Centre for Applied Statistics and we offer discounted rate fees to UWA Graduate Research Students.

Fee information is available on our website http://www.cas.maths.uwa.edu.au/courses. Please register online.

BHP Billiton is a leading global resources company and is committed to respecting the environment and communities in which it operates.

This information evening will be an opportunity to learn more about the BHP Billiton Scholarships and to meet with the current and past recipients, as well as BHP Billiton Executives. Light refreshments included.

RSVP: www.business.uwa.edu.au/school/eventregistration

On the 1st of July 2012 UWA switched its online research opportunities database from COS (Community of Science) to PIVOT. PIVOT quickly and easily allows you to customise your online research profile so that you will be among the first to hear about relevant grant and funding opportunities. Also, PIVOT provides a feature to define ‘saved searches’ for automatic alerts on new funding opportunities corresponding to your research strengths. To introduce you to the functionalities of the system and also to show you how you can ‘claim’ your own profile, Mark Wilson from ProQuest will visit UWA and present PIVOT to the wider UWA research community.

UWA opens up the whole campus to the public.

Come and find out about the courses on offer, career options, scholarship opportunities, our valuable research, community programs and facilities.

There's also residential college tours, hands-on activities, live music and entertainment, and plenty of fun activities for the whole family.

The presentation is concerned with alternative ways to achieve equality policy objectives - drawing upon unrelated areas such as dietary health or workplace health and safety. It is based on current inter-disciplinary work with the UK Government to generate practical insights to inform policy and institutional design. It begins by assessing how well - and why - interventions work to mitigate public harm or detriment in other unrelated spheres (such as public health, food safety, professional standards and financial regulation). Citing the public interest, government and regulatory agencies are able to utilise such knowledge to deliver safer homes, more punctual pupils, healthier diets, cleaner streets, and so on. It then looks at how far attitudinal change and behavioural change are interconnected, and specifically the degree to which attitudinal change serves as a pre-requisite to behavioural change. For instance, securing a legal framework that creates minimum standards of fire safety in workplaces or homes may be influenced by public attitudes but is certainly not dependent on such settled public attitudes to start with. Indeed, legislation, and what this requires of employers and households in practice, can have a demonstration effect, normalising behavioural change in the process. And attitudinal change alone is unlikely to drive behavioural change and may be unwanted or unnecessary in any case, particularly where the potential citizen detriment is hard to spot by individuals themselves. Finally, it considers the implications for policymaking in three regards: first, optimally blending incentives and sanctions to sustain behavioural change relevant to equalities outcomes; second, mapping relationships between background factors that indirectly shape decision-making and choices and foreground factors that can be influenced through policy; and third, targeting policy instruments at hard-to-move individuals, groups and interests.

Professor Ron McCallum is renowned nationally and internationally for his work in labour law. As Emeritus Professor of Labour Law at the University of Sydney, Ron teaches labour law and litigation at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He was the University's foundation Blake Dawson Waldron Professor in Industrial Law and served a five-year term as Dean of the Faculty of Law. He has also taught labour law in Canada and the USA. He has published many books on the subject as well as numerous chapters, journal articles and papers. In recognition of his life's work and expertise in labour law, he was appointed to the eminent panel reviewing the Fair Work Act for the Australian government; the panel made its report in June 2012.

Ron McCallum is the first totally blind person to have been appointed to a full professorship in any field at any university in Australia or New Zealand. In 2008 Ron was elected as Australian representative to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, of which he has been Chair since 2010. Ron was awarded a Centenary Medal by the Australian Government in 2003, and in 2006 he was made an Officer in the Order of Australia (AO). He was the 2011 Senior Australian of the Year, an honour awarded for his achievements as an equal rights campaigner, especially for persons with disabilities.

RSVP: [email protected]

Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It's the art of anticipating your opponent's next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing as you. In the 2012 Shann Memorial Lecture, Professor Dixit will combine common sense with counterintuitive theory to illustrate a new way of seeing the world. He will show how nearly every business and personal interaction - from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history - has a game theory component.

RSVP: www.business.uwa.edu.au/school/shann TIME: 6.30pm - 7.30pm (Refreshments from 5.45pm)

LIWA invites you to a free seminar on: "Patenting for medical researchers the ins and outs" by Mr Gary Cox, Chairman, Partner, Wray and Associates. Time: 12 noon for light lunch with 12.30pm – 1.30pm presentation.

Richard Heinberg, a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, will deliver a public lecture exploring the close link between the resource/environment and the social/economic components of the present global turmoil.

Richard argues that continuous growth of either population or GDP is impossible in a finite world, with both these drivers of unsustainability having now run up against nature’s biophysical limits. While the conventional wisdom is that we must get ‘the economy’ growing again, Heinberg shows that not only is this the wrong strategy, it is actually making the situation worse.

Nature—according to Richard—is now forcing humanity to a transition, one that is as profound as the transition from gatherer/hunter to settled agriculturalist 10,000 years ago.

Richard is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. His latest book, The End of Growth, follows nine others that deal with declining resources, particularly oil. His books have been translated into eight languages. Richard is a recipient of the M. King Hubbert Award for Excellence in Energy Education (2006). He has appeared in a number of documentaries, the most recent being Earth 2100 (2009)

An ‘Inquiring Minds’ lecture by Rod Tyers, Winthrop Professor of Economics, UWA Business School.

This lecture will review recent economic development in China and Japan and will examine the likelihood that either country will overcome barriers to further economic growth. It will draw on research using models of the global economy and associated projections of economic performance to suggest the consequences for the Australian economy during the coming decade.

Free, but RSVP required. Book a seat online (unreserved):http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/tyers

Want to go on exchange to Asia? Come along to the info session to hear specific details on studying in Asia. Meet UWA students who have studied there as well as students studying at UWA from Asia.

In October 2002, Professor Fiona Wood led a Royal Perth Hospital team treating 28 people injured in the Bali bombings. The scale of burns injuries was previously unseen by the hospital, and the exceptional situation required individuals, governments and the private sector to work together closely in coordinating evacuations and treatment. During that time, Fiona witnessed extraordinary bravery, saw incredible acts of courage and was moved by people’s will to survive. The experience inspired her to drive forward on all fronts cutting across boundaries and exploring ground-breaking and innovative research and treatments applicable in burns and other traumatic injuries.

Fiona has now established the Fiona Wood Foundation, which is built on the premise that each and every patient must be given the opportunity to achieve the best possible outcome by combining current treatments with cutting-edge research. At the breakfast, Fiona will share inspiring stories, as well as her vision for the future of burns treatment: a holistic approach encompassing community education, clinical, basic science and population health research to improve wound healing, and the associated long-term physical and psychological complications of burns.

Price: Members $45 / Guests $55 / Table of Ten $450

Price includes a two-course sit down breakfast and presentation by Fiona Wood

Whilst trade and enterprise have led Australia's bilateral relations with China, education promotes mutual understanding and long lasting links. This year's forum will focus on developing Chinese language and cultural competency in schools, universities and industry. His Excellency Mr Chen Yuming, Chinese Ambassador to Australia, will provide the keynote address and a panel of business leaders and education representatives will share their experiences.

***NOW RESCHEDULED TO 18 OCTOBER***

“Individual(s) ….embrace a new paradigm for all sorts of reasons ... . Some of these … lie outside the sphere of science entirely. Others depend upon idiosyncrasies of autobiography….” (Kuhn, 1970, p.l52). I will highlight some “idiosyncrasies of autobiography” that have led to enjoying an academic life – the opportunity to research and teach, to construct and communicate knowledge. I plan to illustrate how psychometrics, a field in which I had the opportunity to ignore or embrace an emergent, non-standard statistical paradigm, has lead beyond mathematical modelling to areas such as the philosophy of science, the sociology of knowledge and academic controversy. I plan to also illustrate the challenges in negotiating the complex world of academic research and communication.

Anne-Sophie has a Research Masters in Islamic finance (2010) from the Australian National University where she focused on the sources of variation in the application of Shariah compliant finance contracts between the Arab states of the GCC and Southeast Asia, both regional epicenters for Islamic finance. She is a PhD candidate in emerging economic thought at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in France.

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.

The annual PhD Conference in Economics and Business attracts national attention and has significantly enhanced PhD studies for a large number of students.

The Confererence was established as a response to the widespread feeling that PhD students could benefit from interacting with their peers at other universities and being exposed to a broader group of scholars. The students present papers on their research and receive comments from prominent scholars in the area. The tone of the conference is scholarly and highly professional, but constructive and supportive, with the students the focus of attention.

The conference was initiated by the UWA Business School in 1987 and is now a joint venture between UWA, the Australian National University, the University of Queensland, and from 2012 Monash University. The 25th Conference will be held at UWA in November 2012.

Over the last 25 years, the Conference has provided the opportunity to gain valuable exposure for, and feedback on, the work of around 700 PhD students from most Australian and New Zealand universities, as well as a number of prominent universities such as Chicago, MIT, Queen’s, Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics. The Conference also acts as an informal job market with major employers sending representatives to the event.

One important feature of the conference is the outstanding quality of the discussants’ comments. The student papers are circulated beforehand and discussants prepare written comments, typically devoting several days to this task. As there is substantial professional prestige in being invited to be a discussant, there are strong incentives for discussants to work hard at the conference and help the students by proving detailed comments and advise. Additionally, there is the highly-valued “Best Discussant Prize” for which the competition is vigorous.

Please see below link for more information.