What's On at UWA

R is a free and extremely powerful language and software environment for statistical computing, data analysis, and graphics. The course is designed for those who have no experience with R, but have a basic understanding of statistics. The course will include: Introduction to R: How to install R on your computer; basic R commands, how to use and understand the R help pages. Data: Reading in data and data manipulation; summarising data; basic statistical analysis and fitting linear models. Graphics and output: Basic plotting commands and how to customise your plots; how to export your plots and output in a user-friendly format. Functions: Writing simple functions and flow control structures.

Join us for casual Friday drinks to help you unwind at the end of the working week with some fellow alumni, staff, and students from the Business School.

Enjoy a refreshing ale or glass of wine, rekindle some old acquaintances or make some new ones and generally have a relaxing start your weekend. Our guest speaker will be Steve Joske CSC, Executive Director of the Australian Red Cross in Western Australia. Steve will provide an insight into how the Red Cross continues to build on its reputation for excellence in service after 100 years as a volunteer organisation in Australia.

Tickets at the door - $15 GMA members | $25 guests

Dates are 7 - 11 and 14 - 18 July 2014, 7.45 am - 5.00 pm. The holiday program provides for exciting educational days in and around the College's historic buildings and beautiful gardens. This year's entry will be expanded to cover school years 3 - 7.

The schedule starts at 7.45 each morning with breakfast in the College's Dining Hall then the day begins with a variety of activities that include the Amazing Race and Team Games, African Drumming, Cooking Lessons, Chemistry Madness, Zumba, Crime Scene at St George's and much more.

The cost is $80 per child per day casual visit or $75 per child per day for more than one child or if three or more days are booked in one week. For a booking of one week the cost is $60 per child per day. The daily price includes a high ratio of mentors to children, breakfast, lunch and tea breaks.

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

This course covers techniques that can be used to analyse data with continuous and categorical variables. The course will begin with simple linear regression and then proceed with approaches that can be used with more than two variables such as multiple regression. ANOVA with interactions and blocking will also be covered. The course will end with techniques that address the analysis of binary or ordinal variables.

The course is designed as an applied course in Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) using the Mplus software package. SEM is used widely by researchers to test complex relationships among observed (measured) and latent (unobserved) variables and subsumes other analytical techniques such as regression, path analysis, factor analysis, and canonical correlation. Mplus is rapidly becoming the program of choice for the analysis of SEMs. Mplus offers a general modelling framework that allows both the modelling of cross-sectional and longitudinal data using observed variables that are a combination of continuous and categorical variables. In addition, Mplus analyses multilevel modelling structures.

The first three days of the course will be an introduction to SEM and the Mplus program. The focus of the last two days of the course is on the analysis of more advanced SEM models.

If you are familiar with the Mplus program and have an understanding of material typically covered in an introduction to SEM course, you may choose to attend only the last two days of the course.

If you have completed an introductory course in SEM using another program (e.g., Amos, Lisrel, EQS) but have not previously used the Mplus program, you may choose to attend the first day and then the last two days of the course.

This course aims to provide you with an introduction to the facilities available in MS Excel from a statistical point of view. As well as an introduction to Excel, spreadsheet functions and graphics, it concentrates on performing basic statistical methods, producing charts and tables, and discusses the limitations of Excel when it comes to more complex statistical analysis.

The School of Population Health are running a ‘community conversation’ for people who have had, or care for someone, with heart disease, heart failure or atrial fibrillation. We are really interested in people coming along to tell us how they manage their heart disease and medicines.

Heart disease is still the number one killer of Australians. However there is strong evidence that certain medications are successful in preventing a second heart attack and improving survival. The problem is that we do not know if people continue to take their medicines for a long time after being discharged from hospital.

For practice to be evidence based, researchers need to understand what is happening with medications and heart disease. To do this it is important to hear about your experiences. We want to hear about any issues you may be experiencing as well as what you think needs to be researched in the area.

Our community conversation will take place on Wednesday 6 August 2014 between 12pm and 2.30pm in the Niche at the Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre in Nedlands. RSVP Essential.

Payment of out-of-pocket expenses and light lunch are provided. For more information or to RSVP for this event, please e-mail [email protected] or call 6488 8176 Mon – Wed or 9489 7742 Thur – Fri.

We reserve the right to make changes to the events and the right to determine the confirmed registration list.

Unicredit is committed to providing a range of benefits to employees of UWA.

As the dedicated Member Relations Manager for the UWA branch, I am available to see you at a time and place that suits you to discuss your banking needs whether they are lending, deposits or general banking.

As part of the suite of discounts and offers available, UWA employees and family have the opportunity to discuss an exclusive Home Loan offer.

This includes: •4.85% p.a. UniStaff variable rate home loan (Comparison Rate 4.85%p.a.) and a No Establishment Fee offer is current for all applications received before 30/09/2014. •Currently 0.40% p.a. lower than our current standard variable rate (5.25% p.a. as at 26/8/13). •Exclusive to UWA Staff and your families. •No monthly, maintenance or ongoing fees. •Unlimited free redraws. •100% offset facility available. •Free split loan option with an Equity Access or Fixed Rate loan. •Additional repayments available on fixed loans up to $10,000 p.a. •MemberCare Insurance options with multi-policy discounts •University staff discounts also apply on personal & car loans.

Unicredit also has Unistaff Term Deposit special rates on offer.

So please arrange a no obligation consultation to see if I can save you some money and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Join us for casual Friday drinks and a short presentation on how to maximise your MBA potential. Our guest speaker is Brian Leedman, a UWA MBA alumni member and former GMA President, who is currently an investor relations professional focusing on the biotechnology industry and co-founder of two newly ASX listed biotechnology companies, Oncosil Medical Limited (OSL) and Imugene Limited (IMU).

Tickets at the door - $15 GMA members | $25 guests

Bitcoin is a "virtual currency” made possible by the internet. One attraction for many is that the creation and use of Bitcoin as a currency is that is independent of any bank. But, is Bitcoin a valid currency or is it a speculative investment? Professor David Yermack provides an informed, unbiased perspective on this issue.

Professor Yermack is the Albert Fingerhut Professor of Finance and Business Transformation at New York University Stern School of Business and also Director, Pollack Center New York University School of Law.

Beethoven: A Tale of Triumph Concert - to be held at St George's College as part of their Spring Concert Series. The concert will see a selection from Beethoven's piano sonatas including the famous Moonlight Sonata performed by Perth's mightiest pianists! Performing: Mark Coughlan, Caroline Badnall, Raymond Yong, Anastasia Buettner-Moore, Rachel Chan, Stephen Armstrong. Free admission, bookings required.

I will be available to discuss your current or future home loan requirements all day. Either book a time or just come into the Clubs Meeting Room, 1st Floor, Guild Central Wing. Go to the Student Centre and they can direct you to the meeting room.

As the dedicated Member Relations Manager for the UWA branch, I look forward to discussing your banking needs whether they are lending, deposits or general banking.

As part of the suite of discounts and offers available, UWA employees and family have the opportunity to discuss an exclusive Home Loan offer.

This includes: •4.85% p.a. UniStaff variable and comparison rate home loan and a No Establishment Fee offer is current for all applications received before 30/09/2014. •Currently 0.40% p.a. lower than our current standard variable rate (5.25% p.a. as at 26/8/13). •Exclusive to UWA Staff and your families. •No monthly, maintenance or ongoing fees. •Unlimited free redraws. •100% offset facility available. •Free split loan option with an Equity Access or Fixed Rate loan. •Additional repayments available on fixed loans up to $10,000 p.a. •MemberCare Insurance options with multi-policy discounts •University staff discounts also apply on personal & car loans.

Unicredit also has Unistaff Term Deposit special rates on offer.

Unicredit – Here for you on campus Unicredit began in 1964 (it’s our 50th anniversary this year!) and we have been on-campus with our UWA branch providing a convenient and competitive alternative for the banking needs of UWA staff and students. Being a credit union, we are not publicly listed (we are effectively owned by our members), so we don’t exist to maximise profits to pay shareholders. Instead, we only retain a modest profit to ensure our future and our member’s financial security then reinvest the remainder back into the society, allowing us to continue providing a strong and stable financial institution delivering outstanding member service, simple and flexible products, competitive rates and fairer fees for our members.

The idea that good performance management is essential for organisations is part of today’s conventional public management wisdom. If public organisations are to perform well, they must know and understand their internal operations and the external environment well. Good performance measures, it is believed, help public managers to make better decisions and ultimately enhance organisational performance. This interest has generated numerous performance management research aimed at identifying factors that facilitate managers to effectively use performance information in decision making. This paper examines some fundamental assumptions of performance management research, including critical gaps in our current understanding of its basic tenets. It then presents an integrative performance management framework aimed at encouraging new directions for scholarship and improved implementation.

Jeannette Taylor is a faculty member in the Political Science discipline at the University of Western Australia. Her research interest lies in public administration, particularly on performance management and public service motivation. Jeannette serves on the editorial board of Public Administration Review and Review of Public Personnel Administration.

The School of Life launches in Perth as a Pop-Up on Sunday 14 September at Winthrop Hall with a keynote by Julian Burnside AO QC and music by John Butler.

Julian Burnside AO QC has devoted his life to fairness and justice, as a barrister, Queens Counsel and human rights advocate. He believes that from the earliest age, children yearn for fairness and they understand what it is. As we grow older, we learn that our childhood instinct for fairness is what grown-ups call ‘Justice’ but we work out ways to deny it, or redefine it, until we live lives in which it disappears. Yet the yearning for fairness – for justice – remains.

Julian will deliver a keynote On Fairness, exploring the much-lauded virtue of a ‘fair go’ in Australian culture with his signature style of persuasive polemics. He will be joined by musician John Butler who will perform three folk-song hymns to convey his interpretation of what fairness means – and why it still matters.

The first 200 people to arrive at Winthrop Hall on Sunday 14th of September will receive a copy of Dumbo Feather Issue #38: Julian Burnside Fights Injustice.

John Butler is an acclaimed singer, multi-instrumentalist musician, songwriter, record label owner and producer. He is the front man for the John Butler Trio, a roots and jam band, which was formed in Fremantle, Perth, Western Australia in 1998. In 2005, Butler and his wife Danielle Caruana co-founded The Seed Fund – to support artistic expression and encourage the social, cultural and artistic diversity in Australian society. John Butler is an advocate of peace, environmental protection, and global harmony. Over the years, he has supported The Wilderness Society, the Save Ningaloo Reef and the Save the Kimberly campaigns.

To find out more and purchase tickets, visit: http://www.theschooloflife.com/melbourne/shop/classroom/perth/julian-burnside-on-fairness.html

The School of Life is a cultural enterprise offering good ideas for everyday life, offering a variety of programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely and well.

Kim Kirsner’s education included a BComm (Melb), a BSc (London), and a PhD (London) under the supervision of Fergus Craik. He subsequently completed a PDF under Ben Murdoch at the University of Toronto, and accepted an appointment to the School of Psychology at UWA in 1972. In the succeeding years he collaborated on research with scientists at the Universities of Parma, Padua, Delhi and Kanpur (IIT). He was appointed Professor at UWA and elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Science in 1997. He has published approximately 80 articles in refereed journals, 40 invited chapters in edited books, hundreds of conference chapters and papers, two edited books and one co-authored book. He has also held numerous ARC grants. He retired from Psychology at the end of 2006 and worked as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Animal Biology at UWA until 2014. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Notre Dame (Fremantle). His current areas of interest focus on the automatic measurement of fluency in natural language production and necessary corrections to the history of the search for HSK Kormoran and HMAS Sydney, where, in collaboration with John Dunn, he produced the most accurate prediction ever for an off-shore and deep sea wreck (Graham, Trotter, King & Kirsner, 2014).

I first presented a paper on this topic for the US Naval Academy proceedings in 1993. Sydney was lost with all hands when she closed to approximately 1 km from an unidentified vessel – actually a heavily armed raider – a distance at which her notional advantages in regard to firepower, range, speed and armour were nullified. The report published by the Cole Commission in 2009 described the approach as ‘inexplicable’. However, analysis of the history of encounters between British cruisers and unidentified vessels (be they raiders, minelayers, supply ships or British Q-ships) in World War II indicates that close approaches were at worst common and, arguably, the rule prior to the meeting between Kormoran and Sydney. The next three encounters that involved cruisers that were aware of the outcome of the engagement involved one sinking of a ‘friend’ and two occasions when an enemy minelayer was allowed to pass. Recent research in an old account of the work of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty in London (McLachlan, 1971) revealed that it had information about Kormoran that could have been provided to the Australian station prior to the engagement but, probably for security reasons, was not so provided. In August 2014, the Canberra launch of The Search for HMAS Sydney: An Australian Story revealed for the first time the pain, and blame, that Captain Burnett’s family experienced in the years following her loss. Burnett was the Captain of HMAS Sydney and has routinely been awarded more or less sole responsibility for the loss. Thanks to Barbara Winter’s early history of the event (Winter, 1984), it is possible to form a plausible hypothesis about the information not provided to Sydney in advance of the engagement. In 1941 British cruisers were not lone sailing frigates months from home and news, as they often were during the Napoleonic Wars, but integral units in a complex weapons system, and the loss should be so understood. An additional factor involved the Captain’s confidence in the system that provided him with information about the positions off allied merchant vessels may have contributed to the disaster.

We have certainly come a long way in preventive medicine. Viruses are becoming more resistant and toxins continue to be the scourge of modern living. Although health and wellness may be on everyone’s minds these days, attention to wellbeing is by no means a new concept. People have been searching for ways to ‘stay in the pink’ since the dawn of civilisation. The field of medicine is vast but to what extent does it accommodate the needs of the Muslim word?

GLOBALVACC AL-SHIFA approved as world's first HIB Halal certified Preventive medicine for Muslim children and is the first step in giving the world Halal Vaccines. To integrate Halal concept into vaccines has been always a challenge because a lot of Pharmaceutical companies look at bottom lines and would not consider going the extra mile in sourcing for ingredients which are Halal. This lecture explores the journey towards developing the world's first HIB Halal certified Preventive medicine for Muslim children.

About the speaker: Mr Ragupathy is a graduate of the National University of Singapore majoring in Molecular Biology and has 20 years of experience in the field establishing new technologies and innovations for large Pharmaceutical companies like Nestle, Pfizer, Roche, Lonza and Wyeth. He has worked on Biosensors, for in-vitro diagnostics use, in Nanyang Technological University using paramagnetic beads to detect organisms in different matrixes like blood, and other bodily fluids. He had set up the Pan B and Pan T Cells Separation Course for students in the National University of Singapore Microbiology Department, using DynaBeads (450nm ad 280 nm beads). He had worked on immuno-separation technology which has been adapted by Nestle for their Salmonella work. Together with Warwick University (UK), he did Real Time Microbial Load Monitoring in production plants manufacturing Infant formula (Nutraceuticals). Usage of flow-cytometry techniques with membrane bound dyes were used to develop this for Pfizer. In virology, he had developed a separation technology to aggregate Hep A virus which was 15 times more sensitive compared to then current methods. He has had previously worked in a R&D company called Singapore Biotech owned by Temasek Holdings co-developing with GSK Hepatitis Vaccines and locally produced Epstein Barr Virus kits. Mr Ragupathy is the CEO of KR Biologicals Pte Ld. which has been working with Serum Institute of India to launch the first Halal HIB vaccine for infants. He is also the Senior Vice-President of Innovative biotech and has also worked with distinguished scientists such as Dr Lance Gordan, who is the inventor and developer of the first bacterial conjugate vaccine to receive FDA and European approval.

Agriculture is one of the hottest investment sectors at the moment. The big names of Forrest, Rinehart, and Packer, plus the Chinese are pouring money into the food and fibre industry. Learn what investors are looking for, why agriculture is undergoing a transformation, and what investment opportunities are being taken up by savvy West Australian investors, producers and entrepreneurs. Our esteemed panel of experts will debate the pros and cons of investing in agriculture.

AAAC/RMA/GMA Members $58 | Non-members: $88. Registration from 5.30pm.

About the 2020 Business Insights Series:

2020 Business Insights are information-packed panel sessions designed to bring members and non-members together for an informative and thought-provoking discussion on current business topics. Respected industry experts deliver a keynote presentation followed by an interactive panel discussion that also allows for audience questions followed by high level networking.

UWA Business School and Family Business Australia invites you to join Denis Horgan as he shares his experiences and discusses ‘Growing the Family in Family Business’.

Denis and Tricia Horgan established Leeuwin Estate in 1974, with the guidance of Napa Valley’s Robert Mondavi.  Now under the direction of two generations of the founding family and maintaining a team of highly skilled and dedicated winemakers, Leeuwin’s philosophy of adhering to excellence has earned the Estate an outstanding international reputation.

Denis has held positions on many boards and community organisations, including the ABC, Rio Tinto, CSIRO, St. John of God Hospital, Notre Dame Australia and the peak Australian wine industry bodies.

Both Denis and Tricia are dual recipients of Western Australia's highest wine industry and tourism awards and have both been admitted to the Order of Australia for their contribution to the Australian wine and tourism industries.

Mark Bellgrove is Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience and Larkin’s Fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences at Monash University. Mark’s laboratory studies the neurobiology of attention and cognitive control in both health and disorder (e.g., ADHD) using a range of techniques including molecular genetics, pharmacology, EEG and functional MRI. He is currently funded by an ARC Future Fellowship and his research programmes are supported by the NHMRC.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent disorder of childhood with negative adult outcomes. Although subjective ratings of attention deficit are diagnostic for the disorder, delineating an objective attentional phenotype has proven difficult. In this seminar I will present behavioural and electrophysiological data from our laboratory showing that childhood ADHD is associated with anomalous spatial attention akin to a developmental form of the “neglect syndrome”; that this phenotype is ameliorated by treatment with the psychostimulant methylphenidate; and that it can be predicted by common DNA variation in the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1), the gene encoding the molecular target for methylphenidate. These lines of evidence suggest disruption to the hemispheric control of spatial attention in ADHD that is at least partly influenced by dopamine.

“Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.” Bill Clinton

In Australia, it is estimated that 45 per cent of people will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime.

This prevalent condition should be at the forefront of social consideration and health policy. However, this is not the case - the millennium development goals have wholly ignored this area of health, and society has appeared to put mental illness ‘Out of sight’ and ‘Out of mind’.

Come join SPAMH as we explore how stigma and discrimination against mental illness affects sufferers, their carers, health professionals in the field and ultimately, serves as a major barrier to quality health care delivery, treatment and recovery.

Do not miss out on this opportunity to have YOUR questions answered by our expert panel and discover how stigma can be combated on a personal, social and policy level.