What's On at UWA

Learn how to make your writing stand out.

Come and meet our exchange partners, speak to returned exchange students and learn more about UWA's Student Exchange Program. Just look for the big marquee.

Practise giving a short presentation.

Inference (or hypothesis testing) is a widely used technique for assessing evidence from data so it gets covered in most introductory statistics or data analysis units. The good news is that all statistical tests follow the same underlying structure. In this workshop we explore this structure in a simple setting and demonstrate how it applies to some common statistical tests. Recommended for anyone studying introductory stats.

Free 50min Concert every Thursday

Professor Engle’s research combines clinical, genetic, and molecular biological approaches to the study of strabismus (commonly referred to as 'misaligned eyes' or 'squint') and ocular motor neuron and axon development. As a paediatric neurologist, her research has focused primarily on a set of disorders referred to as the congenital cranial dysinnervation disorders. These are incomitant forms of strabismus in which primary gaze may be aberrant and one or both eyes are unable to move into one or multiple fields of gaze. These disorders can cause significant visual impairment and can be cosmetically disfiguring. Professor Engle's Lecture will discuss recent advances in causes, genetic diagnosis and treatments for these disorders.

Opening the season, conductor and virtuoso violinist Paul Wright conducts a program affected by classical sensibilities featuring some of the period’s best-loved works.

Grainger: Duke of Marlborough Fanfare; Schubert: Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished); Bach: Violin Concerto in E Major (Soloist: Paul Wright); Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 Classical

Tickets: Standard $25, Concession $20 - available here: http://sa2.seatadvisor.com/sabo/servlets/EventSearch?presenter=AUUNITHEATRES&event=art1 or on the door.

If you want to improve how you respond to IELTS essay task questions, this workshop is for you! You can apply the skills you learn to essays you write at UWA. This workshop runs for 2 hours. Free for UWA degree course students.

Jennifer has recently submitted her PhD in epidemiology investigating the role of sleep as a risk factor for breast cancer. She has previously worked with the cancer epidemiology group at the WA Institute for Medical Research on studies of non-melanoma skin cancer, prostate cancer and bowel cancer.

In Linear Algebra, the concept and algebraic definition of a subspace can be difficult to visualise the first time you see them. In this workshop we match this algebraic definition to simple geometric properties based on vectors to build the foundations of an intuitive understanding of subspaces in general. We will discuss simple proofs and counter examples for test style questions and introduce the concept of Nullspace. Recommended for MATH1001 and higher level MATH students wishing to revise this topic.

All welcome to the Mass and Lunch, either or both, starting at 12 noon. Mass is offerd by the new Catholic Archbishop of Perth, Timothy Costello. Lunch will be served after Mass. The UWA Chapel is on the first floor above the Village Cafe in the Guild Courtyard, that is one floor below the medical centre.

Improve the flow of your writing by using familiar-new patterns within sentences and stating the theme of each group of sentences up front.

The Speaker: Rebecca's background is interdisciplinary: having received training in zoology, statistics and biological anthropology, she has spent most of her academic career teaching demography, first at the London School of Economics and then at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She took up her current post as Reader in Population and Health at LSHTM in April 2012, and now heads the Evolutionary Demography Group http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/eph/dph/research/edg/index.htm here.

The Seminar: Her research is also interdisciplinary: she is a behavioural ecologist but largely works on human demographic data so her research aims to bridge the social and natural sciences. She is currently working on a European Research Council-funded project 'Family matters: intergenerational influences on fertility', which is investigating the influence of kin on fertility across a range of populations, using both small-scale datasets from traditional subsistence populations and large-scale, nationally representative demographic datasets. This project fits into her wider research aim, which is to test the hypothesis that humans are cooperative breeders, by examining the evidence that kin influence reproductive outcomes in all kinds of human society. This talk will describe previous and current work which has found that, though kin do influence reproductive outcomes, which kin matter varies according to ecological context.

The availability of nutrients, light, and physical properties of the water, including small-scale fluid motion, influence phytoplankton dynamics. The Western Australia (WA) coast is characterized by low nutrient concentrations, nitrogen limitation, low primary production (oligotrophic) and lack of large-scale upwelling. The Perth coastal margin (WA) is semi-enclosed from the open ocean by chains of submerged reefs and islands. Alongshore coastal currents, driven by southerly winds, prevail and contribute to a highly dispersive environment. This research investigated how physical processes, occurring at a range of spatial and temporal scales, influence phytoplankton dynamics in the temperate coastal margin of Perth. The thesis is organised in three main components.

First, the relative importance of the main sources of nutrients, including treated wastewater effluent, was assessed. Analysis of a 14-year field monitoring record revealed seasonal variations in nutrients and chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations. Dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) and Chl-a concentrations were higher in the winter period than in summer. Remote-sensing information was used to place the seasonal variations of Chl-a into an oceanographic context. Three-dimensional hydrodynamic-ecological simulations were used to determine the drivers of seasonal variations and reconcile the major inputs of DIN: superficial runoff, groundwater, wastewater effluent, atmospheric deposition and exchange with surrounding coastal waters. The results showed that the increase of DIN concentration during winter was driven by enhanced exchange with offshore waters, caused by changes in the wind field. This suggested that additional wastewater nutrient removal is not likely to affect these dynamics.

Second, the hydrodynamic-ecological model was used to assess the effect of an alternative scenario that considered the wastewater effluent as a resource instead as a waste. This involved running scenario simulations corresponding to a less-stringent wastewater nutrient removal during summer, the season of lowest nutrient and Chl-a levels. The simulation results indicated a moderate Chl-a increase, within the level of historical variability observed in the monitoring data, suggesting that such scenario could enhance the ecological services provided by the coastal ecosystem preserving its oligotrophic state.

Finally, the influence of turbulence on the phytoplankton community was investigated in situ. The results suggested that chain-forming diatoms, the dominant phytoplankton life-form observed when nitrogen availability increases in winter, have a competitive advantage in accessing peak nutrient concentrations in the turbulent heterogeneous microenvironment. By forming cell chains of length longer than the Batchelor scale these diatoms can experience the microscale nutrient gradients that are associated with high turbulence in coastal ecosystems. This implies that coupling the influence of small-scale turbulence into process-based hydrodynamic-ecological models could improve our ability to predict phytoplankton dynamics.

Overall, this thesis quantified how different processes affect the phytoplankton dynamics in the Perth coastal margin and demonstrated that physical processes, operating at different spatial and temporal scales, strongly influence the variations in the abundance and the composition of the phytoplankton community.

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

****All Welcome****

David Symons: Antill After Corroboree: A Return to Conservatism?

This paper investigates one of the widespread perceptions in much critical comment on the music of John Antill following the composition of his famous ballet Corroboree – namely, that the composer reverted to a ‘quieter’ and more conservative musical style in his later output in the 1950s and 1960s. The generally negatively-toned criticisms of Antill’s later work are assessed from two standpoints – that of musical ‘style’ or ‘character’ and that of musical ‘language’ or idiom. While Antill never wrote another work as ‘barbaric’ or ‘abrasive’ in manner as Corroboree, his later works explore a wider expressive palette in which there are some examples of the milder English ‘pastoral’ style, but the predominant ‘language’ is that of between-the-wars neoclassicism or neo-tonality of Bartok, Hindemith and Stravinsky. In this respect Antill shares a general stylistic range with the more progressive Australian composers of the same period such as Margaret Sutherland, Dorian Le Gallienne, Raymond Hanson and Robert Hughes.

The Confucius Institute will be running our 2nd intake of our Chinese Language courses. We offer an ongoing series of Chinese language classes from Beginners to Advanced levels and Business Chinese.

Our language courses are designed for those with an interest in travel, business and friendship. Our teachers are qualified Chinese language teaching professionals with many years of experience.

When you have assignments to hand in and reading to catch up on, it can be easy to put off your exam preparation. This workshop will outline the stages in getting ready for exams.

Improve the flow of your writing by using familiar-new patterns within sentences and stating the theme of each group of sentences up front.

Solutions are found for a linear model of the circulation near the shore of a lake that is subject to two diurnal forcing mechanisms. The first is the day/night heating/cooling induced horizontal pressure gradients. The second is an unsteady surface stress modelling a sea breeze/gully wind pattern.

The two forcing mechanisms can oppose or reinforce each other depending on their relative phase. The interplay of different dynamic balances at different times and locations in the domain lead to complex circulation patterns especially during the period of flow reversal. The solutions to the linear problem are compared with recent and more general numerical solutions of a more complete model.

Short Bio,

Duncan graduated with a first class honors in applied mathematics from University of Adelaide in 1986. He went on to study a for a PhD at the CWR under the supervision of John Patterson where he used a combination of analytical and numerical methods to examine unsteady natural convection phenomena in lakes.

After completing his PhD in 1992 Duncan took up a post-doctoral position at the University of Adelaide working with Ernie Tuck working on free surface problems associated with ship hydrodynamics. From 1993 to 1995 Duncan worked in a post-doctoral position in the Department of Mathematics at the University of East Anglia working with David Stevens and John Johnson on numerical methods for Ocean General Circulation Models. Since 1996 Duncan has been an academic in the Mathematics & Statistics program at Murdoch University.

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

****All Welcome****

The Telethon Institute for Child Health Research is one of the largest independent not-for-profit successful medical research institutes in Australia, comprising a dedicated and diverse team of more than 500 staff and students.

The Telethon Institute for Child Health Research is supporting Big Data Week by hosting an event entitled “Big Data: the Big Picture” on Friday 26 April.