Archive for March, 2008

Students living at the University of New England’s Earle Page College have begun their annual program of fund-raising activities that, last year, raised $30,000 for the Children’s Medical Research Institute. Now in its 29th year, the Earle Page College charity campaign includes the sale of a discount card sponsored by 41 local businesses. Purchasers of the $10 card can get ongoing discounts of up to 15 per cent – or a range of special deals – from participating businesses until the end of November.

The Vice-Chancellor of UNE, Professor Alan Pettigrew, bought one of the discount cards this week when he officially launched this year’s campaign. Professor Pettigrew, the campaign’s Patron, said he was “very happy to support it for the third year in succession”. “The students’ involvement in raising funds for a worthwhile charity adds to their own lives as well as the reputation of the University,” he said. “It is one of the highlights of their time at Earle Page College.”

While the campaign has already raised about $13,000 this year through donations and the sale of the discount card to students, its official launch marks the beginning of a series of fund-raising events – including a fashion parade and a charity auction – culminating in September in the annual Armidale to Coffs Harbour Coast Run which gives the entire campaign its name. The organisers of the Coast Run are inviting UNE staff members to contribute to the campaign by buying one of the discount cards.

The fashion parade, at Armidale Ex-Services Memorial Club on Saturday 3 May, will involve about 80 students and staff members as models, and will draw its audience from the general community as well as the University. The auction, at Earle Page College on Saturday 16 August, will offer a wide range of goods (including sports memorabilia) and services donated by local businesses. One of the items for auction will be “drinks at Trevenna” (the Vice-Chancellor’s residence) in November, hosted by Professor Pettigrew and his wife Ann.

Peter Bedford, one of the seven members of the Coast Run organising committee, said the aim of the campaign was “to give the Children’s Medical Research Institute all the help we can”. “Personally,” he said, “spending time on this is one of the most valuable things I could do as a resident of Earle Page College. It’s an Earle Page tradition – and it’s a worthy cause.”

THE PHOTOGRAPH displayed here shows Professor Pettigrew buying a discount card from the Coast Run Convener, Kamal Sohi. It expands to include another member of the organising committee, Ben Bowman.

“Are animals autistic savants?” This intriguing title of a recently-published scientific paper gives some idea of the exciting questions that today’s researchers in animal behaviour are asking. In answering this question in the negative, the authors of the paper (Giorgio Vallortigara, Allan Snyder, Gisela Kaplan, Patrick Bateson, Nicola Clayton and Lesley Rogers) draw on a body of research that, over the past 30 years, has successfully demolished some long-held assumptions about the essentially “primitive” nature of cognitive processes and abilities in animals.

At the forefront of that research has been one of the paper’s authors – Emeritus Professor Lesley Rogers of the University of New England. Professor Rogers’s pioneering work – together with that of her colleagues and students – has shown that the well-known specialisation of the left and right sides of the brain for different aspects of cognition and behaviour, long thought to be unique to humans and a mark of our more “advanced” cognitive function, is also characteristic of many animal species.

This Thursday, the 27th of March, Professor Rogers will give the opening Plenary Lecture at the 35th annual conference of the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASSAB), organised by her UNE colleague Professor Gisela Kaplan who is also an international authority on animal behaviour and a joint author of the “autism” paper. The title of Professor Rogers’s lecture, in which she will survey the latest results of research on brain asymmetry, will be “Social and cognitive behaviour of animals with asymmetrical brains”. The conference will then proceed with 42 spoken papers and about 30 posters covering a huge range of species and behaviours: from navigation by ants and food hoarding by birds to dolphin social networks and “courtship effort in a desert-dwelling fish”.

A special feature of the conference, to be hosted by UNE’s Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour and held at the Novotel Pacific Bay Resort (and the National Marine Science Centre), Coffs Harbour, from Thursday the 27th to Sunday the 30th of March, will be a celebration of the career of Professor Rogers, who recently retired as Professor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at UNE. She was a founding member of ASSAB, and has served as its President (1973-75), Vice-President, and Secretary. The conference will be preceded – on Thursday morning – by a special symposium in her honour (also organised by Professor Kaplan with the help of a team of research students from the Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour).

Last year Professor Rogers convened and chaired both the Australian Academy of Science’s first-ever symposium on animal cognition, and the associated four-day inaugural workshop of the Forum for European-Australian Science and Technology (FEAST). The question of animal “autism” was raised at that workshop, the suggestion being that the amazing cognitive abilities of some animals – such as the ability of a species of bird (Clark’s nutcracker) to remember the locations of thousands of cached nuts – could be functionally analogous to the abilities of autistic savants.

The “autism” paper (PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 2), written by participants in the FEAST workshop who are among the foremost researchers in their fields in Europe and Australia, argues that the cognitive function of animals is much more like that of “normal” humans. Animals as well as humans have lateralised brains, the authors argue, and rely on the integrated function of the right cerebral hemisphere (responsive, in a “savant-like” way, to details and novel stimuli) and the left cerebral hemisphere (which processes stimuli according to patterns based on experience).

“Animals as well as humans need both right-hemisphere and left-hemisphere functions to survive in the world,” Professor Rogers said. Next week’s ASSAB conference will explore many of those means of survival.

THE PHOTOGRAPH displayed here is of a tawny frogmouth, a species to be discussed at the conference in a paper by Gisela Kaplan titled “Emotional state, signals and communication in the tawny frogmouth (Podargus strigoides)”.

The University of New England is joining an innovative program that prepares women who are students of business, finance, accounting, economics or law for their entry into professional life. The Lucy Mentoring Program, established in 2004 by the Office for Women within the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet, matches each participating student with a mentor who is a working professional in either the public or the private sector.

UNE joins the Universities of Sydney, New South Wales, Western Sydney, and Newcastle in the program, which has already increased employment opportunities for more than 240 women students across the State.

An information session at UNE on Wednesday 26 March will introduce the program to potential participants, and the program itself will operate between May and October this year. It involves a “work-based activity” totalling 35 hours in the mentor’s workplace, and professional-development meetings with other “Lucy” students and staff of UNE Student Assist.

Those eligible for the program are undergraduate women studying business, finance, accounting, law or economics who live in the region, have been performing well in their studies (averaging a credit), and have gained at least 96 credit points towards their degree.

Airlie Bell, a UNE Careers Officer, said “Lucy” was designed “to inspire and motivate students about opportunities for employment in business and law, and to assist them in building professional networks both inside and outside our region”. “It’s particularly important for us to involve students who may – for a number of reasons – feel diffident about entering a professional career,” she said. “They may come, for instance, from a family with no experience of such a career, or from a non-English-speaking background.”

Those interested in participating in the program, or attending Wednesday’s information session – at 4pm in the Lewis Seminar Room in the Economics, Business and Law building – should contact Ms Bell or her colleague Julia Perryman at Student Assist on (02) 6773 2897 or Lou Conway in the School of Business, Economics and Public Policy on (02) 6773 3919.

Ms Bell said that some local businesses and government offices able to provide mentors had already been identified, and that mentors would be matched with the participating students. “At the end of the program there will be a formal ‘graduation’ event attended by officials of the University and the Premier’s Department, during which the students will report on their ‘Lucy’ experiences,” she said.