Archive for January, 2012

The personal stories of East Timorese women, and performances of Timorese music by professional musicians, will be features of this year’s CWA Country of Study School, which will focus on the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste.

Almost 200 members of the Country Women’s Association of NSW will travel to the University of New England from all over the State for the annual Study School, which will run this year from Friday the 3^rd to Sunday the 5^th of February.

Among the many highlights of the program will be a performance by the celebrated East Timorese singer-songwriter Ego Lemos (whose award-winning song “Balibo” was a feature of the film of that name) and a talk by Paul Cleary, author of Shakedown: Australia’s Grab for Timor Oil and The Men Who Came Out of the Ground (about Australia’s guerrilla war against the Japanese in Timor in the 1940s). Paul Cleary’s talk will be titled “Australia’s war-time debt to the people of East Timor”.

The Consul-General of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, Ms Maria José da Fonseca Monteiro de Jesus, will present a “Welcome to Timor-Leste” at the Study School’s formal dinner on Friday evening, and an introductory talk on Saturday morning to begin the weekend’s program of presentations.

That program will include a talk by Ms Zelia Fernandes, Coordinator of the Timor-Leste Media Development Centre, titled “The role of Timorese women in gaining Independence and rebuilding the country”, and a presentation by the musician Roslyn Dunlop on the traditional music and arts of Timor-Leste. Roslyn Dunlop will join Ego Lemos in presenting a program of Timorese music at the Cultural Evening on Saturday.

Another highlight of the program will be a screening of the film Heru ini Lafu: Weaving Life, presented by Sophie Miller, co-founder of East Timor Women Australia, which supports women’s weaving cooperatives in the Lautem district of Timor-Leste. And Richard Jones, a teacher and filmmaker who works part-time as a volunteer adult education teacher in Timor-Leste, will present “Open Your Eyes, See and Hear Us”, a photo-storytelling project with young Timorese women.

The Study School participants will stay at UNE’s Earle Page College, and all the presentations will be in the University’s Wright Centre. During the formal dinner at Earle Page College the Vice-Chancellor of UNE, Professor Jim Barber, will welcome the delegates to the University, and the Deputy Mayor, Councillor Jim Maher, will welcome them to Armidale.

The annual CWA Study School at UNE, organised by the UNE Conference Company, is an expression of the long-standing relationship between the University and the Country Women’s Association of NSW. Sharon Gallen, Manager of the Conference Company, said that she was particularly happy with this year’s program, which reflected the CWA’s interest in active support for developing countries.

The University of New England’s English Language Centre (ELC), which recorded one of  its biggest-ever intakes of students last year, is celebrating its 21^st anniversary in 2012.

This anniversary year will see a number of innovations at the ELC, including – apart from those in the academic program itself – the introduction of an e-newsletter featuring ELC graduates and events at UNE, and the addition of camping and canoeing excursions to the program of the study tours that the Centre provides for groups of students from overseas universities.

The first study tour for 2012 will be in February, when 12 students from Chubu University in Nagoya, Japan, will come to UNE for four weeks of English language tuition and Australian cultural experience with an overall environmental and Indigenous Australian theme.

In September, 15 students from Tsurumi University in Tokyo will venture into the Australian outdoors to enjoy a two-night canoeing trip in the Gloucester region during their two-week study tour program.

While UNE’s relationship with Chubu University has brought students from Nagoya to Armidale for the past eight years, last year saw the ELC welcome its first group of students from Tsurumi University. The three students returned home at the end of 2011 after a 30-week English language program.

“They stayed at first in the homes of Armidale families,” said Mark Cooper, the Centre’s Deputy Director of Studies. “These ‘homestay’ arrangements enable students to make connections throughout the local community and gain a rich cross-cultural experience. And the families themselves form international friendships that continue into the future.”

Another program for 2012 using ‘homestay’ arrangements will be the six-week English Language and Early Childhood Education program, now in its fourth year, for students from the Hong Kong Institute of Education. About 20 of these students will be at the ELC in May and June, improving their English language skills, attending lectures by UNE specialists in early childhood education, and engaging with local pre-school centres to identify differences in early childhood theory and practice between Hong Kong and Australia.

The study tours from overseas universities account for only 5 per cent of the Centre’s students, the majority of whom have come to Armidale from all over the world to enter full-time degree programs at UNE. The ELC provides courses in academic English that enable these students to embark on their studies with confidence.

A ceremony at the end of last year marked the completion of these courses by 140 students from China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Korea. Among them were three young men from Saudi Arabia who – already Diploma graduates in their home country – are studying towards Bachelor of Nursing degrees at UNE. All three of them are employees of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health – Tariq Alanazi in an intensive care unit, Alghareeb Alsamari in an adult cardiology centre, and Saud Alharbi (pictured here) as a nursing tutor – and all three are studying at UNE as recipients of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Scholarships. Mr Alanazi said the ELC program had been “very challenging” but had definitely improved his language skills, and Mr Alharbi added that it had improved their spoken as well as written communication in English.

Newly published research reveals that soils are self-organising systems, in which soil structure and microbial activity interact in a dynamic way to maximise the storage of water and carbon.

Professor Iain Young from the University of New England, a member of the research team, explained that the presence of microbes and fungi  in soil (pictured here) can transform a random structure of particles into a system that functions, in some respects, like a complex biological organism.

The experimental findings are published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface (ranked as one of the world’s four leading multidisciplinary science journals). While the impact of microbes on soil structure is well known, this is the first study to show that soil structure, in its turn, affects microbial activity – thus completing the feedback loop necessary for a self-organising system. And so, the authors say, “an understanding of how soil changes over time will only be achieved by studying the integrated behaviour of the biology and the physics”. (http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/12/07/rsif.2011.0679.short?rss=1)

Professor Young, Head of UNE’s School of Environmental and Rural Science, is a biophysicist whose career-long involvement in soil research has informed his understanding of soil as “the most complex biomaterial on the planet”. “In a handful of fertile soil there are more individual organisms than the total number of human beings who have ever lived on Earth,” he says. “We know – we’ve counted them.”

In explaining the organising impact of microbes and fungi on soil he likes to use a house-building analogy. “They act as architects, builders, interior designers and plumbers,” he says. “They design the ‘house’, assemble it by extruding glue-like chemicals, arrange the furniture, and optimise plumbing and ventilation. Using a little feng shui, they create a structure that takes on a life of its own.”

In a series of laboratory experiments using sophisticated X-ray technology to construct three-dimensional images of soil structure, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the presence of microbes and fungi is directly related to changes in the soil’s porosity that enhance the flow and storage of water and gases.

“Both the experimental and theoretical work presented here provide evidence that the soil-microbe system is self-organising as a consequence of the feedback between microbial activity and particle aggregation,” they report. “This feedback results in an increase in porosity at scales relevant to water storage and flow, and to gas diffusion.”

“Given the importance of soil for carbon storage, it will be important to determine the impact of self-organising behaviour for carbon turnover,” they continue.

Professor Young said that the main aim of the research, however, was to create “designer soils” that “can store water in a way that will increase the value to agriculture of every millilitre of water used”. “We will be developing this work through the Cooperative Research Centre for Polymers to design soils for agriculture,” he said.

Research at the University of New England is giving scientists new insights into the complex society of Australia’s Noisy Miner.

In a paper published online today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, UNE’s Dr Paul McDonald reports that Noisy Miners (Manorina melanocephala) can discriminate among the calls of individuals – even individuals from a distant colony. This is the first publication to demonstrate such an ability in a cooperative avian species. (http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/lookup/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2011.1118)

“The research reported in the paper shows that miners attend to information encoded in their calls – an ability that could contribute to the complexity of their social organisation,” Dr McDonald said. “Given that Noisy Miners call to solicit aid from others, the ability to differentiate callers may underpin the many social interactions in this species.”

“Miner society is similar to ours in some respects,” he said. “A colony – typically comprising 100 to 120 birds – includes relatives and non-relatives that may all work together cooperatively. With their ability to discriminate among the calls of individuals, it’s possible that they can actually identify individuals within the colony from their calls alone.

“The more we look at them, the more complex their society is. Through research such as this we’re finding out that they have cognitive capabilities that 10 years ago we were attributing only to animals such as primates, marine mammals and elephants.”

As well as demonstrating the birds’ ability to discriminate among individuals’ calls, Dr McDonald’s experiments – using a testing procedure pioneered on humans – have shown that that discrimination is based on frequency patterns within the calls. Together, these findings open the way for further exploration of the intriguing world of Noisy Miner vocal communication. By experimentally manipulating a call’s frequency components, for example, it could be possible to isolate the component that encodes information on individual identity.

“Repetitions of a particular call by a single individual show an extraordinary degree of variation,” Dr McDonald said. “So the call could contain a lot of information in addition to that which signals individual identity.  It’s exciting: this work is opening up a lot of possibilities for further research.”

“I think Noisy Miners are a very much undervalued species in our environment,” he said. “They’re not just those annoying colonists of the backyard; they’re actually doing things that are pretty amazing.”

Jillian Huntley is pioneering the use of a new, non-destructive technique to analyse the chemical composition of ancient Aboriginal rock-art pigments.

Her use of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy is allowing her to conduct large-scale, non-destructive rock-art studies that are among the first of their kind in the world. The technique involves the analysis – on site – of characteristic radiation emitted by electrons within a pigment’s component atoms after they have been excited by X-rays from a portable “ray gun”.

Jillian, an archaeology researcher at the University of New England, is using one of the University’s portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) instruments (pictured here) to analyse the pigments in rock art across the Sydney Basin – including the Woronora Plateau west of Wollongong. She is also involved in a major project in the Kimberley, Western Australia.

“Having a non-destructive technique for analysing the composition of rock-art pigments is fantastic,” she said. “Until now, such analysis had to be done in the laboratory after removing a small amount of pigment material from the site. We can now say to the Aboriginal custodians of a rock-art site that our study will have absolutely no impact on the art work itself. They’re over the moon about it.”

Jillian has been studying the rock art of the Woronora Plateau for the past 10 years, and her current project there (2011-2013), in collaboration with the Australian Museum, is being supported by the Australian Geographic Society.

The project in Western Australia is documenting the chronology of human occupation in the North Kimberley through a study of rock art and artefacts. “I’m the project’s ochre person,” Jillian explained. Led by UNE’s Dr June Ross and Professor Mike Morwood from the University of Wollongong, the work is being funded by the Australian Research Council in conjunction with a number of industry partners including Kimberley Foundation Australia.

“It’s exciting to be part of a large team of different specialists,” Jillian said, “and to be working on a rich archaeological assemblage that allows us to look at the use of ochre through many millennia.

“Sources of ochre used by people often change over time, and being able to tie a particular art site to a particular source of ochre may help us trace the chronology of people’s movements and their changing relationship with the land. In Australia, ochre sources are often associated with Dreaming stories, and so form part of a cultural landscape. It’s all beautifully complicated.”

Jillian is bringing all her previous archaeological science experience to her use of this new generation of PXRF instruments, and her PhD project at UNE represents one of the first systematic studies of the use of the new technology in archaeology. “It works brilliantly,” she said, “as long as you know how to apply it correctly through an understanding of its limitations. Its great advantages as a portable instrument for the non-destructive chemical analysis of art and artefacts on-site are necessarily balanced by certain limitations in precision when compared with laboratory instruments.”

The School of Law at the University of New England has announced the launch of a new online Journal: the International Journal of Rural Law and Policy.

The Journal publishes special themed editions as well as unsolicited, relevant and peer reviewed articles as they are completed. It covers the many interdisciplinary and complex issues which make up rural law and policy. The journal is online and is free to registered users.

The journal’s editor, Prof Paul Martin, said: “There are many excellent journals that deal with legal doctrine and practice, policy and institutions, and with themes relevant to rural people and the rural context. However there is a relative lack of concentrated attention upon the unique issues and features of rural law and policy. We believe that rural issues are sufficiently distinctive and important to justify a specialist focus and have international relevance. We offer the medium of this journal as a platform to explore and share the learning.”

 The journal has adopted an “open access” policy, with the intention of replicating some of the features of the modern community to benefit both readers and authors. They are taking advantage of the flexibility that modern technology provides, by publishing:

• Editions, which comprise papers on a theme. The theme in the first Special Edition is on the topic of ‘Water Law: Through the Lens of Conflict’. Papers in the edition are based on a colloquium held in January 2011 at the University of New England, Australia.
• Regular publications of unsolicited, relevant papers on an ad hoc basis. Scholars and practitioners are invited to submit papers for peer review and inclusion.
• Commentary.  Comment is invited (see the comment link to each paper) upon all papers published in the journal. On a periodic basis, the comments will be reviewed and a ‘commentary ‘published.

Prof Martin said: “We hope that by these means the International Journal of Rural Law and Policy will generate a lively community of scholars of rural law and policy, as well as contributing innovative and useful ideas to the field.”

Link to Journal website.

The University of New England’s reputation as a national leader in Distance Education has been strengthened with a new partnership with the University of Western Sydney.

Acting Vice-Chancellor Annabelle Duncan said the cross-institutional enrolment agreement allows UWS students to undertake pre-approved UNE Distance Education units and these will count towards their qualification at UWS.

“This partnership gives UWS students access to more unit options and the flexibility to undertake some of their subjects via Distance Education.
“At UNE we have a proud history of Distance Education and it is an area we are constantly improving to ensure we continue to offer the best study options for our students.

“We are excited about our new partnership with UWS and look forward to providing their students with our exceptional Distance Education experience,” Professor Duncan said.

For media enquiries, please contact Catherine Goldie on 0409 215 640.

A massive collaborative research project, involving 53 scientists on six continents, has proved the importance of maintaining a rich variety of plant species in ecosystems in dry and arid regions.

In the first global study of its kind, the scientists studied 224 dryland sites in 15 countries. They found that a study site’s “plant species richness” was directly related to its “multifunctionality” – its ability to perform a number of simultaneous functions related to the cycling and storage of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.

In their paper published today in the international journal Science, the researchers say their results “suggest that preservation of plant biodiversity is crucial to buffer negative effects of climate change and desertification in drylands”.

Dr Matthew Tighe, a lecturer in the School of Environmental and Rural Science at the University of New England, contributed to the project with sites in – and data from – central and western NSW. “The Australian component of the project was important,” Dr Tighe said, “because Australia is one of relatively few countries having large arid and semi-arid areas where agriculture is not at the subsistence level.” The other countries included in the study were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Ecuador, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, Spain, Tunisia, the United States and Venezuela.  (For details of the paper’s authors and their affiliations go to: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6065/214.abstract.)

“The work involved selecting representative sites, identifying the range of plant species present, and collecting soil samples to monitor a total of 14 ‘functions’, including soil biological activity and soil carbon levels and cycling,” Dr Tighe explained. “All of the measures are important aspects of the system, but their combined importance is reflected in plant species richness.”

Statistical analysis of the major variable factors (including climate and the physical environment) that affect ecosystem multifunctionality found that plant species richness was one of the most dominant factors overall.

The paper (Maestre et al: “Plant species richness and ecosystem multifunctionality in global drylands”, Science Vol. 335 pp. 214-218) notes that drylands cover 41 per cent of Earth’s land surface, support 38 per cent of the global human population, and are home to many endemic plant and animal species. These ecosystems are “highly vulnerable to global environmental change and desertification”, the authors say.

They conclude that, in the event of the dryland temperature increases predicted by climate change models, maintaining plant species richness “may be particularly important for maintaining ecosystem functions linked to carbon and nitrogen cycling that sustain carbon sequestration and soil fertility”.

High-school students from around the State are enjoying a three-day experience of science experiments, demonstrations and talks at the University of New England this week.

The students, mainly from the New England, North-West, Mid North Coast and North Coast regions but also from as far afield as Moss Vale, are programming robots, making well-known chemical compounds, exploring the world of microbes, extracting DNA, and experimenting with musical sounds (as pictured here).

They are taking part in The Science Experience – a national progam, conducted at more than 30 universities around the nation, designed to provide students with an opportunity to engage in a wide range of science-based activities under the guidance of scientists who love their work. The Science Experience at UNE is running from Tuesday the 10^th to Thursday the 12^th of January.

All of the students have a keen interest in science, and are preparing to enter Year 10 or Year 11 in 2012. They have travelled to UNE from Armidale, Bellbrook, Crescent Head, Grafton, Johns River, Lower Creek, Moss Vale, Port Macquarie, Sandy Beach, South Grafton, Tamworth, Toormina, Uralla, Waterview Heights and Woolgoolga.

In addition to gaining fresh insights into the principles and practice of science, they are meeting like-minded students from schools in other areas and experiencing student life on a university campus (with some of them staying at UNE’s Mary White College over the three days). The program provides them with information about further studies in science, technology and engineering, and highlights the wide range of careers that allow students to pursue their interests and abilities in the sciences.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to get involved in science in the school holidays,” said Mollie Galvin from Uralla, who goes into Year 11 at New England Girls’ School, Armidale, this year. After only the first couple of hours of the program, Molly said, she had learnt about methane production in cattle and been involved in the programming of a robot. Her ambitions are already firmly focused on a scientific career, with forensic anthropology one of her preferred options.

The Science Experience is supported by the Science Schools Foundation, Rotary clubs around Australia, the Australian Science Teachers Association, and Young Scientists of Australia, as well as by the universities themselves. It is organised at UNE by Richard Willis, with Dr Tom van der Touw as academic director. “We’re very keen to keep young minds interested in science,” Dr van der Touw said, “and to show students that the sciences offer fascinating and rewarding career paths.”

Successful writers and illustrators of books for young people will be visiting Armidale and the New England region over the next three years to lead a series of workshops aimed at fostering local talent in the writing of children’s and young adult literature, including graphic novels and multimedia productions.

The “writers and illustrators in residence” program, titled “Creative Communities in Children’s and Young Adult Literature”, is being funded by a grant of $90,000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund to the School of Arts at the University of New England.

UNE’s Dr Elizabeth Hale, who is managing the new program, said it would bring three published writer/illustrators to the region during each year of the program’s duration – 2012, 2013 and 2014. “We’re hoping to attract, for example, a graphic novelist, a picture book writer, and a creator in digital media each year,” Dr Hale said.

The first of the fortnight-long “writer/illustrator-in-residence” periods is planned for March this year.

“Australia has one of the most dynamic picture book industries in the world,” Dr Hale explained, “and we need programs like this to foster new talent. There’s a lot of talent in Armidale and New England, and I’d like to see a few people launched into new careers as a result of this program. To find the next Shaun Tan [the Australian writer and illustrator of award-winning children's books] living in Armidale would be wonderful.”

The “Creative Communities” program is being conducted in association with Arts New England (UNE’s Centre for Research and Innovation in the Arts), and partners in the program include the New England Regional Art Museum (which will provide studio space), the New England Institute of TAFE, the New England Writers’ Centre, schools in the New England region, and the local branch of the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

Each writer/illustrator will conduct a series of workshops during their two-week residence. The workshops will be open to school students, university and TAFE students, and members of the New England community. In addition to providing a $5,000 stipend, the program will subsidise accommodation and transport costs for each of the writer/illustrators-in-residence.

An application form for writers and/or illustrators interested in participating in the program is at: http://www.une.edu.au/arts/writers-in-res/. Community members who want to inquire about the program can contact Dr Hale via e-mail: ehale@une.edu.au.

“The program aims to recognise and promote the work of writers and illustrators publishing in a range of narrative styles – verbal, visual, and multimedia,” Dr Hale said, “and to foster regional talent by bringing people into contact with leading producers of such work.

“It will encourage wider community knowledge of – and participation in – the creation and reception of children’s and young adult literature, as well as an increased integration of creative practice into education in a regional context that may provide a model for other communities in the future. Given UNE’s role as a major provider of distance education, and Armidale’s role in the NBN roll-out, there is the potential to expand the program well beyond the region.”