Archive for the 'Research' Category

In a recently-published study, Hugh de Ferranti has interpreted the history and documented the demise of a centuries-old tradition of oral performance in Japan.

His book - The Last Biwa Singer - is not only a valedictory analysis of that tradition as personified by Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-1996), but also a celebration of the process of composition-in-performance itself. Within the book is an implicit plea for a greater understanding of such oral performance traditions, and thus their preservation not as cultural relics but as living forms of artistic expression.

Allan Marett, Professor of Ethnomusicology at Charles Darwin University and Emeritus Professor (Musicology) at the University of Sydney, officially launched The Last Biwa Singer at the University of New England, where Dr de Ferranti is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts. Professor Marett spoke about the pride he had felt, as the supervisor of Dr de Ferranti’s PhD thesis on the blind musicians of Japan’s Kyushu province, on reading the book. “It’s the culmination of a journey that Hugh and I started together,” he said.

“Yamashika was the last person to have earned his living in Japan as a blind musician performing a repertoire of tales, songs, and religious rites accompanying himself on the biwa (a four-stringed lute),” Dr de Ferranti said. “He became well known as ‘the last biwa hoshi‘, and was the subject of books, television programs, and a feature-length documentary film. An apparent living relic of a long-vanished Japan, Yamashika also appeared in The New York Times in his last years.”

Professor Marett praised Dr de Ferranti’s insights, gained through conversations with Yamashika and analysis of his repertoire, into the true nature of the biwa singer’s performances - insights that help to correct the official “nationalistic” view of such performances as idealised “cultural relics” of a literary and musical canon.

On the contrary, the picture of the biwa singer’s art that emerges from the book is one of dynamic oral composition - traditional tales virtually recreated in the course of each telling, according (among other things) to the singer’s prior knowledge of his audience and his interaction with them during the performance.

“It is through comparison of multiple performances of a tale that the question of composition-in-performance can be addressed,” Dr de Ferranti explains in the book. “What are the common elements in each performance, what differences are there, how do they occur, and why? In examining this problem one is not trying to establish any ’standard’ or definitive form of the piece, but to establish how different versions of the piece come about.”

“The unfolding of the tale anew in each performance gives it its power,” Professor Marett said, deploring the loss of that “power” with the demise of such performance traditions. “All extinctions - biological or cultural - impoverish us and threaten our survival as a species on this planet,” he concluded.

The Last Biwa Singer: A Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance, is published by Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) as No. 143 in the Cornell East Asia Series.

Clicking on the image (a section of the book’s cover) displayed here reveals a photograph, taken at the UNE book launch, of Associate Professor Hugh de Ferranti (left) and Professor Allan Marett.

Professor William (Ned) Friedman flew all the way to Armidale, NSW, from Boulder in the United States for two days of fieldwork in pursuit of a species of plant unique to north-eastern NSW.

“There aren’t many places in the world I’d go for only two days,” he said. “But I’d come here for just one day.”

Ned Friedman is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A leading authority on plant morphology and embryology, he has a particular interest in the evolution of flowering plants. And the plant he flew to Armidale to see - a direct descendant of an ancient lineage of flowering plants - could reveal some vital secrets of that evolutionary process.

Before coming to Australia, Professor Friedman had examined records of the plant - Trimenia moorei (a bitter vine) - sent to him from the N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium at the University of New England and available through Australia’s Virtual Herbarium, but he had never seen a living specimen. The species - the only Australian member of the family Trimeniaceae - is a woody vine or liana that climbs to a height of 10 metres.

Professor Friedman’s host at UNE was the Director of the Beadle Herbarium, Associate Professor Jeremy Bruhl, and it was Dr Bruhl and the Herbarium’s Curator, Ian Telford, who took him to see the vine in its forest habitat. “They led me directly to the plants,” he said. “It’s been amazing; everything’s happened spectacularly.”

Dr Bruhl - accompanied by Tilly Eldridge, a young English botanist from the University of Manchester who is visiting UNE for three months - had undertaken a reconnaissance trip to the New England escarpment to ensure that the plants were in flower and with young fruit. The two days of fieldwork by the four botanists took them to the Cunnawarra, New England, and Gibraltar Range National Parks, and then back to UNE Botany for the preparation of samples for transport to the United States.

“Darwin called the origin of flowering plants ‘an abominable mystery’,” Professor Friedman said. “In a fraction of the time that it’s taken for the conifers, for example, to reach their modest level of diversity, flowering plants have taken over the world. What led to this explosion of biodiversity?”

This is the question that he’s hoping a study of Trimenia moorei (pictured here) will help to answer.

His particular interest is the evolution of endosperm - the tissue that nourishes the embryo in the seeds of flowering plants, and that nourishes humankind in the form of flour (wheat endosperm) and related foods. “Flowering plants provide between two-thirds and three-quarters of our caloric intake worldwide,” he said.  “In fact, without endosperm we humans wouldn’t have evolved.”

A deeper understanding of the evolution of endosperm could have major implications for both plant breeding and human nutrition.

Professor Friedman hopes to return to New England before the end of the year to observe, in a later stage of development, the plants he saw flowering in spring. He has a double incentive for the return visit, as UNE is hosting, over the first few days of December, the annual conference of the Australian Systematic Botany Society - “a tremendous opportunity,” he said, “for me to interact with the plant evolutionary biology community in Australia.”

Clicking on the Trimenia moorei image displayed here reveals a photograph of (from left) Ian Telford, Tilly Eldridge, Associate Professor Jeremy Bruhl, and Professor Ned Friedman.

The University of New England’s Professor David Brunckhorst has received a major international award for his work over more than two decades as a world leader in conservation planning.

Professor Brunckhorst, the Director of UNE’s Institute for Rural Futures, travelled to the United States last month to receive the Natural Areas Association’s George B. Fell Award. The presentation was at a banquet for 300 guests during the Association’s annual conference in Vancouver, Washington State.

The award, which the Association presents annually to someone it considers “a giant in their field”, recognises “exceptional career-long achievements in the natural areas profession”.

Professor Brunckhorst has made an important contribution to the planning of nature reserves - and their integration with sustainable agriculture - both in Australia and abroad.

In the early 1990s, as Secretary and Principal Scientific Adviser to the House of Representatives Committee on the Environment, he achieved the establishment of a National Reserve System, which aims to develop an ecologically representative network of protected natural areas around Australia. In doing so, he obtained not only unanimous bipartisan support at the Federal level, but also collaboration between the Federal and State Governments.

He has been an adviser for reserve projects in Canada, Germany, South Africa and the UK, and was a co-author of the Seville Strategy - the 1995 revision of UNESCO’s Biosphere Reserve Program. For all this work - and more - he was awarded a UNESCO Medal in 2000.

Professor Brunckhorst is internationally renowned for his pioneering work in “bioregional” planning - planning that promotes the mutually-sustaining interaction of human society and the natural environment within regional contexts. Much of his research activity at UNE has been focused in this direction, and his book Bioregional Planning: Resource Management Beyond the New Millennium (Gordon & Breach / Taylor & Francis, 2000) is used as a text in several countries.

“No matter how many protected areas you create, they will never adequately protect all species and ecosystems,” he said. “We need far more innovative ways of collaborating for conservation across private and public tenures of land ownership, and combining such conservation with sustainable land use.”

Eminent scientists and policy makers from Australia, Canada, the United States, Europe and South Africa nominated Professor Brunckhorst for the George B. Fell Award, the announcement of which came as a complete surprise to him.

After being presented with the award, Professor Brunckhorst gave public lectures at the University of Idaho and the University of California. In introducing him at those lectures, Professor Michael Scott, Leader of the US Geological Survey’s Biological Sciences Program, said: “Through his strong leadership, David Brunckhorst has continued his innovative and visionary approaches, which now focus on integrating conservation and environmental planning with working agricultural landscapes and communities.”

THE PHOTOGRAPH displayed here shows Professor Brunckhorst with the George B. Fell Award.

The Governor of New South Wales, Her Excellency Marie Bashir AC, has recognised the University of New England’s School of Rural Medicine with an award for its research into rural mental healthcare.

The award was presented to Professor Fiona Stewart on behalf of UNE’s School of Rural Medicine, and recognizes research into ways of supporting mental health practitioners, particularly those who work with children and adolescents in regional areas.

Chancellor of the UNE, Dr Richard Torbay commended the research undertaken by Professor John Fraser and Associate Professor Christian Alexander .

“Australia’s regional community is ‘crying out’ for real assistance, and I am pleased that UNE is focused on bringing results to the table that provide real assistance to the community.

“UNE’s first-class research demonstrates the University’s commitment to delivering tangible outcomes to Australia’s rural and regional community,” Dr Torbay said.

Professor Fraser said the research involved great deal of collaboration between UNE and rural GPs across rural NSW.

“As this research deepens, the University will continue to work alongside Hunter New England Health Service to explore programs that address this area of need,” Professor Fraser said.

Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of UNE’s Faculty of The Professions, Professor Victor Minichiello said the award demonstrates the significant impact the newly established medical school is making in the field of rural healthcare.

“As one of Australasia’s first rural medical school, UNE is clearly providing leadership to the rural community, delivering real research outcomes in the area of rural healthcare delivery.

“This award is evidence that UNE’s research is making a real difference to peoples’ lives, importantly in this acutely under-resourced area,” Professor Minichiello said.

An academic from the University of New England has won a highly competitive scholarship from the European Commission that will enable him to share ideas with researchers in Scandinavia.

Dr Siri Gamage, a Senior Lecturer in UNE’s School of Education, is known internationally as an expert analyst of - and commentator on - ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. He said that the Erasmus Mundus Scheme Scholarship would enable him to broaden his investigation of the human rights instruments available to ethnic minorities in nations around the world, and the conflicting claims of “national sovereignty” and the rights of minorities to “self-determination”.

Next week, Dr Gamage’s scholarship will take him to the University of Tromso in Norway - the northernmost university in the world. There, as a Visiting Scholar, he will contribute - from the perspective of his own expertise and experience - to seminars and discussions with academics and postgraduate students in the university’s Department of Social Anthropology.

After six weeks in Tromso, he will go on to the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he will be hosted for six weeks as a Visiting Scholar by that university’s School of Global Studies.

Dr Gamage’s  paper “Economic liberalisation, changes in governance structure and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka”, was published this year in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 39 (2). His most recent paper, “Can Sri Lanka achieve durable peace after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers?” has been accepted for publication by the Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict (Wisconsin Institute).

He said that - among other things - the  scholarship experience would be invaluable for him in his supervision of PhD students who are investigating issues surrounding the human rights of refugees and migrant workers, and in his coordination of a UNE course unit on social justice in education.

“Talking about human rights is not a revolutionary, radical activity,”  Dr Gamage said. “It’s part of being human.”

The Erasmus Mundus Scheme aims to enhance the quality of higher education within the European Union by encouraging dialogue between European academics and researchers and those from beyond Union.

Clicking on the image of refugee children displayed here reveals a photograph of Dr Siri Gamage.

The University of New England was the venue for an international symposium last week that reviewed current and future technologies that will help agriculture meet the world’s ever-increasing demands for food and fibre while maintaining the health of rural landscapes.

More than 130 delegates from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and China discussed the use of global positioning systems (GPS) for tracking livestock and guiding farm machinery such as tractors, new aerial and on-ground sensors for mapping soils and crops, and other advanced technologies in the field of “precision agriculture”.

The 13th Annual Symposium on Precision Agriculture in Australasia, hosted by UNE’s Precision Agriculture Research Group, was held at UNE last Thursday and Friday (10-11 September). “The symposium included two half-day workshops that allowed delegates to see -first-hand - some of the new technologies in action, and to discuss applications with both researchers and farmers,” said the Chair of the organising committee, Associate Professor David Lamb. “The response to the symposium was fantastic - we captured most people in Australia working in the field and there was a real spirit of inter-organisational cooperation in sharing ideas and aspirations.”

Two international speakers - Emeritus Professor Jim Schepers from the University of Nebraska in the United States and Professor Ke Wang from Zhejiang University in China - delivered  keynote addresses on the use of new technologies in managing the application of fertiliser.

Professor Schepers demonstrated a newly-developed sensor that records the level of organic matter in soil and thus indicates the amount of fertiliser required for a crop. He explained that this new sensor was “an attempt to fine-tune” a precision agriculture system that already used an aerial sensor to assess the need for fertiliser by monitoring the chlorophyll content and biomass of a crop. “The UNE workshop demonstration of the device was in fact the first time this sensor has been operated anywhere in the world, and it generated a lot of interest,” he said.

He spoke about the importance of these technologies in managing the application of fertiliser so as to minimise nitrate levels in groundwater.

Professor Wang outlined developments in the use of remote sensing and communication technologies to facilitate the interaction of farmers and scientists in crop management in China.

Central to this interaction, he explained, is the mobile phone, with farmers sending photographs of their fields to scientists, and the scientists using these and other data in advising the farmers on procedures such as fertiliser application.

“Information technology can play a big role in agricultural management,” Professor Wang said, adding that the use of the new system had already begun in Zhejiang Province.

UNE’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Pettigrew, officially opened the symposium, and the Chancellor, Dr Richard Torbay, officially closed it. “UNE is particularly proud to have hosted this symposium,” Dr Torbay said, emphasising UNE’s leading role - exemplified by its Precision Agriculture Research Group - in rural research.

Clicking on the image displayed here, taken at a field workshop during the symposium, reveals a photograph of (from left) Emeritus Professor Jim Schepers, Dr Richard Torbay, Professor Ke Wang, and Associate Professor David Lamb.

An international team of scientists working at the University of New England has been experimenting with technologies that can help to monitor the health of the environment by measuring the level of “stress” in trees.

Professor Kathy Steppe (pictured here) and Dr Dirk De Pauw travelled from Belgium to spend the past month in Armidale working with UNE plant ecophysiologist Dr Nigel Warwick and Alec Downey from ICT International, an Armidale-based company making - and distributing world-wide - equipment for plant, soil, and environmental monitoring. Professor Steppe comes from the Laboratory of Plant Ecology at Ghent University, and Dr De Pauw is Chief Executive Officer of Phyto-IT, Belgium - a  company that specialises in the analysis of data from - and the mathematical modelling of - plant systems.

They have been conducting experiments to compare the performance of three technologies that all use a pulse of heat injected into a tree trunk to measure how fast the sap is travelling up the trunk. As the heat pulse travels with the sap, sensors in the trunk measure its progress. The rate of flow is a sensitive indicator of the degree of environmental stress.

“Our original sap flow measurements were done on European trees in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Professor Steppe, “and in coming to Armidale we’ve had a chance to measure sap flow in eucalypts and acacias.” The research visit of Professor Steppe was funded by a grant from the National Fund for Scientific Research, Belgium (FWO).

“Our job here is to compare three different ways of measuring the movement of the heat pulse, and to assess the accuracy of the sensors and the effectiveness of these systems in measuring stress in trees,” said Dr De Pauw, who designs software for analysing the data recorded by the heat-pulse instruments.

In the experiments at UNE the scientists were able to control and vary the rate at which water flowed through sections of tree trunk, and see how accurately the three different measurement systems recorded these varying rates of flow. Dr Warwick pointed out that, after the development of semiconductor technology in the 1990s, accurate measurements were now possible. “But we still don’t know the biology,” he said, “- for example, how wood behaves when it’s heated. Now that we have accurate instruments we can start asking some really interesting questions.”

Mr Downey, who is the Manager of Plant Science Applications and Research at ICT International, said that his Armidale-based company exported monitoring equipment to countries on all continents. “The company’s owned and operated by scientists for scientists,” he said.

He explained the role of equipment such as heat-pulse sensors in the large-scale modelling of environmental phenomena such as carbon sequestration. “The more water that flows through a tree, the more carbon it can store,” he said.

Dr Warwick said that UNE’s collaboration with Northern-Hemisphere scientists and an Armidale-based company that supplied monitoring equipment to the world gave the current experiments a uniquely global perspective.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Professor Kathy Steppe displayed here expands to show her working with (from left) Dr Dirk De Pauw, Dr Nigel Warwick, and Alec Downey.

The UNE-based Poultry Cooperative Research Centre, which is Australia’s leading researcher into sustainable poultry production, has secured an additional $28 million to conduct new research over a further 7.5 years.

UNE’s Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer, Professor Alan Pettigrew, said the cash injection would have significant flow-on benefits for the University of New England, and was great news for the University and its academic community.

Professor Pettigrew congratulated UNE’s Professor Mingan Choct (pictured here),  the Poultry CRC’s Chief Executive Officer, and his colleagues on the successful rebid for the CRC, which is funded under the Australian Government’s CRC program.

“The Poultry CRC attracts world-class researchers and academics,” Professor Pettigrew said, and added that it already supported 35 students nationally for their Honours, Master’s and PhD degrees, and had developed undergraduate courses dedicated to poultry science.

The Poultry CRC has been performing research and driving education since 2003 aimed at improving the sustainability of the Australian poultry industries. Professor Choct said that it had delivered 20 diagnostic tests that cut diagnosis time from days to hours, and had seven vaccines under development and seven patents - some of them international breakthroughs. “These, and our educational outputs, contribute to our success,” he said.

The  CRC will address the major challenge of meeting increasing demand for ‘clean and green’ poultry products and maintaining food security in the face of climate change and population growth.

“Australians eat almost 40 kgs of chicken each every year, as well as around 175 eggs,” Professor Choct said. “Our industry must meet increasing demand for poultry products while using fewer resources and reducing environmental impacts. To ensure food security, we must massively increase productivity, without compromising food safety or welfare.”

Professor Pettigrew also congratulated UNE’s Associate Professor David Lamb who leads an important component of the CRC for Spatial Information, based at the CSIRO, which received a total of $32.2 million.

UNE will be involved in two major projects. An “Agriculture, Natural Resources and Climate Change: Biomass project” aims to empower Australia’s response to climate change by transforming the way public and private land managers balance agricultural productivity and sustainability. UNE will host this major project, using its significant strength in precision agriculture research to bring together agronomists, soil scientists, sensor specialists, physicists, ecosystem scientists, plant biologists, statisticians and computer scientists.

A “Health Research through the CRC for Spatial Information project” is predicated on the expectation that linking spatial technology with other technology and management methods can assist to deliver tangible healthcare improvement in rural areas.

“Our thanks go to Professor Ray Cooksey and the team at Research Services for their assistance in achieving these great outcomes,” Professor Pettigrew said.

The University of New England has been ranked among the country’s top sandstone universities in a national survey that measures dollars earned from research commercialisation.

The national survey of research commercialisation, conducted by the Federal Government’s Commercialisation Institute, lists UNE together with Monash University, the University of Queensland, CSIRO, and Melbourne University as one of Australia’s top five generators of commerialised research revenue.

With $6.8 million in earnings from commercialised research, the University of New England beats research giant, University of Melbourne ($6m), and is ranked well ahead of the State’s biggest university, UNSW ($3.5m).

UNE’s Vice-Chancellor and CEO, Professor Alan Pettigrew, said the result was in large part attributable to the commercialisation of animal genetics research outcomes at the university’s Agricultural Business Research Institute (ABRI), and served to highlight UNE’s research strengths - particularly in the area of rural science, a core focus for the University.

“UNE has enjoyed the benefits from this synergy between research production and commercialisation for a number of years now,” Professor Pettigrew said.

“UNE’s core focus is on rural and inland regional issues, and our strengths in the sciences have always been in rural science and land-based agriculture,” he said, “so it’s great that the commercialisation of UNE research in this field continues to achieve great outcomes.”

Professor Pettigrew commended Professor Ray Cooksey, UNE’s Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) and the University’s Research Services team for their assistance in achieving these great outcomes for UNE.

The Managing Director of ABRI, Dr Arthur Rickards OAM, said ABRI, a controlled entity of UNE, had achieved commercialisation of beef genetic technologies in 14 countries, including Argentina, the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and the UK.

“This performance has been made possible by the very high quality of UNE research that underpins the beef genetic products,” Dr Rickards said, adding that UNE’s Animal Science, the Animal Genetics & Breeding Unit, and the Beef CRC had all contributed to an outstanding result.

The Chancellor of UNE, Dr Richard Torbay (pictured here), said the ranking was a significant achievement for the University of New England, and a real indication of UNE’s research strengths.

“UNE’s ranking among Australia’s top universities goes to show that, even by comparison with much larger institutions like the University of Melbourne and the University of NSW, UNE is certainly capable of punching well above its weight,” Dr Torbay said.

Clicking on the photograph of UNE’s Chancellor, Dr Richard Torbay, displayed here reveals a photograph of Dr Torbay congratulating the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Pettigrew (left) and the Managing Director of ABRI, Dr Arthur Rickards.

For millennia, poets, playwrights, and even the odd pop singer have been trying to tie down with words that most elusive of subjects, romantic love. Now psychologists at the University of New England are taking the scientific approach, in a new study that seeks to identify — and name — the underlying characteristics of romantic relationships.

UNE researchers are seeking at least 400 men and women to respond anonymously to a questionnaire asking them to describe their romantic relationships.

The researchers will then use factor analysis to identify groupings of descriptors that might make up the “building blocks” of romantic relationships.

The study would break new ground by focusing on the qualities of the relationship, rather than the individuals in the relationship, according to Dr John Malouff, the psychologist leading the study.

“The key factors that make up romantic relationships are not really something that’s been looked at by psychologists to date,” Dr Malouff said. “We know a lot about personality, and the characteristics that define individuals. What we don’t know much about are the characteristics that define relationships, especially romantic ones. That’s what this study is trying to find out.”

Dr. Malouff said understanding relationships was important, because their success or otherwise had such a big impact on our lives.

“We know that the times in life when we are most upset are often when we’ve had an argument with a spouse or a lover,” Dr. Malouff said.

“Our hope is that by identifying the key characteristics of romantic relationships, we may then be able to help people improve their relationships, make them longer lasting and more satisfying.”

People interested in participating in the study should go to http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=clcxaEhNTmZ1bi1ITlpJLTNGUTA2Q3c6MA or contact Hans Receveur at unepsychologystudy@une.edu.au.

Press contact: Dr John Malouff on (02) 6773 3776 or Leon Braun (UNE public relations) on (02) 6773 3771.