Commonwealth universities news in brief

Etiquette Guide for Australians in Beijing

Australian visitors to the Beijing Olympics have been given an insight into the practical and social skills they will need to make the most of their trip.

A new three-hour course at The University of Western Australia's Confucius Institute equips visitors with the basics of language, good manners, sight-seeing and shopping tips and other social skills such as eating out and handling chop-sticks.

Course presenter Vada Ng said if visitors were aware of the many minor cultural differences their stay in China could be more enjoyable.

"Chinese people are very polite and it is not in our culture to say no, unless we can do it in a roundabout way, so we tend to say yes to be polite, although we might not mean it in an affirmative way," Ms Ng said.

Aristotle's brain wave may speed internet searches

University of Waikato philosophy lecturer Dr Cathy Legg and computer science PhD student Olena Medelyan have been collaborating on a project to use ontology, a science first proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle more than 2300 years ago, to refine internet searches.

Ontology, the theory of being, attempts to break down the universe to its most basic components, such as material objects, events, numbers, and persons.

One example of where ontologies can help the Information Technology field is in the paring down of internet search results to remove superfluous or irrelevant results. For instance, currently a Google search for 'turkey' returns a mixture of results about Turkey the country and turkey the bird. As the search engine works only with the character-string (letters), it cannot tell the difference between the two.

Dr Legg's background in formal ontology includes a previous project called CYC, developed for the US company Cycorp and largely funded by the US military. For this reason, Dr Legg and Ms Medelyan decided to find all concepts in CYC and Wikipedia which are equivalent ontologically – in other words, which describe the same thing.

They managed to find more than 50,000 such mappings, using a purely automated algorithm, mapping not only concepts that have the same name, but also those that have different names but mean the same, for example pest management/pest control, homo sapiens/humans.

Such a large automated ontology alignment is a first for the computing world. It will make it possible to create a 'super ontology' combining the developed structure of CYC and the much larger store of information in Wikipedia.

Student Idea Adopted as Marketing Slogan

South Africa's North-West University (NWU) is changing its public tag line to "Innovation through diversity" after a competition entered by 231 staff and students.

It will replace the existing "Getting it right, Ons doen dit reg, Re dira sentle" across the university's marketing, communication and advertising campaigns aimed at enhancing and strengthening the new University's brand.

It is inspired by a competition entry from second-year Master's student Malebo Matlala.

Dr Theuns Eloff, the university's Vice-Chancellor, said: "Simple and effective, the new pay-off line will help to send a consistent and clear message to our stakeholders and address any misperceptions about what the University is about. The pay-off line articulates the essence of our strategic intent and says we are harnessing diversity and allowing our students and staff to be who they want to be and in return enrich our innovative spirit."

Ms Matlala is currently completing her master's studies in water sciences on the university's Potchefstroom Campus, thought of the competition entry that inspired the new pay-off line.

"After reading about the competition, I was thinking about the unique diversity at the NWU, but I knew that there was more to it," she said.

Dr Ngoato Takalo, Vice-Principal and Executive Director: Teaching and Learning, encouraged Ms Matlala to continue using her innovative spirit. Mr Frans du Preez, Director in the office of the Vice-Chancellor, said that Ms Matlala represented the 'new face of the NWU' and that the NWU is thankful for the valuable contribution she made to the University's branding process.

NWU was formed in 2004 from the merger of historically-black University of the North West and the historically-white Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education.

Stormy weather

Flinders University will provide the technology and research expertise in a major international collaboration that aims to improve the quality and use of Singapore's stormwater.

The practical applications of the new technology flowing from the project will ultimately be transferred to Adelaide and the rest of Australia.

A $1.1 million research project brings together Flinders' expertise in leading edge water technologies and research capability with a major Australian water company, United Water International, and the National University of Singapore, the Singapore-Delft Water Alliance ("SDWA", comprising Singaporean public utilities and Dutch water experts) and Deltares Netherlands (a Dutch business consortium).

The project will install and trial a state-of-the-art filtration system in a major canal in Singapore down which millions of litres of tropical rainfall currently flow from dense urban areas to reservoirs and the sea, carrying with it undesirable impurities. The highly porous, large capacity, modular filter system being developed by Flinders University will purify the storm water and have major cost and efficiency advantages over conventional gravel and sand-based systems. Importantly, as part of the SDWA programme, it will enable these large and often unsightly canals to be landscaped for aesthetic and recreational purposes, and yet remain flood-preventative.

The two year project is co-funded by the Australian Research Council.