'Things ain’t what they used to be’: Marvin Gaye and the making of “What’s Going On”

Born 1939 in Washington, D.C, Marvin Pentz Gay Jnr (who later added the “e” to his name) was one of four born to a mother he remained devoted to throughout his life and a father whose cross-dressing tendencies he reportedly found both humiliating and confusing. A minister for a small Hebrew Pentecostal sect, according to his daughter, Marvin Gay Snr. was not one to “spare the rod” when it came to his children. Violence coursed through Gaye’s life (in a BBC Radio 2 documentary to commemorate the 40th anniversary of What’s Going On, Gaye also alluded to frequent scuffles with Motown boss Berry Gordy), culminating in his violent death at the hands of his father in 1984

Joni Mitchell: music and feminism

This article considers singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell's often fraught relationship with second and third-wave feminism

A partial differential equation for pseudocontact shift

It is demonstrated that pseudocontact shift (PCS), viewed as a scalar or a tensor field in three dimensions, obeys an elliptic partial differential equation with a source term that depends on the Hessian of the unpaired electron probability density. The equation enables straightforward PCS prediction and analysis in systems with delocalized unpaired electrons, particularly for the nuclei located in their immediate vicinity. It is also shown that the probability density of the unpaired electron may be extracted, using a regularization procedure, from PCS data

A standard format and a graphical user interface for spin system specification

We introduce a simple and general XML format for spin system description that is the result of extensive consultations within Magnetic Resonance community and unifies under one roof all major existing spin interaction specification conventions. The format is human-readable, easy to edit and easy to parse using standard XML libraries. We also describe a graphical user interface that was designed to facilitate construction and visualization of complicated spin systems. The interface is capable of generating input files for several popular spin dynamics simulation packages.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Civil society as a quasi-regulator: accounting for carbon risk

How can the financial sector be persuaded to play a role in climate action? This poster offers an overview of my findings regarding work conducted by civil society organisations

Antepartum Haemorrhage

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Post-War Changes in the Influence of Social Structure on Australian Voting: The 'Decline of Social Cleavages' Revisited

Franklin, Mackie and Valen?s 1992 book on Electoral Change drew on evidence taken from a small number of surveys in each included country (including Australia) during the mid-1960s to 1990 to derive some general conclusions about the historical decline of cleavage politics. In this article, I make some methodological improvements and also considerably chronologically extend the analyses for Australia, to cover the whole of the post-war period. The results show that some of the previous conclusions are incorrect and that although there has been a decline in the strength of association between social structural variables and voting for the ALP over the post-war period, the decline has not been a smooth one and predominantly occurred in the earlier part of the period. I also discuss the results in the context of broader international debates about the impact of social changes on voting

Links between family structure and voting in Australia

Some of the features of the 2004 Australian federal election campaign and outcomes raise the possibility that we might have seen the beginnings of a divide in voting behaviour based on family structure, particularly those aspects related to the presence or absence of children. In the light of ongoing demographic trends (such as low fertility rates and growth in single person households) this would be plausible and the issue certainly justifies some further investigation. Relevant data from the 2004 Australian Election Study is quite limited, so I use data from both the 2004 AES and the 2003 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to explore the extent to which family structure currently appears to be associated with federal voting