Unfinished Business: Confirming Australia's Constitution as an Act of Political Settlement

This paper sympathises with both conservatives who oppose continual tampering with the Constitution and progressive reformers wishing to improve its democratic character. It suggests a constitutional reconciliation between the two is feasible if both take more account of the position advanced by federal constitutionalists. Such a reconciliation would leave the mainframe of the Constitution intact and establish it more securely as an authoritative framework for political association. Doing so would also resolve much of the normative confusion surrounding the polity, help establish a more coherent philosophy of government in Australia, and subsume the translation to a republic.     

Ten compactness properties of circles: measuring shape in geography

This essay sheds new light on the meaning and measurement of compactness—one of the most intriguing and least‐understood properties of geographic shapes. We articulate a unified theoretical foundation for the study of shape compactness that rests on two simple observations: First, that the circle is the most compact of shapes. And second, that there are 10—and possibly more—distinct geometrical properties of the circle that make it the most compact of shapes. We introduce these 10 properties, illustrate them with real‐world examples and define indices associated with these properties that can be calculated using a geographic information system.