The role of tobacco taxes in starting and quitting smoking

The annual five per cent in real terms increase in tobacco taxes proposed in the recent White Paper on smoking has reaffirmed the commitment of successive United Kingdom governments to above inflation increases in tobacco taxation to encourage people to stop smoking. This paper presents evidence on the determinants of starting and quitting smoking using data from the British 'Health and Lifestyle Survey' and is the first to identify tax elasticities for starting and quitting smoking using British data. Self-reported individual smoking histories are coupled with a long time series for the tax rate on cigarettes to construct a longitudinal data set. Estimates are obtained for the impact of above inflation tax rises on the age of starting smoking and the number of years of smoking. The estimates of the tax elasticity of the age of starting smoking are +0.16 for men and +0.08 for women. The estimates of the tax elasticity of quitting are - 0.60 for men and -0.46 for women. These are robust to different specifications.Smoking initiation and cessation; Tobacco taxes; Duration analysis.

Energy Harvesting From Exercise Machines: Buck-Boost Converter Design

This report details the design and implementation of a switching DC-DC converter for use in the Energy Harvesting From Exercise Machines (EHFEM) project. It uses a four-switch, buck-boost topology to regulate the wide, 5-60 V output of an elliptical machine to 36 V, suitable as input for a microinverter to reclaim the energy for the electrical grid. Successful implementation reduces heat emissions from electrical energy originally wasted as heat, and facilitates a financial and environmental benefit from reduced net energy consumption

Clairvoyant Practices for the Designed World (The Job of the Artist is to De-Design)

This thesis uses the term ‘designed world’ to designate an envelope that contains what is usually understood as public space. It asks how certain experimental artistic practices can make apparent, from within, our evolving everyday (our human-centered real). It also asserts that the space between the practical fields of art and of design is one area where the importance of such investigations comes into view. A range of concepts – coping, critical spatial practice, de-design, imagination, strange tools, clairvoyance, complicity, real and virtual spaces, the shaping of time, format, design fiction, counter-factual event, and analogy – are introduced to describe how art practices can unsettle or open the designed world to scrutiny. Artist Vito Acconci’s term ‘de-design’ is used as an initial step in showing the kinds of questions that artworks ask of the designed world. Theodore Schatzki’s use of the word art to designate ‘clairvoyant practices’ (that certain practices make change palpable) and Jane Rendell’s term ‘critical spatial practice’ (embedded interventions in urban space) enlarge the scope of these questions. Bernard Stiegler’s idea of the ‘amateur’ contributes to a critical examination of a contemporary ideology of ‘disruptive innovation.’ Clairvoyant practices are associated with a fundamental formulation of imagination as a condition of politics (via Arendt). This radical idea of imagination is nuanced through art historian David Summer’s spatio-temporal inquiry into form, format, and the virtual, as a critical stance in relation to artefacts. I examine specific artworks, films, performances, choreographies and designed things as ‘clairvoyant,’ i.e.: able to reflect on the designed world on multiple registers, including a spatio-temporal one. I focuses in detail on two contemporary practices that ‘cope’ in a generative manner with the designed world from a position of complicity: Hito Steyerl (in the space of digital practice) and Theaster Gates (in the space of material practice). With Steyerl, ‘clairvoyance’ is turned towards contemporary digital representation and its manipulation. With Gates it focuses on urban social actions based in musical improvisation. The thesis concludes with a situated description of my own practice, including the studio components of this thesis – the public installation Paraguayan Sea (with Erín Moure) and the video installation The Machine Stops, set in Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex, Chandigarh

Public Spaces - The Architecture and Landscape Architecture of Vito Acconci: Critical Motion between Art & Design

This thesis investigates the distinction between high-art and applied-art in the frame of the avant-garde’s relation to modernity. It takes the practice of Vito Acconci (a performance artist who became an architect) as an example of the viability of art and design to engage with important questions in a culture determined by ‘functionality.’ It proposes questions about the nature of ‘criticality’ in the interstices between high-art and applied-art as they have been institutionalized as distinct disciplines in schools of art and design, where the ‘and’ has become a term of separation rather than complicity. This separation is interrogated in the light of avant-garde art practices and their relationship to ‘technicity’. I look at the unfolding of a ‘Bauhaus project’ that constructs a divide between applied and high art by merging goals of utility and aesthetics while superseding the radical conjecture of the ‘irrational’ avant-garde. This ‘Bauhaus project’ is then juxtaposed to critical theory in art criticism (via Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh) which fixes a place for art in society and fixes the limits of what criticality can mean. I suggest that, taken together, the Bauhaus project and critical theory have served to create and reinforce a binary between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ which is self-fulfilling, self-limiting and self-regulating. In discussing how Acconci’s practice encounters and ‘unfixes’ this binary, I draw from Craig Dworkin (who asserts that Accconci’s practice continues poetry by other means), Grace McQuilten (who asserts a contrarian ‘mis-design’ as a way of opening up commercial culture to critical practice) and Krzysztof Ziarek (who, through an exploration of Adorno and Heidegger, asserts a relevance for avant-garde practices as gestures of post-aesthetic nonpower). In brief, this thesis asks if, in consideration of these positions, we can begin to define a criticality between art and design that supersedes the binary as described