Public wealth, public health, and private stealth: Australia's black market in cigarettes

Taxes on tobacco provide a significant income for the Australian government – $5.1 billion in 2001. At the same time, health officials are making strenuous efforts to reduce smoking, particularly among teenagers. Some economists suggest that raising taxes on tobacco will produce more revenue while at the same time lowering smoking rates, particularly among youths who have less discretionary spending power than adults. But a by-product of excise tax in Australia has been the emerging market in ‘chop-chop,’ tobacco diverted from legal channels by growers who receive considerably higher prices for a part of their yield than they can obtain from legal manufacturers. The article details this situation and suggests that only bold solutions may be able to reduce tensions in tax policies, smoking rates and the ‘chop-chop’ black market

Once upon a time, there was a fabulous funambulist: What children learn about the “high-level” vocabulary they encounter while listening to stories

Previous research has shown that listening to stories supports vocabulary growth in preschool and school-aged children and that lexical entries for even very difficult or rare words can be established if these are defined when they are first introduced. However, little is known about the nature of the lexical representations children form for the words they encounter while listening to stories, or whether these are sufficiently robust to support the child’s own use of such ‘high-level’ vocabulary. This study explored these questions by administering multiple assessments of children’s knowledge about a set of newly-acquired vocabulary. Four- and 6-year-old children were introduced to nine difficult new words (including nouns, verbs and adjectives) through three exposures to a story read by their class teacher. The story included a definition of each new word at its first encounter. Learning of the target vocabulary was assessed by means of two tests of semantic understanding – a forced choice picture-selection task and a definition production task – and a grammaticality judgment task, which asked children to choose between a syntactically-appropriate and syntactically-inappropriate usage of the word. Children in both age groups selected the correct pictorial representation and provided an appropriate definition for the target words in all three word classes significantly more often than they did for a matched set of non-exposed control words. However, only the older group was able to identify the syntactically-appropriate sentence frames in the grammaticality judgment task. Further analyses elucidate some of the components of the lexical representations children lay down when they hear difficult new vocabulary in stories and how different tests of word knowledge might overlap in their assessment of these components

Public Wealth, Public Health, and Private Stealth: Ausralias Black Market in Cigarettes

Taxes on tobacco provide a significant income for the Australian government - $5.1 billion in 2001. At the same time, health officials are making strenuous efforts to reduce smoking, particularly among teenagers. Some economists suggest that raising taxes on tobacco will produce more revenue while at the same time lowering smoking rates, particularly among youths who have less discretionary spending power than adults. But a by-product of excise tax in Australia has been the emerging market in "chop-chop" tobacco diverted from legal channels by growers who receive considerably higher prices for a part of their yield than they can obtain from legal manufacturers. The article details this situation and suggests that only bold solutions may be able to reduce tensions in tax policies, smoking rates and the "chop-chop" black market

Lessons learned in autoclave synthesis of upconversion nanoparticles : unreported variables and safety considerations

Autoclaves – vessels for sustaining high temperatures and high pressures – are widely used across chemical and biological sciences, and are one of the more accessible pieces of equipment for synthesis of luminescent upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) amongst other nanomaterials. Yet, despite being crucial to nanomaterial synthesis, the details of autoclave reactors used are barely reported in the literature, leaving several key synthesis variables widely unreported, and thereby hampering the reproducibility of many synthesises. In this perspective, we discuss the safety considerations of autoclave reactors and note that autoclaves should only be used if they are (a) purchased from reputable suppliers/manufacturers and (b) have been certified compliant with relevant safety standards. Ultimately, using unsuitable autoclave equipment can pose a severe physical hazard and may breach legal workplace safety requirements. In addition, we highlight a number of parameters in autoclave synthesis that we suggest should be reported as standard in order to maximise the reproducibility of autoclave synthesis experiments. Subsequently, we discuss two case studies where a commercially available high-safety autoclave system was used to synthesise UCNPs. We also provide broader context for the physical and optical properties of UCNPs, their applications, and other UCNP synthesis methods. We hope that this perspective encourages users of autoclave synthesis, whether in nanomaterials or in broader contexts to: (a) adopt and report the use of high-safety autoclaves and (b) report the many experimental variables involved in autoclave use to enhance reproducibility and robustness of nanomaterial synthesis

Public wealth, public health, and private stealth: Australia's black market in cigarettes

Taxes on tobacco provide a significant income for the Australian government – $5.1 billion in 2001. At the same time, health officials are making strenuous efforts to reduce smoking, particularly among teenagers. Some economists suggest that raising taxes on tobacco will produce more revenue while at the same time lowering smoking rates, particularly among youths who have less discretionary spending power than adults. But a by-product of excise tax in Australia has been the emerging market in ‘chop-chop,’ tobacco diverted from legal channels by growers who receive considerably higher prices for a part of their yield than they can obtain from legal manufacturers. The article details this situation and suggests that only bold solutions may be able to reduce tensions in tax policies, smoking rates and the ‘chop-chop’ black market