Behavior of high dose O+-implanted Si/Ge/Si structures

The synthesis of a buried oxide layer in multilayer Si/Ge/Si structures by the implantation of high doses of 200 keV O+ ions is studied by Rutherford backscattering analysis. The presence of Ge is found to have a minimal effect upon the mass transport of excess oxygen and interstitial silicon. Infrared transmission spectroscopy and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy confirm that the oxygen atoms bond preferentially to silicon forming silicon dioxide and SiOx, where x<2, with no evidence for Ge—O bonding

Citizen observatory based soil moisture monitoring – The GROW example

GROW Observatory is a project funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. Its aim is to establish a large scale (more than 20,000 participants), resilient and integrated ‘Citizen Observatory’ (CO) and community for environmental monitoring that is self-sustaining beyond the life of the project. This article describes how the initial framework and tools were developed to evolve, bring together and train such a community; raising interest, engaging participants, and educating to support reliable observations, measurements and documentation, and considerations with a special focus on the reliability of the resulting dataset for scientific purposes. The scientific purposes of GROW observatory are to test the data quality and the spatial representativity of a citizen engagement driven spatial distribution as reliably inputs for soil moisture monitoring and to create timely series of gridded soil moisture products based on citizens’ observations using low cost soil moisture (SM) sensors, and to provide an extensive dataset of in situ soil moisture observations which can serve as a reference to validate satellite-based SM products and support the Copernicus in situ component. This article aims to showcase the initial steps of setting up such a monitoring network that has been reached at the mid-way point of the project’s funded period, focusing mainly on the design and development of the CO monitoring network

Self-determined citizens? New forms of civic activism and citizenship in Armenia

This article examines the recent emergence and growth of grassroots social movements in Armenia which are locally known as ‘civic initiatives’. It considers what their emergence tells us about the development of civil society and the changing understandings and practices of citizenship in Armenia in the post-Soviet period. It analyses why civic initiatives explicitly reject and distance themselves from formal, professionalised NGOs and what new models of civic activism and citizenship they have introduced. It argues that civic initiatives embrace a more political understanding of civil society than that which was introduced by Western donors in the 1990s

Citizen science as seen by scientists: Methodological, epistemological and ethical dimensions

Citizen science as a way of communicating science and doing public engagement has over the past decade become the focus of considerable hopes and expectations. It can be seen as a win–win situation, where scientists get help from the public and the participants get a public engagement experience that involves them in real and meaningful scientific research. In this paper we present the results of a series of qualitative interviews with scientists who participated in the ‘OPAL’ portfolio of citizen science projects that has been running in England since 2007: What were their experiences of participating in citizen science? We highlight two particular sets of issues that our participants have voiced, methodological/epistemological and ethical issues. While we share the general enthusiasm over citizen science, we hope that the research in this paper opens up more debate over the potential pitfalls of citizen science as seen by the scientists themselves