Strengthening Democracy in Europe and its Resilience against Autocracy: Daring more Democracy and a European Democracy Charter. Research Paper in Law 01/2019

Representative Democracy is in crisis and this not only in Europe, considering developments in the US in particular.1 EU Member States like Poland, 2 Hungary3 and Austria4 are governed by populists, some of them with autocratic tendencies.5 France is facing a crisis of political violence with “Gilets Jaunes” rampaging on its streets. Romania is riddled by corruption.6 Ever lower participation in elections and declining membership in political parties on both sides of the Atlantic document the steady decline of engagement of people in representative democracy. At the same time, the US under President Trump tries to weaken the EU7 and so does Russia, both spreading fake news, openly and covertly undermining democracy in Europe.8And the new electronic communication environment on the internet, controlled by a few mega corporations, undermines journalism and the free, privately financed press of the fourth estate. They provide not only a fertile ground for populist slogans and the mobilisation of hate and violence but also the means to manipulate voters, effectively leading to situations like the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal and in fine the result of the Brexit vote in the UK.9 They socialise people to instant consumption, cutting out the middlemen – and create the illusion that this is possible in democracy, as it is possible in markets, thus undermining elections, elected lawmakers and representative democracy

Rethinking data and rebalancing digital power

This report highlights and contextualises four cross-cutting interventions with a strong potential to reshape the digital ecosystem: 1. Transforming infrastructure into open and interoperable ecosystems. 2. Reclaiming control of data from dominant companies. 3. Rebalancing the centres of power with new (non-commercial) institutions. 4. Ensuring public participation as an essential component of technology policymaking. The interventions are multidisciplinary and they integrate legal, technological, market and governance solutions. They offer a path towards addressing present digital challenges and the possibility for a new, healthy digital ecosystem to emerge. What do we mean by a healthy digital ecosystem? One that privileges people over profit, communities over corporations, society over shareholders. And, most importantly, one where power is not held by a few large corporations, but is distributed among different and diverse models, alongside people who are represented in, and affected by the data used by those new models. The digital ecosystem we propose is balanced, accountable and sustainable, and imagines new types of infrastructure, new institutions and new governance models that can make data work for people and society. Some of these interventions can be located within (or built from) emerging and recently adopted policy initiatives, while others require the wholesale overhaul of regulatory regimes and markets. They are designed to spark ideas that political thinkers, forward-looking policymakers, researchers, civil society organisations, funders and ethical innovators in the private sector consider and respond to when designing future regulations, policies or initiatives around data use and governance. This report also acknowledges the need to prepare the ground for the more ambitious transformation of power relations in the digital ecosystem. Even a well-targeted intervention won't change the system unless it is supported by relevant institutions and behavioural change

Uniform Large-Area Free-Standing Silver Nanowire Arrays on Transparent Conducting Substrates

Arrays of silver nanowires have received increasing attention in a variety of applications such as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), plasmonic biosensing and electrode for photoelectric devices. However, until now, large scale fabrication of device-suitable silver nanowire arrays on supporting substrates has seen very limited success. Here we show the synthesis of free-standing silver nanowire arrays on indium-tin oxide (ITO) coated glass by pulsed electrodeposition into anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) templates. We use an in situ oxygen plasma cleaning process and a sputtered Ti layer to enhance the adhesion between the template and ITO glass. An ultrathin gold layer (2 nm) is deposited as a nucleation layer for the electrodeposition of silver. An unprecedented high level of uniformity and control of the nanowire diameter, spacing and length has been achieved. The absorption measurements show that the free-standing silver nanowire arrays possess tunable plasmonic resonances.publishe

Country-scale greenhouse gas budgets using shipborne measurements: a case study for the UK and Ireland

We present a mass balance approach to estimate the seasonal and annual budgets of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) of the United Kingdom (excluding Scotland) and the Republic of Ireland from concentration measurements taken on a ferry along the east coast of the United Kingdom over a 3-year period (2015–2017). We estimate the annual emissions of CH4 to be 2.55±0.48 Tg, which is consistent with the combined 2.29 Tg reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by the individual countries. The net CO2 budget (i.e. including all anthropogenic and biogenic sources and sinks of CO2) is estimated at 881.0±125.8 Tg, with a net biogenic contribution of 458.7 Tg (taken as the difference between the estimated net emissions and the inventory value, which accounts for anthropogenic emissions only). The largest emissions for both gases were observed in a broad latitudinal band (52.5–54∘ N), which coincides with densely populated areas. The emissions of both gases were seasonal (maxima in winter and minima in summer), strongly correlated with natural gas usage and, to a lesser extent, also anti-correlated with mean air temperature. Methane emissions exhibited a statistically significant anti-correlation with air temperature at the seasonal timescale in the central region spanning 52.8–54.2∘ N, which hosts a relatively high density of waste treatment facilities. Methane emissions from landfills have been shown to sometimes increase with decreasing air temperature due to changes in the CH4-oxidising potential of the topsoil, and we speculate that the waste sector contributes significantly to the CH4 budget of this central region. This study brings independent verification of the emission budgets estimated using alternative products (e.g. mass balance budgets by aircraft measurements, inverse modelling, inventorying) and offers an opportunity to investigate the seasonality of these emissions, which is usually not possible