Suchergebnisse

With the proliferation and application of democratic innovations around the world, the empirical study of deliberative and participatory processes has shifted from small-scale environments and experiments to real-life political processes on a large scale. With this shift, there is also a need to explore new theoretical approaches in order to understand current developments. Instead of analyzing democratic innovations in isolation, the recent 'systemic turn' in the field encourages us to broaden our perspective and evaluate democratic innovations as complementary parts of a political system.This paper will draw upon a qualitative case study, based on interview and supported by survey data, of the 'Estonian Citizens' Assembly Process' (ECA), in order to operationalize the systemic approach to deliberative democracy and illustrate how this can be applied to an analysis of democratic innovations.The ECA spanned more than a year (November 2012 to April 2014) and covered three political arenas: the public sphere, democratic innovations and representative institutions. The systemic analysis highlights the deliberative strengths and weaknesses of arenas and institutions, and illuminates how various arenas and democratic innovations did and did not complement one another in the creation of a deliberative process. The systemic analysis offers two possible interpretations of the ECA. The more affirmative interpretation is it constituted a deliberative system, as it did perform the three main functions fulfilled by different arenas and institutions. The more critical interpretation is that the ECA partly failed to be a deliberative system, due to social domination and decoupling of institutions.

With the proliferation and application of democratic innovations around the world, the empirical study of deliberative and participatory processes has shifted from small-scale environments and experiments to real-life political processes on a large scale. With this shift, there is also a need to explore new theoretical approaches in order to understand current developments. Instead of analyzing democratic innovations in isolation, the recent 'systemic turn' in the field encourages us to broaden our perspective and evaluate democratic innovations as complementary parts of a political system. This paper will draw upon a qualitative case study, based on interview and supported by survey data, of the 'Estonian Citizens' Assembly Process' (ECA), in order to operationalize the systemic approach to deliberative democracy and illustrate how this can be applied to an analysis of democratic innovations. The ECA spanned more than a year (November 2012 to April 2014) and covered three political arenas: the public sphere, democratic innovations and representative institutions. The systemic analysis highlights the deliberative strengths and weaknesses of arenas and institutions, and illuminates how various arenas and democratic innovations did and did not complement one another in the creation of a deliberative process. The systemic analysis offers two possible interpretations of the ECA. The more affirmative interpretation is it constituted a deliberative system, as it did perform the three main functions fulfilled by different arenas and institutions. The more critical interpretation is that the ECA partly failed to be a deliberative system, due to social domination and decoupling of institutions.

Reflective structural colors are of interest for many applications as alternatives to dyes and pigments and many different solutions have been proposed. The ideal systems should provide high reflectance efficiency while keeping good chromaticity and offering tunability throughout the visible spectral range. It is challenging to achieve such combined features with a simple single structure. Here we address this challenge using a concept that combines the Fabry-Perot effect with a broadband absorbing layer. Our easy-to-fabricate structures form highly reflective optical nanocavities with improved chromaticity throughout the visible compared with the two separate concepts. The addition of an additional cavity layer and a transparent top coating further improves the chromaticity and allows the formation of black surfaces. ; Funding Agencies|Swedish Foundation for Strategic ResearchSwedish Foundation for Strategic Research; Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science on Functional Materials at Linkoping University (Faculty Grant SFO-Mat-LiU) [2009 00971]

While pure deliberation has still not been found online, the field of online deliberation research is blossoming. Born out of the "frustrations and possibilities" of the 1990s, a current theme in the field is to re-link deliberative theory with empirical political science. The aim of this systematic literature review is to sort out and examine important features of this development; to identify and categorise important research themes and issues as well as to pinpoint some research gaps. Using citation analysis as a method for article selection, 788 abstracts were retrieved and out of these, 130 items were chosen for further analysis. First the review shows that researchers from several different disciplines are involved in the field and that these researchers are studying online deliberation in a variety of arenas aided by a wide range of methods. Second the review reveals that the field struggles with a highly diversified concept of deliberation; that newer theoretical developments are underutilised in the operationalisation of theoretical concepts for empirical analyses, and that it there is a rather low degree of cumulativity in the field. Finally, more attention is paid on deliberation per se, rather than the political and democratic consequences of deliberation.

We study the evolution from suppressed to enhanced optical transmission through metal nanohole arrays with increasing film thickness. Due to Fano interferences, the plasmon resonances gradually shift from transmission dips for ultrathin films to peaks for thick films, accompanied by a Fano asymmetry parameter that increases with film thickness. For intermediate thicknesses, both peaks and dips in transmission are far from the plasmon resonances, and hence, also far from the spectral positions of maximum light absorption and nearfield enhancements. Calculations for various hole diameters and periodicities confirm the universality of our conclusions. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement ; Funding Agencies|Wenner-Gren Foundations; AForsk foundation; Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Swedish Research Foundation; Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science on Functional Materials at Linkoping University [2009 00971]

The Estonian Citizens' Assembly Process (ECA) was initiated in 2013 as a direct consequence of a legitimacy crisis of Estonian political parties and representative institutions. The spark igniting this crisis was the unravelling of a scheme of illegal party financing. The response from the governmental institutions took the form of a democratic innovation drawing on public crowdsourcing and deliberative mini-publics. This study is conducted on the basis of a broad survey among the participants in the initial crowdsourcing for proposals of the ECA (n=847). The focus of this paper is on the relationship between citizen participation and political trust. Two main research questions guides this paper: (1) How has participants vertical and horizontal trust developed in relation to their participation in the ECA?, and (2) What factors explain variations of change in trust among participants? While existing research questions whether citizens engagement in political participation functions as a source of trust, participatory processes alike the ECA are continually being initiated with the explicit aim of impeding developments of growing public distrust and fostering a greater trust in governmental institutions.

A military training radio network requires support for a large number of mobile nodes with heterogeneous traffic and real-time requirements. We propose a deterministic protocol and an admission control using real-time analysis for a centralized radio network with a multichannel base station. The admission control implements an algorithm for frequency allocation to mobile nodes, and guarantees timely treatment of real-time traffic. The proposed online heuristic frequency allocation algorithm is compared to other known heuristic algorithms: round robin over channels and fill one channel first. The goal with the heuristic algorithms is to maximize the number of supported mobile nodes. Our results show that when the high utilization part of the traffic have shorter deadlines it is advantageous to differentiate different types of nodes onto separate frequencies, whilst if the deadline is increased it is advantageous to mix different types of nodes on each frequency. © Copyright 2015 IEEE

Part 1: Research Directions ; International audience ; Why and how do e-participation policies sometimes flow with politics as usual and sometimes lead to challenging powerful elites and institutions? With the aim of investigating this question, we introduce a framework for comparative research that includes not only systemic but also circumstantial factors. The approach is tested in a comparative case study of three northern European countries–Sweden, Estonia and Iceland–that are all experimenting with e-participation but which are experiencing rather different levels of crisis. The results show that innovation and elite challenging aspirations are very much related to the type and degree of crisis. It is therefore argued that the interplay between institutional constraints and circumstantial catalysts needs further scholarly attention and elaboration.

New e-participation services are heralded as an important means to achieve "citizen-centric government". The project "Citizen-centric e-Participation" is a trilateral collaboration project between Sweden, Estonia and Iceland, combining research with networking to enhance e-participation in three countries. The project network includes partners from local governments, experienced researchers in the field as well as software companies that are exploring new possibilities and markets. The project, which is running between 2012-14, is funded by Vinnova, Rannis, Nordforsk & Estonian Ministry for Economic Affairs and Communications. The main partners include Örebro University, Praxis Center for Policy Studies, Citizens Foundation, imCode Partner, the City of Reykjavik and Haparanda and Borås municipalities. Engaging citizens in policy-making is an important aspect of the design and delivery of better public policies and a core element of what is sometimes called "good government" or "citizen-centric government". Using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to gather and analyze public input is expected to stimulate public deliberation. The project explores links between standardized e-participation models and the particularities of local contexts. This report presents case studies of the e-participation policy development in Sweden, Estonia and Iceland. The case studies give readers a background to the political context and policy as well as technological development in each country and present analyses of important e-participation initiatives in each country. ; Citizen Centric E-participation

Structural color generation by plasmonic and other means has attracted significant interest as a solution to avoid inks based on dyes. Prominent advantages include better robustness compared with organic dyes while also providing high chromaticity and brightness in ultrathin films. However, lack of cheap and scalable fabrication techniques has so far limited structural coloration to only a few applications and functional devices. Here, we demonstrate reflective (plasmonic) structural coloration at high resolution by inkjet printing on non-patterned surfaces. The method is flexible, scalable to large areas, and avoids complicated or costly fabrication steps. Optical microcavities on flexible plastic substrates were made starting with an inkjet-printed silver film as a bottom mirror. Inkjet-printed organic dielectric micropixels then served as the spacer layer, resulting in optical microcavities with reflective structural colors after coating with a thin semi-transparent metallic top layer. Optimization of ink formulation allowed for uniform pixels with minimum coffee stain effects as well as control of spacer thickness (around 50-150 nm) and color by varying the solid content of the ink. We investigate the possibility to obtain red, green and blue (RGB) pixels and demonstrate the improvement of particularly the blue coloration using wavelength-dependent plasmon absorption of gold nanoislands as a top mirror. Inkjet printing of optical microcavities and plasmonic cavities may find use in various applications, such as reflective displays in color. ; Funding Agencies|Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research; AForsk Foundation; Wenner-Gren Foundations; Swedish Research Council; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science on Functional Materials at Linkoping University (Faculty Grant SFO-Mat-LiU) [2009 00971]

Nonradiative decay of plasmons in metallic nanostructures offers unique means for light-to-heat conversion at the nanoscale. Typical thermoplasmonic systems utilize discrete particles, while metal nanohole arrays were instead considered suitable as heat sinks to reduce heating effects. By contrast, we show for the first time that under uniform broadband illumination (e.g., the sun) ultrathin plasmonic nanohole arrays can be highly competitive plasmonic heaters and provide significantly higher temperatures than analogous nanodisk arrays. Our plasmonic nanohole arrays also heat significantly more than nonstructured metal films, while simultaneously providing superior light transmission. Besides being efficient light-driven heat sources, these thin perforated gold films can simultaneously be used as electrodes. We used this feature to develop "plasmonic thermistors" for electrical monitoring of plasmon-induced temperature changes. The nanohole arrays provided temperature changes up to 7.5 K by simulated sunlight, which is very high compared to previously reported plasmonic systems under similar conditions (solar illumination and ambient conditions). Both temperatures and heating profiles quantitatively agree with combined optical and thermal simulations. Finally, we demonstrate the use of a thermoplasmonic nanohole electrode to power the first hybrid plasmonic ionic thermoelectric device, resulting in strong solar-induced heat gradients and corresponding thermoelectric voltages. ; Funding Agencies|Wenner-Gren Foundations; Swedish Research Council; Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research; AForsk Foundation; Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation; Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science on Functional Materials at Linkoping University [SFO-Mat-LiU No 2009 00971]