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This study explores perceptions of fossil fuel interests and the role narratives of fossil fuel obstruction play in slowing down the renewable energy transition in Puerto Rico. We analyzed interviews conducted with 56 “energy actors” engaged in Puerto Rico’s energy system about their visions of the system’s future and perceptions of the influence of different actors in promoting change or reinforcing the status-quo. The analysis also examined the use of discourses of delay in participant interviews using a framework proposed by Lamb et al. (2020). Our interviews revealed that a wide range of energy actors perceived obstruction by fossil fuel interests as shaping Puerto Rico’s energy transition, and used discourses of delay to describe Puerto Rico’s energy transition, but also employed narratives that countered this obstruction and resisted fossil fuel interests. The results depict the conflicted nature of Puerto Rico’s energy transition: on the one hand there was widespread agreement across a wide range of actors that the future of Puerto Rico’s energy system would eventually be renewable based, and at the same time, there were signi昀椀cant doubts that a renewable transition could or would occur. The complex interplay among perceptions of the influence of fossil fuel interests, discourses of delay, and narratives of resistance and community power offers insights into why renewable energy deployment has been slow in Puerto Rico, despite the possibility of a rapid transition after Hurricane Maria devastated the energy system in 2017 and ambitious energy policies were passed. 

In Bounty Everything: Hackers and the Making of the Global Bug Marketplace, researchers Ryan Ellis and Yuan Stevens provide a window into the working lives of hackers who participate in “bug bounty” programs—programs that hire hackers to discover and report bugs or other vulnerabilities in their systems. This report illuminates the risks and insecurities for hackers as gig workers, and how bounty programs rely on vulnerable workers to fix their vulnerable systems. Ellis and Stevens’s research offers a historical overview of bounty programs and an analysis of contemporary bug bounty platforms​​—the new intermediaries that now structure the vast majority of bounty work. The report draws directly from interviews with hackers, who recount that bounty programs seem willing to integrate a diverse workforce in their practices, but only on terms that deny them the job security and access enjoyed by core security workforces. These inequities go far beyond the difference experienced by temporary and permanent employees at companies such as Google and Apple, contend the authors. The global bug bounty workforce is doing piecework—they are paid for each bug, and the conditions under which a bug is paid vary greatly from one company to the next. Bounty Everything offers to reimagine how bounty programs can better serve the interests of both computer security and the workers that protect our digital world. Ellis & Stevens argue that if bounty programs are not designed and implemented properly, “this model can ironically perpetuate a world full of bugs that uses a global pool of insecure workers to prop up a business model centered on rapid iteration and perpetual beta. 

Solution processing of CuInSe 2 /CuInGaSe 2 (CISe/CIGSe) photovoltaic devices via non-hydrazine based routes has been studied for the past few years and a significant improvement in the device performance has been achieved for multiple solvent routes. However, none of these routes have ever reported the fabrication of absorbers with a thickness of above 1.2–1.3 microns which is almost half of what has been traditionally used in vacuum based high efficiency CIGSe devices. The main reason for this limitation is associated with the formation of a fine-grain layer in solution based systems. Here we manipulate the formation of such a fine-grain layer in an amine–thiol based solution route through surface modifications at the bottom Mo interface and achieve an active area efficiency of up to 14.1% for CIGSe devices. Furthermore, with a detailed analysis of the fine-grain layer, not just in the amine–thiol based film, but also in the film fabricated via the dimethylformamide-thiourea route, we identify the reason for the formation of such a fine-grain layer as the presence of the sulfide material and carbon impurity (if any) in the precursor film. We utilize the amine–thiol solvent system's ability for selenium and metal selenide dissolution to manipulate the ink formulations and demonstrate the reduction in the formation of sulfide materials as well as the extent of trapped carbon in the precursor film. With modified precursor films, we then successfully grow CISe/CIGSe thin films of 2-micron thickness with the complete absence of a fine-grain layer through a high temperature, thickness independent bulk growth mechanism making the film morphology similar to the one fabricated using a high efficiency hydrazine based route.