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X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy was used to analyze an authentic sample of (η4-cyclooctatetraene)Ru(CO)3 held at 173 K to prevent sublimation of the compound during measurement. This precursor has previously shown utility for photoassisted chemical vapor deposition of Ru species onto alkanethiolate self-assembled monolayers. Herein, we report that the Ru signals for the Ru(0) complex are at a higher binding energy than those of pure Ru metal. 

Public records requests are a central mechanism for government transparency. In practice, they are slow, complex processes that require analyzing large amounts of messy, unstructured data. In this paper, we introduce RequestAtlas, a system that helps investigative journalists review large quantities of unstructured data that result from submitting many public records requests. RequestAtlas was developed through a year-long participatory design collaboration with the California Reporting Project (CRP), a journalistic collective researching police use of force and police misconduct in California. RequestAtlas helps journalists evaluate the results of public records requests for completeness and negotiate with agencies for additional information. RequestAtlas has had significant real-world impact. It has been deployed for more than a year to identify missing data in response to public records requests and to facilitate negotiation with public records request officers. Through the process of designing and observing the use of RequestAtlas, we explore the technical challenges associated with the public records request process and the design needs of investigative journalists more generally. We argue that public records requests represent an instance of an adversarialtechnical relationshipin which two entities engage in a prolonged, iterative, often adversarial exchange of information. Technologists can support information-gathering efforts within these adversarial technical relationships by building flexible local solutions that help both entities account for the state of the ongoing information exchange. Additionally, we offer insights on ways to design applications that can assist investigative journalists in the inevitably significant data cleaning phase of processing large documents while supporting journalistic norms of verification and human review. Finally, we reflect on the ways that this participatory design process, despite its success, lays bare some of the limitations inherent in the public records request process and in the ''request and respond'' model of transparency more generally. 

The electron-induced decomposition of Fe(CO)₄MA (MA = methyl acrylate), which is a potential new precursor for focused electron beam-induced deposition (FEBID), was investigated by surface science experiments under UHV conditions. Auger electron spectroscopy was used to monitor deposit formation. The comparison between Fe(CO)₄MA and Fe(CO)₅revealed the effect of the modified ligand architecture on the deposit formation in electron irradiation experiments that mimic FEBID and cryo-FEBID processes. Electron-stimulated desorption and post-irradiation thermal desorption spectrometry were used to obtain insight into the fate of the ligands upon electron irradiation. As a key finding, the deposits obtained from Fe(CO)₄MA and Fe(CO)₅were surprisingly similar, and the relative amount of carbon in deposits prepared from Fe(CO)₄MA was considerably less than the amount of carbon in the MA ligand. This demonstrates that electron irradiation efficiently cleaves the neutral MA ligand from the precursor. In addition to deposit formation by electron irradiation, the thermal decomposition of Fe(CO)₄MA and Fe(CO)₅on an Fe seed layer prepared by EBID was compared. While Fe(CO)₅sustains autocatalytic growth of the deposit, the MA ligand hinders the thermal decomposition in the case of Fe(CO)₄MA. The heteroleptic precursor Fe(CO)₄MA, thus, offers the possibility to suppress contributions of thermal reactions, which can compromise control over the deposit shape and size in FEBID processes. 

We developed All-ABOARD (Alliance Building Offshore to Achieve Resilience and Diversity) to meet the ever-increasing needs of cultivating a diverse geoscience workforce. All-ABOARD incorporates the Be the Messenger theoretical framework in all programmatic aspects to encourage participants to think about their own identities, positionalities, and privileges. Drawing from US-based institutions, we recruited four teams of four to five members who spanned a spectrum of positionality and career stages. To evaluate the efficacy of the program, we collected both quantitative and qualitative data at different intervals to measure changes in participants’ understanding and perception of identity, culture, respect, and diversity. The year-long core programming included regular webinars via Zoom and an in-person retreat. We found that immersive experiences and intergenerational teams led to the cultivation of a strong identity as a DEI-champion, enhanced group cohesion, and promoted feelings of resilience among participants. Our participants reported they felt most accountable to themselves and their teams, and that learning was accelerated by bringing together teams from multiple institutions to collaborate across intergenerational boundaries. Our program provides a model for training DEI-champions in geoscience who can advance strategic objectives in their home environments and demonstrates how frameworks from the social sciences can be effectively leveraged to transform geoscience. 

String matching is at the core of data cleaning, record matching, and information retrieval. String matching relies on a similarity measure that evaluates the similarity of two strings, regarding the two as a match if their similarity is larger than a user-defined threshold. In our collaboration with journalists and public defenders, we found that real-world datasets, such as police rosters that journalists and public defenders work with, often contain acronyms, abbreviations, and typos, thanks to errors during manual entry, into, say, a spreadsheet or a form. Unfortunately, traditional similarity measures lead to low accuracy since they do not consider all three aspects together. Some recent work proposes leveraging synonym rules to improve matching, but either requires these rules to be provided upfront, or generated prior to matching, which leads to low accuracy in our setting and similar ones. To address these limitations, we propose Smash, a simple yet effective measure to assess the similarity of two strings with acronyms, abbreviations, and typos, all without relying on synonym rules. We design a dynamic programming algorithm to efficiently compute this measure, along with two optimizations that improve accuracy. We show that compared to the best baselines, including one based on ChatGPT with GPT-4, Smash improves the max and mean F-score by 23.5% and 110.8%, respectively. We implement Smash in OpenRefine, a graphical data cleaning tool, to facilitate its use by journalists, public defenders, and other non-programmers for data cleaning. 

We probe the separation of ligands from iron tetracarbonyl methyl acrylate (Fe(CO)₄(C₄H₆O₂) or Fe(CO)₄MA) induced by the interaction with free electrons. The motivation comes from the possible use of this molecule as a nanofabrication precursor and from the corresponding need to understand its elementary reactions fundamental to the electron-induced deposition. We utilize two complementary electron collision setups and support the interpretation of data by quantum chemical calculations. This way, both the dissociative ionization and dissociative electron attachment fragmentation channels are characterized. Considerable differences in the degree of precursor fragmentation in these two channels are observed. Interesting differences also appear when this precursor is compared to structurally similar iron pentacarbonyl. The present findings shed light on the recent electron-induced chemistry of Fe(CO)₄MA on a surface under ultrahigh vacuum.