Behavioral economics catalogs examples of how people fail to act as naпve economic models say they should. In theory, such examples should lead to revised models of economic behavior that are more sophisticated, nuanced, and accurate. These have been slow in coming. To date, behavioral economists have been more concerned with classifications and applications than with foundations, representations, or explanations. Courses and textbooks tend to take up one anomaly or bias after another, without much of a conceptual or analytic framework to offer. Funds from this grant support a project by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer to develop a theoretical framework that can systematically accommodate many of the anomalous behaviors detected by behavioral economists. Shleifer will attempt to do this through further development of “salience theory,” which hypothesizes that certain facts or pieces of information can appear more salient or command more attention at the moment of decision. These salient facts are then overweighted by decision-makers relative to their nonsalient cousins, causing decision-makers to deviate from the rational behavior predicted by, say, expected utility theory. Grant funds will support Shleifer as he continues to develop salience theory and use it to incorporate the diverse insights of behavioral economics into satisfying, predictive models of human economic behavior. Topics to be explored include the role stereotypes and generalization play in decision-making, how being surprised affects salience, and how attitudes about what is or is not normal shape what people pay attention to.

Launched in 2008 with the help of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the World Science Festival is perhaps the world’s premiere science festival, bringing first class scientists from all over the globe to New York City to lead the public in a weeklong series of panels, presentations, and events in celebration of all that is fun and fascinating about science. More than 50 panels and events are targeted at all ages and education levels, with recent panels devoted to such diverse topics as the science and history of beer-making, the use of electrical stimulation to improve cognitive function, and the effects of zero gravity environments on the human body. To increase its reach beyond New York City, the festival produces online and video segments and education material for science teachers to incorporate into their curricula. Funds from this grant provide continued support to the World Science Festival for another three years.

Empirical articles and the data they use have not always been carefully connected. That makes it hard to replicate findings, to reuse data, or to build on previous work rather than just duplicating it. This grants supports the development and expansion of a new platform, DUOS (Dataset-Utilization Open Search), that links existing papers with the standard datasets and methodologies they use. Conceived by Svetlozar Nestorov of Loyola University, the system allows researchers, graduate students, and policymakers to find the published results of performing particular kinds of calculations on particular sets of survey data. Nestorov’s initial work has focused on the Current Population Survey, the primary source of labor force statistics in the United States. Student research assistants have manually compiled hundreds of linkages between the survey and the published academic literature. This information constitutes a training set for machine-learning algorithms that, when sufficiently developed, will be able to scan the online literature and extract links automatically. Grant funds support the continuation of Nestorov’s work and its expansion to other datasets, including the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) run by the U.S. Census, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) funded by NSF. Once developed, tested, and refined, Nestorov’s machine-learning software for automating DUOS operations will be made freely available for use in fields besides economics.

The BioBus is a fully mobile research lab that visit schools and public science events in New York City. Outfitted with state-of-the-art microscopes and run by a diverse team of young scientists, the BioBus is a mobile science field trip where students can use a phase-contrast video microscope to make movies of crawling amoeba, use a scanning electron microscope to image a fly eye, or use a fluorescing microscope to see glowing, streaming plant chloroplast. In 2014, the BioBus visited 88 K-12 schools in New York City, bringing high-quality, engaging education to some 16,000 students, 57 percent of whom were African-American or Latino. Funds from this grant support the continued operation and expansion of BioBus. Over the next three years, Cell Motion Laboratories, the parent organization of the BioBus, will build another BioBus mobile lab and, in partnership with Columbia University, build a “BioBase” community lab in Harlem, which will allow students to continue their educational experiences once the BioBus has moved locations, and expand its educational offerings to underserved students in Harlem.

Science Goes to the Movies is a new public television program produced by the CUNY TV Foundation that reviews current movies and television shows from a scientific perspective. Topics discussed in early episodes include visualizing black holes, Birdman and the prevalence of hallucinations, and depictions of women scientists in the Big Bang Theory. Hosted by neuroscientist Heather Belin and journalist Faith Sailie, Science Goes to the Movies premiered in February 2015 and is reaching a growing audience through integrated use of broadcast, cable, web, and mobile platforms and has performed well in its native market of New York City. Funds from this grant provide production support for the show as it explores possible distribution to a national audience through PBS’s Executive Programming Service, bringing the series to half the PBS stations in the country with a net audience of more than a million viewers.

The basic process of moving large tabular data from one environment to another is fraught with issues. Ambiguous column headings and messy metadata can make it difficult and time consuming to understand exactly what a data file contains. As researchers move data from repository to research tool (and often through a series of research tools), the opportunities for error proliferate. Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation has developed a lightweight approach to structuring metadata about tabular datasets. With the Pollock approach, tabular datasets are packaged and moved with files that describe the data—datatypes, formatting, source, etc.—allowing research tools like Matlab, Excel, and Stata to appropriately parse the data inside. He describes this “data package” model as the equivalent to a shipping container for data, making it easier to standardize the entire logistics process. Funds from this grant continue development of the Pollock’s “data package” standard. Funded activities include the development of validators and extensions that would make it easy to export and import data packages from standard research tools (essentially adding new “Save As” and “Open” options); outreach to specific user communities to model use of the specification for individual disciplinary communities; the launch of several pilot projects integrating the data package model into existing user workflows; and building a broader development community around the need for better tools for efficient and trusted storage, transport, and analysis of large tabular data.

This grant provides partial funding for eight postdoctoral fellowships in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences. Though the fellowship program is administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), fellows are appointed at host institutions, where they work on digital initiatives that marshal a university’s technical, archival, and library resources in service to the data curation and management needs of the institution’s researchers.  Of the eight fellowships supported, four will focus on software curation, the growing archival field that seeks to preserve the software programs and platforms developed for and as a result of scientific research.  In addition to providing fellowship support, grant funds will expand the fellowship program to include improved education and training on software curation, both among the fellows and at participating host institutions.

There are currently no academic social science repositories that can routinely handle terabytes of data. This despite the fact that the rise of the Internet and new sensing technologies are creating large new datasets of potential interest to social scientists, like phone usage data or geospatial social media data. This grant supports efforts by Gary King at Harvard University to expand the popular Dataverse platform so that it becomes the first data archiving and management application capable of handling social science data at the terabyte scale. Fully open source, Dataverse is a decentralized web application that allows individual institutions to download and run their own instances. Universities and research labs can manage their data easily while at the same time configuring the system to meet their own needs and comply with their own institutional policies. Funds from this grant will fund the technical development of the Dataverse platform to accommodate the immense logistical and resource challenges posed by “big data” datasets, expanding the power of an increasingly important resource for social scientists everywhere.

Funds from this grant provide continued operating support to the New York Genome Center (NYGC) in its efforts to strengthen and diversify the bioinformatics community in New York City. Sloan funds will support the NYGC’s plans to develop new infrastructure, methods, and training that it expects will catalyze research insights, empower researchers with new bioinformatics capabilities, and continue to solidify New York City as a genomics and life sciences hub. Over the next three years, the NYGC will continue to develop its bioinformatics capabilities in support of its member institutions, develop a shared computing facility with access to public data sets and state-of-the-art data analysis pipelines, craft new algorithms and techniques in bioinformatics, and train biological and medical researchers in core bioinformatics skills through training courses and in-person and virtual educational sessions. Expected outputs include peer-reviewed publications, updated software packages, a bioinformatics commons and genomic data warehouse, and the training of 50 researchers per year.

This grant continues support of an initiative by the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) to commission, develop, and produce new science- and technology-themed plays. Over the next three years, MTC plans to commission 15 science-themed plays from both emerging and established playwrights, provide dramaturgical support to commissioned artists, hold in-house readings of all completed scripts, stage three public readings, and produce one science-themed play at the theater’s 47th Street mainstage. Plays are commissioned and scripts selected for production in consultation with an independent advisory board composed of distinguished working scientists. Commissioned playwrights receive between $10,000 and $20,000 for their work.