Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most important statistic in macroeconomics. As a measure of the value of goods and services produced within a country, GDP announcements can swing stock markets, political sentiments, business plans, and much else. Yet despite its importance, GDP figures--calculated in the U.S. by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) --are merely estimates and often subject to substantial subsequent revision. With businesses, politicians, and consumers making choices based on GDP data, however, such revisions can be costly. With so much at stake, the methodology for estimating GDP and similar statistics is the subject of constant scrutiny. This grant supports a major international conference about macroeconomic statistics to be held in August 2012. Conference participants will include a host of venerable research and government institutions, including the BEA, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Grant funds will offset conference costs, support the commissioning of papers for conference sessions on GDP revisions and new GDP data sources, and enable the publication of a selection of peer-reviewed papers from the conference.

This grant provides continuing support to an initiative at New York City's Manhattan Theatre Club to commission, produce, and promote new science-themed plays from emerging, midlevel, and established playwrights. Grant funds support a series of interrelated activities, including the commissioning of four new science-themed plays per year, public and private readings of scripts in progress, and an annual workshop.

This grant supports activities in support of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' (AAAS) Global Nuclear Future Initiative, an international effort that focuses on increasing the security of nuclear materials, strengthening the global nuclear regime, and solving the unresolved problem of what to do with spent nuclear reactor fuel. Led by Stephen Miller, Director of Harvard University's International Security Program, the project aims to build international consensus around a series of prescriptions for strengthening nuclear security, including principles governing the development of regional nuclear storage facilities; best practices governing contracts between suppliers, customers, and government entities; and the proper arrangements connecting nuclear fuel storage and disposal. Supported activities under this grant include the convening of regional meetings of key stakeholders in government, industry, and non-governmental organizations and the commissioning of conference presentations and publishable research papers by respected experts, academics, and practitioners in the field.

The foundational treaty of the global nuclear order, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), does not define what constitutes a nuclear weapon and therefore what activities, technologies, and materials should be regarded as evidence that a state is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. This lack of definition exacerbates the nonproliferation challenge of distinguishing between legitimate nuclear activities (be they peaceful or military applications such as naval propulsion) and illegitimate ones (namely, those oriented toward nuclear weapons). This challenge, in turn, exacerbates the difficulty of promoting the peaceful spread of nuclear energy while, at the same time, preventing weapons proliferation. This grant supports an initiative by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to build an international consensus around how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate nuclear activity. The Carnegie team will convene policymakers, regulators, and technical personnel from the five permanent member countries of the UN Security Council - China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States - for a series of non-political meetings to discuss national perspectives on what constitutes illegitimate nuclear activity, weigh the costs and benefits of potential frameworks, and identify areas for further technical analysis.

Though few deny that administrative and other large-linked datasets represent new frontiers for social science research, there have been surprisingly few formal studies that survey and document how so-called "big data" in all its forms is actually changing social science research. This grant supports a project by a team led by Eric T. Meyer at Oxford's Internet Institute (OII) to empirically document the ways social scientists are getting access to data at scale and the tools they use to work with it. Meyer and his team will conduct a series of in-depth interviews with 125 researchers and technologists in academia, industry, and government to look at a series of interrelated questions about how big data is changing research, including how data flows between data sources and scientists, what questions big data is being used to address, how does the openness of a dataset affect its use, and how public and private data are used differently by researchers.