This grant will support four integrated research projects on the role played by nontraditional work arrangements—defined as jobs that lack benefits and that have significant wage and hour volatility—in the labor market decisions of older workers. Led by Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, three of the projects focus on workers in their 50s and early 60s who may consider themselves too young to retire. The first project examines the extent to which the apparent rise in nontraditional employment for older individuals reflects the loss of traditional jobs to globalization and automation. The goal is to learn how the spread of these pressures to more industries could increase nontraditional work. To the extent that more older workers hold nontraditional jobs, the second project explores how these jobs are part of late-career employment patterns. Do these workers move back into traditional employment, for example—and, if so, after how long—and how often and for how long do they stay in nontraditional work for the remainder of their careers. The third project addresses the question of whether older nontraditional workers obtain access to retirement savings vehicles and health insurance through other sources, such as their spouses, public programs, or their own initiative. The fourth project focuses on an older group of workers—those in their 60s who are old enough to retire but are still working—and examines the extent to which nontraditional jobs help these workers improve their retirement security relative to retiring early.

Funds from this grant provide four years of continued support for a multidisciplinary postdoctoral fellowship program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS) at Harvard’s School of Public Health. The Harvard fellowship program is designed to provide opportunities for seminars, mentorships, and speakers, with the goal of catalyzing a Cambridge-based research community for scholars of aging and work that will become part of the growing community of researchers focused on the intersection of aging and work. Grant funds will provide stipend support for two two-year fellowships along with subsidiary funds to support the fellows’ travel and research needs.

This grant funds work by Katharine Abraham and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland and Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute to bring greater precision to our understanding of how to define and count the “alternative workforce,” and to gain deeper understanding of the roles the different types of alternative work arrangements play in older workers’ lives. Partnering with Gallup, Abraham and her team will field a nationally representative telephone survey of adults aged 18 to 80, asking them about their nontraditional work arrangements. The team will then create a new dataset by linking survey responses with administrative data from tax filings and household surveys. The new dataset will allow the team to probe how alternative work arrangements fit into the labor market behavior of older workers. Questions of interest include whether and to what extent alternative work arrangements are used during periods of traditional unemployment; whether they are a prelude to re-entry into the traditional workforce; the extent to which they are used to supplement retirement income, to offset the risk of 401(k)s, or to balance elder care responsibilities with the need to earn money; and what role the social aspects of work and its capacity to help structure one’s days play in the decision to take up an alternative work arrangement. These questions beg a more fundamental one: are these arrangements positive choices or options of last resort for older Americans? The created dataset will be made publicly available for use by other researchers and the project team expects the project to produce at least two peer reviewed papers, as well as a series of policy briefs and presentations aimed at both scholars and policymakers.

Distributed volunteer computing has not changed substantially since the late 1990s when the SETI@Home project offered a downloadable screensaver that used spare PC computing cycles to analyze radio astronomy data, and thereby allowed hundreds of thousands of citizens to participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Computer scientist Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont proposes to bring that idea of volunteer computing into the internet era by building a volunteer computing platform that lives in the web browser, allowing users who visit a special webpage to contribute computing capacity and/or disk storage to computational researchers. This grant will provide three years of support to Bongard and his team for the initial build out and deployment of the platform, which could complement or provide an alternative to local supercomputing facilities and cloud services from companies like Amazon or Microsoft.

This grant to WNET, New York’s PBS station, in partnership with Windfall Films, supports the production and broadcast of a three-hour series about one of America’s biggest infrastructure projects: the rebuilding of LaGuardia airport, which is currently underway and slated for completion in 2021. Episode One: A Grand Terminal will focus on the state-of-the-art, 1.3-million-square-foot terminal itself, including its history and an overview of terminal design. Episode Two: Runways and Highways will cover building the runway space that surrounds the terminal, including flood-proofing the new taxiways—LaGuardia is surrounded on three sides by water—and preparing for environmental threats such as climate change and hurricanes. Episode Three: Bridges, Belts, and Baggage will explore the construction of two skybridges to get passengers from the new terminal to the 35 boarding gates as well as upgraded systems for moving baggage and passengers. The series will discuss a host of topics in science and engineering, including new construction techniques and machinery, the logistics of urban planning, impacts on local communities and the environment, tailoring runways to limit noise pollution, advanced radar technology to detect runway debris, and the use of swarm modeling mathematics to efficiently guide passengers and avoid congestion. In addition to primetime broadcast, grant funds support the production and dissemination of complementary educational resources through PBS Learning Media, and outreach through social and other media. 

Each year since 1973, the Sloan Public Service Awards have recognized six outstanding civil servants out of the hundreds of thousands who work for New York City government. The Fund for the City of New York manages the nomination and selection process and refers to the awards as “the Nobel Prizes of Government…, the highest award that can be bestowed upon a New York City public servant.” Nominated by their colleagues and selected by a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished New Yorkers, each of the six winners receives a $10,000 cash prize and is honored at individual celebrations at their workplaces and at a citywide celebration at the Cooper Union. This grant continues the Foundation’s long support of the Sloan Public Service Awards with funding for an additional three years.

This grant supports research by information scientists Matt Germonprez (University of Nebraska) and Sean Goggins (University of Missouri) to develop and test rubrics for the evaluation of the health of online, open source development communities. Building on previous work that resulted in the successful Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project and using a rich dataset drawn from GitHub and other sources, Germonprez and Goggins will investigate how definitions of the health of an online community might rightly vary depending on the type of community in question or type of project being jointly developed, how the injection of money into an online development community influences individual contributor behavior, and how individual decisions by contributors impact overall community health.

One crucial component of the current and future data workforce is the data curators who steward and curate research data in the interests of reproducibility and reuse. Academic libraries seeking to increase data curation support face a structural problem, however: it’s simply not possible to hire an expert data curator for every discipline. From 2016 to 2018, seed funding from the Sloan Foundation was used to plan a network that could facilitate the sharing of disciplinary data curation expertise across a cohort of partner universities. Funds from this grant support the launch and expansion of this Data Curation Network over the next three years. Initial participating institutions include Cornell; Duke; Johns Hopkins; Penn State; and the universities of Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The grant will support a modest amount of each participating data curator’s time, a network coordinator to be based at the University of Minnesota under the supervision of principal investigator Lisa Johnston, annual meetings of the network, and a business consultant to test business models and plan for sustainability beyond the funded launch period.

Computers do nothing but process logical statements. Mathematics consists of nothing but such statements. It would be reasonable to assume, then, that computers would be adept, perhaps uniquely, at reading, understanding, and cataloging the academic literature of mathematics. Not yet. People and machines, it turns out, speak different mathematical languages. If computers are to help manage mathematical knowledge, they need to be taught how to read math papers. The grant funds efforts by mathematician Thomas Hales to begin that instruction. Hales has raised an international army of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, which he plans to unleash on the abstracts of thousands of mathematical papers. They will carefully translate the definitions and results that appear in these abstracts into formal programming language. These formalized abstracts—“fabstracts,” for short—can then be used to train machine learning algorithms to “read” textual mathematics.   

This grant supports the launch and operation of a new working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dedicated to studying the “economics of science.” Led by Paula Stephan, the group will bring together top flight economists to share existing work and findings, identify new areas for research, examine methodological and data issues, and commission new research. Topics include incentives in the current system, how the structure of grants and review systems affects scientific risk taking, the costs and efficiencies of different research funding models, how to judge scientific quality, and how to measure return on investment in basic and applied science. Along with four meetings of the working group, the grant will fund administrative and planning costs, support for small research grants, and partnerships between the working group and institutions like research universities or other science funders.