Funds from this grant provide one year of continued support to efforts by a team led by Pamela Samuelson at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to examine the legal obstacles posed by copyright law to digital library initiatives and the digital storage and dissemination of in-copyright works. The Berkeley team will examine a diverse range of issues, including orphan works, library and archive copyright exceptions, private ordering solutions, collective licensing for certain copyrighted works, digital lending of in-copyright works, and metadata ownership and use issues. Samuelson’s team will also provide advice and counsel to the Digital Public Library of America on legal issues related its mission and will serve as a locus for informed legal discussion of copyright issues in the digital age.

This grant funds an ambitious new project by the Chemical Heritage Foundation to build a free mobile app for iPad that recreates the excitement and educational potential of working with a chemistry set. Structured like a game, the app will instruct users in the principles of chemistry and guide them through a series of increasingly complicated virtual experiments that explore the properties of matter, thermodynamics, gases, and chemical energy. The app will be focused on 12 to 15 year olds and, when completed, will be available to download for free. The project is an experiment in how to leverage new developments in information technology and media to advance the public understanding of science.

Funds from this grant provide three years of continued operational and programming support to Science Friday, the only regular weekly slot on public radio—two hours long—devoted to all things science. Reaching more than two million people each week via his radio show, podcasts, blogs, online videos, mobile apps, and social media, award-winning host Ira Flatow targets the fertile intersection between science and the arts and has made the show a magnet for filmmakers, playwrights, authors, musicians, sculptors, painters, and digital artists who engage with science. In addition to providing operational support, funds support several new initiatives, including collaborative (audience) art projects, a Science Friday book club, a film viewing and discussion series, an artist of the month spotlight, and an annual remote broadcast about science and the arts produced in conjunction with the Foundation-supported Science and Entertainment Exchange.

Funds from this grant support a conference organized by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago on “Benefit-Cost Analysis for Financial Regulation.” At the conference, economists, regulators, and lawyers will present and debate frameworks for evaluating government interventions in financial markets with the specific goal of catalyzing, collecting, and synthesizing the normative and quantitative research on the social welfare implications of rulemaking associated with the Dodd-Frank Act. Conference participants will represent a broad spectrum of practical and conceptual approaches to the issues at hand. Findings are scheduled to appear in a special issue of the Journal of Legal Studies. The hope is that such efforts can point the way toward more efficient, effective, and rational regimes for regulating the financial sector.

This grant to Yale University supports the planning and development of a new “Program on Financial Stability” aimed at training a new generation of experts on financial regulation. Led by Yale Finance and Management professor Andrew Metrick, the program will aim to translate and synthesize research on macroprudential regulation that speaks to practitioners; compile case studies containing raw data and documentation that describe the interaction between regulation and firm behavior; train early-career scholar-regulators employed by major national and international agencies; and help build an international community of scholars, regulators, and financial experts. If successful, the program promises to provide an invaluable training resource that responds to the need to develop the human, social, and intellectual capital that financial regulators need to fend off future financial crises.

The grant provides support for a project headed by Yale biologist Jo Handelsman to find targeted interventions that to increase equitable decision-making and overcome the effects of explicit and implicit gender bias in the many review processes that are an essential part of academic science. Leading a multidisciplinary team, Handelsman will conduct two experiments comparing interventions designed to mitigate explicit bias, implicit bias, or both (hybrid). Depending on which intervention is found to be most effective, the team will then develop, evaluate, and distribute a training guide, and publish their results. Prospective audiences for the training guide include faculty, staff, and students in campus diversity training settings; graduate students in “responsible conduct of research” courses; faculty search committees; and senior academic administrators responsible for university personnel practices.

InsideSchools.org is a comprehensive source of information on New York City schools visited by over 140,000 students, parents, educators, and members of the public each month. Its user-friendly website offers detailed profiles of New York’s 1,700 schools, including in-class videos, student achievement statistics, and insights gained from on-site visits. News and advice columns also cover everything from entrance tests to new administrative appointments. To ensure access by diverse demographic groups, the entire site can be immediately translated into 50 different languages. The Sloan Foundation has supported InsideSchools since its inception in 2002.Funds from this grant support efforts by InsideSchools to expand its offerings by providing information about the different pedagogical and curricular offerings at each school, such as Everyday Math, TERC, Saxon, Singapore, or Montessori. In a separate effort to improve data quality, InsideSchools will also begin consulting with a statistician to help separate school effects from small sample biases or other confounding variables.

This grant provides two years of support for a new awards program by the Council for Economic Education (CEE) that honors exceptional, innovative K-12 teaching of economics and finance in the New York Metropolitan Area. These “Economic Educator of the Year Awards” will be awarded by a distinguished independent committee to three K-12 teachers based on evidence of their creativity, general effectiveness, and success at motivating underserved students.Winners will be honored at the CEE annual dinner, where a video will also be shown that highlights their achievements and showcases their teaching methods. Each winner receives a $5,000 prize and their schools will receive $2,500 to strengthen its economic education offerings.

The published research literature on any given topic likely represents a highly unrepresentative sample of all that is known. That is because authors and editors are rarely interested in publishing ambiguous or disconfirming results concerning a given hypothesis. Such “publication bias” creates vexing problems when performing formal meta-analyses, or whenever anyone tries to interpret the results of a body of empirical work.Suppose, however, that investigators could agree to collect and post public commitments to their research plans, including their hypotheses and methodologies, in advance of collecting all their data. Not only could simple transparency like this go a long way toward alleviating publication bias, it could also deter other ways researchers have of cherry picking and distorting results.This grant funds a project by the American Economic Association (AEA) to bring just such a thing about. Led by MIT economist Esther Duflo, the AEA will set up a national registry for randomized controlled trials in economics. By linking study designs to related datasets and by making study details more easily searchable, the proposed registry would advance the Foundation’s efforts to promote communication, transparency, and best practices among scholarly researchers.

This grant supports the production, broadcast, and promotion of four primetime science-themed documentaries by the popular PBS series, American Experience. Supported documentaries include Edison, about the life and enormous scientific contributions of the famed American inventor; Penn Station, about the ambitious engineering marvel that brought the Pennsylvania Railroad’s tunnels and trains under the Hudson River and into Manhattan; Tuberculosis, about the rise and fall of the most lethal disease in American history; and The Great Fire, about the 1910 wildfire that burned three million acres across Washington, Idaho, and Montana and subsequently gave rise to the conservation movement, the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service, and the battle between Roosevelt and the railroad barons to establish a public, scientifically managed system of national forests. Additional funds from this grant support the development of an interactive mobile app, the Engineering Map of America, that will offer entertaining and educational walking tours of select engineering sites across the country.