The relative absence of minority males, compared to minority females, in higher education and subsequent careers has become widely recognized across the United States. This is especially true for African American males, although the problem is also very real for Hispanic and Native American males. Although a few individual universities (including Howard University, Ohio State University and the University of Georgia) have begun to focus on this issue, it urgently requires higher profile and more systematic attention. This grant will fund efforts by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) to take up this issue for its own member institutions within the fields of mathematics, science, engineering, and technology. APLU's 218 member institutions enroll 3.5 million undergraduates and 1.1 million graduate students, including 34% of all students and 36% of minority males who are enrolled in U.S. four-year public and private institutions. The first phase of this effort will employ a planning task force of prominent scholars, university administrators and others to define the problem and develop an action plan. Anticipated products include a published paper that presents the action plan, summarizes what is known about the issue, identifies gaps in this knowledge that could be filled by further research, provides a preliminary list of resources for university presidents and others who want to address the issue, and summarizes the attributes of successful programs that are already underway. The planning task force will also produce a policy statement that can be endorsed by presidents of APLU-member institutions that raises awareness about the issue of minority males in STEM disciplines and frames the issues for an anticipated second phase of the project.

This grant funds a project by The Public Media Lab, under the auspices of veteran, award-winning television producer Michael Pack, to produce and broadcast a PBS documentary about the pugnacious, pioneering Admiral Hyman Rickover and his role in the development of both the first nuclear submarine and the first civilian nuclear power plant. Admiral Hyman Rickover was a take-no-prisoners innovator who transformed the navy and the role of commercial nuclear power as part of President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program, a subject that remains timely today. In addition, Rickover recruited more scientists and engineers into the navy and attempted to transform the American educational system to produce more qualified technologists. The documentary will combine interviews, footage, and live-action sequences and promises to appeal to a significant audience, advancing the public understanding of science and technology with an important and compelling story that has never been seen on television before.

The digitization of information on a massive scale challenges many traditional assumptions about how media markets, intellectual property laws, innovation, governance, and other important aspects of our world can or should work. Adjustments taking place due to advances in digital information technology are rapid, significant, unfinished, and little studied by objective academics as opposed to interested stakeholders. This grant to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), supports efforts to establish an impartial community of scholars dedicated to studying the determinants and consequences of digitization. Activities funded through this grant divide into three broad categories: the development an economic framework for analyzing the effects of changes in and diffusion of digital information technology that is theoretically grounded and empirically relevant; the application of such a framework to the systematic evaluation of policy and governance issues; and the improvement of measures of the extent, impact, and potential for the diffusion and use of digital information technology through providing datasets that researchers can share. Funds from this grant will support annual workshops at the NBER Summer Institute, winter outreach meetings with practitioners and a culminating conference and proceedings. Funds for small research grants, postdoctoral fellowships, and data infrastructure are also included. Taken together, the funded activities represent a comprehensive and unique opportunity for improving how we understand the problems and promise of digitization.

This grant to L.A. Theatre Works (LATW) provides support to its continuing project to record and distribute science plays. Over the next two years, L.A. Theatre Works will record four more science plays, including two new plays commissioned through the Foundation's Theater program. In addition to garnering significant new audiences for each play, recordings become part of LATW's permanent Audio Theater Collection made available to individuals and libraries through an online catalogue and retail partner sites, including iTunes, Audible.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Overdrive.net. Additionally, two of the four plays will be distributed free of charge to 3,000 schools in over 600 cities in all 50 states, with accompanying curricular material. While only a few thousand people can see science-themed plays in their original, limited theatrical run, LATW guarantees that these plays will be heard by hundreds of thousands of people over many years and belong to the permanent collections of schools, libraries, and retail partners.