This grant provides funding for a major new effort by Pioneer Works—a thriving, multidisciplinary cultural center in Red Hook, NY—to launch its new multicultural and interdisciplinary website, The Broadcast. The Broadcast’s Science Channel will include science-themed video, animations, podcasts, and editorial presented in fresh, original ways and featuring some of the most important scientists and scientific ideas of our day. Content development is being overseen by Janna Levin, the head of Pioneer Works’ science program and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College/Columbia University. Planned content includes a fresh mix of programming, including Pioneer Works’s signature Scientific Controversies series, in which Levin interviews two leading scientists about their latest work, along with Author Talks, Conversations, Science and Society, The Universe in Verse, and Condensed Matters. In addition to supporting content development and production, grant funds will support an ambitious marketing and social media campaign that includes a major build-out of Pioneer Works’s website, as well as expanded content through their newsletter, YouTube channel, Instagram, and Twitter.

This grant supports an ongoing initiative by Consumer Reports to empower consumer choices of products and services by conducting research, developing tools, and providing accurate, easy-to-understand reporting on how companies and products collect and use consumer data. Led by Justin Brookman, Director of Consumer Privacy and Technology Policy, Consumer Reports will engage researchers and technologists over the next two years to build tools and construct research methodologies to map the collection, manipulation, and sharing of consumer data across three pivotal industries: the Internet of Things (devices in our homes, such as smart thermostats and other internet-connected appliances); automobiles (geolocation data, sensors); and data brokers (second and third parties who collect and sell information about consumers). Grant funds will support a series of dedicated fellowships for technologists and other digital experts who will help create new tools and research methodologies with the goal of creating state-of-the-art testing capacity that Consumer Reports will use to generate insights into how companies and products in these three spaces collect and use data. These insights will then be made public through Consumer ReportsХ impartial, evidence-driven journalism, which will aim both to improve consumersХ ability to choose products effectively and create incentives for market participants in these industries to improve and make more transparent their data collection and use policies. К