UCR Research and Economic Development Newsletter: February 22, 2017
Michael Pazzani
Vice Chancellor for Research
and Economic Development
Back Issues of Newsletter: http://research.ucr.edu/vcr/newsletters.aspx
Grant Opportunity Search: http://pivot.cos.com
·
Strategic Considerations
in Navigating the NIH System: An insiders perspective: 2/23
·
2018-19 Fulbright Scholar
Competition: August 1, 2017
·
Russell Sage Foundation: Computational
Social Science
·
NSF: The Future of Thwaites
Glacier and its Contribution to Sea-level Rise
·
Marijuana Research Guidelines
Strategic
Considerations in Navigating the NIH System: An insiders
perspective
Please join us on Thursday, February 23 at 1:30p in Orbach Science Library 240 for a talk by Howard Moss, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UC Riverside. Howard will deliver a talk called “Strategic Considerations in Navigating the NIH System: An insiders perspective”.
Bio: Howard B. Moss, M.D. is the former Associate Director for Clinical and Translational Research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland and is now Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Riverside School of Medicine. He is a board-certified psychiatrist with added qualifications in the subspecialty of Addiction Psychiatry. He has authored over 175 peer-reviewed scientific journal publications and three books. He has been Professor of Psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania, Vice Chair of Psychiatry at Temple University, and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh prior to assuming his role at N.I.H., and has held a Senior Scientist Award (K05) from National Institute on Drug Abuse. He has been the Scientific Director of two major Federally-funded research centers (P60) at the University of Pittsburgh, and has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on numerous investigator-initiated research grants.
His research has focused on the clinical manifestations of substance use disorders, their etiology, and the intergenerational transmission of risk and resilience. This work has employed diverse methodologies that include psychiatric epidemiology, neuroimaging, behavior genetics, advanced statistical methods, neurochemistry/neuropharmacology, psychophysiology, and biomarker development.
Note: I’m planning a panel of
faculty who have served on NIH study sections recently. If you have, and
would like to participate, please contact me. A separate session on NSF
panels is planned and if you’ve been on a NSF panel
recently and would like to participate, please contact me.
2018-19 Fulbright Scholar Competition Deadline
August 1, 2017
The Fulbright Scholar Program offers teaching, research or a combination of teaching/research awards in over 125 countries for the 2018-2019 academic year. Opportunities are available for faculty, administrators, professionals, artists, journalists, scientists, lawyers, independent scholars and many others.
http://www.cies.org/program/core-fulbright-us-scholar-program
The application deadline for most awards is August 1, 2017. U.S. citizenship is required. For eligibility requirements and detailed award descriptions, visit the Fulbright Scholar website at: http://www.cies.org/ or contact them at scholars@iie.org.
UCOP
has issued guidance on Marijuana Research. http://researchmemos.ucop.edu/php-app/index.php/site/document?memo=UlBBQy0xNy0wMQ==&doc=3663
This
Guidance Memorandum is intended to provide information for University of California
(UC) researchers and research administrators regarding the Marijuana Legalization
Initiative, Proposition 64, which became law on January 1, 2017, and this new
law’s effect on marijuana research conducted at the University of California (UC).
Russell
Sage Foundation: Computational Social Science
Sponsor
Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) http://www.russellsage.org/research/funding/call-proposals-computational-social-science
Amount
Upper $150,000
Applications
must be limited to no more than a two-year period, with a maximum of $150,000
per project (including overhead).
Letter of
Inquiry: (required) 21 Aug 2017
Full Proposal: 15 Nov
2017
Abstract
Social
science research on many topics has often been hampered
by the limitations associated with survey data. However, the digital age has
rapidly increased access to large and comprehensive data sources such as public… more » and
private administrative databases, and unique new sources of information from
online transactions, social-media interactions, and internet searches. New
computational tools also allow for the extraction, coding, and analysis of
large volumes of text. Advances in analytical methods for exploiting and
analyzing data have accompanied the rise of these data. The emergence of these
new data also raises questions about access, privacy and confidentiality.
The Russell Sage Foundation's initiative on Computational Social
Science (CSS) supports innovative social science research that brings new data
and methods to bear on questions of interest in its core programs in Behavioral
Economics, Future of Work, Race, Ethnicity and Immigration, and Social Inequality.
Limited consideration will be given to questions that
pertain to core methodologies, such as causal inference and innovations in data
collection. Examples of research (some recently funded by
RSF) that are of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:
Linked Administrative Data
Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff
(2014a; 2014b) linked school district administrative records with federal
income tax data to identify which teachers, in the short term, have the largest
impact on student achievement, and in the longer-term, to show that students
assigned to teachers with higher value-added scores have higher college
attendance and higher salaries as adults.
Imberman, Lovenheim
and Andrews link K-12 student-level administrative data from the Texas
Education Agency (TEA), post-secondary administrative data from the Texas
Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and individual quarterly earnings
data from the state's Workforce Commission to assess the effectiveness of
targeted scholarship programs on educational attainment and earnings in young
adulthood.
Private Administrative Data
Normative decision theory implies that a dollar is a dollar no
matter its source, but psychological research suggests that financial windfalls
or additional expenses have different effects depending on which "mental
accounts" they impact. Shapiro and Hastings
analyze retail panel data (500,000 households, 6 billion transactions) to
understand "mental accounting," or how households think about and
spend money from different sources.
Machine-Learning
Evidence from tax return data suggests no clear trend in
intergenerational income mobility for recent cohorts of young adults (Chetty et al., 2014a; 2014b). In contrast, survey data
suggest an increasing intergenerational persistence of occupational mobility.
To date, no single "big data" source allows the analysis of income
and occupational mobility simultaneously. Hout and Grusky are utilizing a machine-learning approach to code
taxpayer occupation on Internal Revenue Service forms consistent with Current
Population Survey records that already have respondent occupation reliably
coded.
Online Surveys and Experiments
Survey response rates for in-person and telephone interviews
have declined significantly and surveys are expensive to administer. Salganik and Levy (2015) highlight the advantage of Wiki
surveys that have data collection instruments that can capture as much
information as a respondent is willing to provide, collect information
contributed by respondents that was unanticipated by the researcher, and modify
the instrument as more information is obtained.
The literature showing an association between race and economic
outcomes is extensive, but it is difficult to determine the extent to which
these associations are due to racial discrimination or characteristics
correlated with race. Doleac and Stein (2013) use
online classified advertisements to examine the effect of race on market outcomes
by featuring a photograph of the item for sale, and experimentally manipulating
the color of the seller's hand (dark or light-skinned). They find that black
sellers receive fewer and lower offers than white sellers, and that buyer
communication with black sellers indicates lower levels of trust.
Text Analysis
Bail (2012) assessed competing predictions about how civil
society organizations influence media portrayals of Muslims in the aftermath of
9/11. Using plagiarism detection software, he compared press releases about
Muslims produced by civil society organizations to more than 50,000 newspaper
articles and television transcripts produced between 2001 and 2008. He finds
that anti-Muslim fringe organizations were overrepresented in media portrayals
and exerted a powerful influence on media discourse, allowing these groups to
evolve and become part of the "mainstream."
Enns and colleagues
hypothesize that levels of redistributive and egalitarian policy rhetoric will
decline as the level of campaign contributions from wealthy donors and business
interests increase. Using data on campaign contributions collected by the
Federal Election Commission from the 1970s through the present, they
incorporate automated content analysis and other qualitative analysis software
to examine all speeches and content inserted into the Congressional Record by
members of Congress during the same period.
Jelveh, Kogut,
and Naidu (2015) used a combination of machine-learning
and text tools to examine the extent to which social science empirical research
has an ideological bias. Using a large corpus of economic articles, they
created partisan scores for economists whose political contributions are recorded in Federal Election Commission data. Articles
written by economists with known political ideology provided the text that was mined to predict the ideological scores of economists
whose political preferences are unknown.
Social Media
The large volume of data from social media sites and online
interactions presents methodological challenges because the data are often
highly unstructured and lack demographic information that is central to social
science research. Bail (2015) describes the development and application of
"social media survey apps" (SMSAs) using Facebook data to illustrate
how such data can be mined to study organizational behavior. McCormick and
colleagues (2015) developed and implemented a method for retrieving demographic
information from non-text images using Twitter data. Barberá
(2016) combines voting registration records and home valuations from Zillow
with Twitter data to generate representative public opinion estimates. He uses
machine learning methods to estimate key demographics (age, gender, race,
income, party affiliation, propensity to vote) of any Twitter user in the U.S.
Funding Considerations
Applicants should specify how the proposed project informs and
advances RSF's computational social science research priorities in its core
program areas: Behavioral Economics, Future of Work, Race, Ethnicity and
Immigration, and Social Inequality. RSF values reproducibility and open
science, and where applicable, investigators should explain their data release
plan (data, code, codebooks) or any prohibitions on providing such materials.
Examples of the kinds of questions that are of interest can be found on the Foundation's website, but examples
include:
Program on Behavioral Economics
- What are the psychological consequences of income scarcity and
how do they affect individual decision-making and judgment?
- What factors influence decision-making processes that involve
tradeoffs between costs and benefits that occur at different points in time, or
the tendency to over-value immediate rewards at the expense of longer-term
benefits?
Program on the Future of Work
- To what extent have labor market changes affected family
formation, transitions to adulthood, or social mobility?
- Job quality is related to many different factors including
government policies (e.g., minimum-wage laws or parental and sick leave
policies) and employer instituted policies (e.g., flex hours, retirement
plans). What are the consequences of such policies for employers, workers and
families?
Program on Race, Ethnicity and Immigration
- How do race-related beliefs evolve in the context of growing
population diversity?
- What is the impact of immigration policies on the social and
political development of immigrants? To what extent have these policies
influenced public opinion, inter-group relations or civic participation?
Program on Social Inequality
- To what extent has increased economic inequality (income,
wealth, consumption) affected equality of opportunity or social mobility?
- Are changes in the labor market and occupational structure
related to changes in economic inequality?
Funding is available for secondary analysis of data or for
original data collection. RSF is especially interested in novel uses of new or
under-utilized data and new methods for analyzing these data. Smaller projects
might consist of a pilot study to demonstrate proof-of-concept. RSF encourages
methodological variety and inter-disciplinary collaboration. Proposed projects
must have well-developed conceptual frameworks and research designs. Analytical
models must be specified and research questions and hypotheses (where
applicable) must be clearly stated.
If you want help finding a collaborator, please contact me.
NSF: The
Future of Thwaites Glacier and its
Contribution to Sea-level Rise
Although I realize funding
from this program will interest few faculty, the fact that exists at all may
interest more.
Full Proposal Deadline Date: March 1, 2017.
Click for
details: Thwaites: The Future of Thwaites
Glacier and its Contribution to Sea-level Rise
Considerable uncertainty remains in projections of future ice loss from
West Antarctica. Reducing this uncertainty is an international priority
that was recently underscored by the Scientific
Committee on Antarctic Research in its “Horizon Scan 2020” (SCAR, 2015). The
recent U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report (A
Strategic Vision for NSF Investments in Antarctic and Southern Ocean Research,
2015) places prediction of ice mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
(WAIS) as the top priority for Antarctic research, and singles out Thwaites Glacier as a “region of particular concern”.
Building on this community priority, and recognizing that such research is
becoming an increasingly global endeavor with demands that exceed the
capacities of any one nation, NSF and the UK Natural Environment Research
Council (NERC) have developed this joint program with the objective to
substantially improve both decadal and longer-term (century-to-multi-century)
projections of ice loss and sea-level rise originating from Thwaites
Glacier.
2017 Faculty
Networking Lunches
Due to other campus meetings
on Mondays, the Sustainability Lunch has been moved to
Feb 27 and the High Performance Computing Lunch to 3/13
Sustainability Research
and Education on 2/27/17 (register
here: https://sustainability-lunch.eventbrite.com)
Immigration: Research on immigration 3/6/17
(register here. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ucr-immigation-research-discussion-tickets-31567187307)
High Performance Computing on 3/13/17 (register here: https://high_performance_computing.eventbrite.com)
The goal is get faculty with
common interests to meet each other in an informal setting and discuss possible
collaborations. All lunches are held at
11:55-1:00 in University Office Building Room 210.
The immigration lunch is intended to be broad covering all aspects of research on
immigration populations as well as immigration policy. It will catered by
a local Persian restaurant and include vegetarian and halal dishes.
Computers now consume a
significant portion of US, campus and home electrical energy. The US government
(still) has a website on how to save energy with your desktop or laptop
computing. thttps://www.energystar.gov/products/low_carbon_it_campaign/power_management_computer
The most important step one
can take is putting the computer to sleep after it is idle for a few
minutes. Years ago, sleep mode was available on laptops to save battery
power, but nearly all desktop computers now support it to save energy when
plugged in.
See directions below for
windows and IOS:
Windows
1. Type “sleep” in the
search programs in file box (available when you click on the windows Icon on
the lower left)
2. Select “change when
the computer sleeps” (under Control panel)
3. Select times for turning
off the display and putting the computer to sleep.
Mac (IOS)
1.
Click
on the apple symbol (Apple Menu) in the upper left of your screen.
2.
Go
to "System Preferences"
3.
Click
"Show All" (if necessary)
4.
Select
"Energy Saver" from the "Hardware" row
5.
Set
"Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for" to 30 minutes
using the slider
6.
Set
"Put the Display to Sleep when the computer is inactive for" to 5
minutes using the slider
Of course, turning the
computer off when not in use saves even more energy. While you are it,
turn the lights off when you leave the room. This helps reduce the carbon
footprint of the university or your home.
I’m still a bit too busy to go birding in California, and
the birds in my yard seem ordinary compared to those from my Australia
trip. So, here’s two photos of Tawny Frogmouths
from Australia. The perch on braches in the day time and are day
camouflaged as part of the tree.
(click
photo to enlarge)
From the photo above, one
might wonder why they are called frogmouths, but it’s
obvious from the fledgings below (that haven’t fully
mastered the art of camoflauge)
(click
photo to enlarge)