The NSF in 2020: The future of the Social, Behavioral,and Economic Sciences

The NSF/SBE released its executive summary of 252 short white papers on the future of the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Among other things, the report identifies four focus areas (population change; sources of disparities; communication, language, and linguistics; and technology, new media, and social network) and three properties of future research (data-intensive, multidisciplinary, and collaborative). But read for yourself. The report summarizes what the community (authors that submitted white papers) had to say about what works well and what needs to be improved in terms of the processes that are currently employed by the NSF to distribute its funding. On p. 24 an onward, you can read a summary of the many many linguistic white papers that seem to have been submitted (see p. 39 for a summary of which disciplines the white papers came from). On p.29 an onward the report lays out possible scenarios as to how the NSF might change in order to get to the outlined vision.

Google scholar now provides detailed citation report

This might be of interest to some of you: Google Scholar now allows you to correct links or citations to your work. It also provides a complete summary of all your citations, by article, by year, etc. It’s a functionality similar to academia.edu, but it let’s you remove wrong links to your work (e.g. to old prepublished manuscripts).

The interface is rather convenient since it allows you to import all references from scholar, which is almost 95% correct. Overall, it’s actually much more convenient than academia.edu (though I’d say it serves a slightly different purpose). It also generates a list of all your co-authors and other schnick-schnack . Check it out. Sweet.

Lot’s of zeros? Be careful with your chi-square (exact or not) and alike

If you’re running chi-squares to analyze categorical data and you have lots of very low count (or even 0 cells), be careful in how to interpret the result. There’s a nice article by Andrew Gelman on this topic, where he shows that the problem is that all the low counts can make it harder to detect the signal (and hence a significant deviation from the expected values for a part of the table). Put differently, you might have a significant pattern, but not detect. I don’t think it’s so much a problem for most of the tests we conduct since contingency tables in psycholinguistic and linguistic research are usually rather small. I can’t recall the last time that I saw anything larger than a 3×4 or alike. From what I understand from the Gelman’s post, it would seem that the problem he points out becomes more serious the larger the table is.

some (relatively) new funding mechanisms through NSF

This might be of interest to folks, in case you haven’t seen it. First, there’s RAPID and EAGER. RAPID is a mechanism for research that requires fast funding decisions (e.g. b/c the first language with only one phoneme was just discovered but its last speaker is just about to enter into a vow of silence). EAGERs are “Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research” for exploratory work – i.e. high risk research with a high potential for high pay-off. One important property of both mechanisms is that submissions do not have to be sent out for external review, which should substantially shorten the time until you hear back from NSF.

Second, there is now a new type of proposal that is specifically aimed at interdisciplinary work that would not usually be funded by any of the existing NSF panels alone – CREATIV: Creative Research Awards for Transformative Interdisciplinary Ventures.

Note that all three of these funding types allow no re-submission.

The serial founder hypothesis and word order universals

Check out this article in ScienceNews summarizing commentaries on two recent language studies in Science (Atkinson, 2011: ) and Nature (Dunn et al., 2011). Each of the studies has received a lot of attention and they are the subject of two special issues in press for Linguistic Typology, to which HLP Lab contributed on three articles. I will add a link to the special issue(s) once it comes out.