On Thursday, May 11, 2006 the Journal of Industrial Ecology celebrated its 10th anniversary and inclusion in the Science Citation Index with a seminar and festive program. Jesse was one of three honorees, for PHE’s work on Dematerialization, carried out with Robert Herman and Iddo Wernick.

Our longstanding interest in Serious Games extended during the past year to the “Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition” organized by Josh Fouts and Doug Thomas at USC sponsored by the Lounsbery Foundation. First place went to PeaceMaker, a cross-cultural political video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which can be used to promote a peaceful resolution among Israelis, Palestinians and young adults worldwide. Congratulations to Asi Burak and PeaceMaker team members at Carnegie-Mellon.

A little history of our involvement with gaming: Swedish economist Ingolf Stahl first involved Jesse in interactive gaming in 1980-1981, when Ingolf, Jesse, Jennifer Robinson, and John Lathorp built a board game and two computer games about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming (described in Jennifer Robinson and Jesse H. Ausubel, A Game Framework for Scenario Generation for the CO2 Issue, Simulation and Games 14(3):317-344). The 1981 paper, Ingolf Stahl and Jesse H. Ausubel, Estimating the Future Input of Fossil Fuel CO2 into the Atmosphere by Simulation Gaming (IIASA Working Paper-81-107, published in Beyond the Energy Crisis-Opportunity and Challenge, Rocco.A. Fazzolare and Craig B. Smith, eds., Oxford, Pergamon, 1981) was the first paper to introduce the idea of greenhouse gas emission trading. Jesse’s 1988 book with Robert Herman, Cities and their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future, found its way to the brilliant young Will Wright, and Will made terrific use of it in his first 1989 release of SimCity, for which Jesse had the great opportunity to be a beta tester. Jesse wonders whether he still somewhere has the diskettes of the beta version. Will opened Jesse’s eyes to modern simulation and helpfully advised Jesse and Bill Massey on the creation of the university simulator, Virtual U . (For the game history: http://phe.rockefeller.edu/jesse/vupenn.pdf). Virtual U provided the kernel around which the enterprising Ben Sawyer (http://www.dmill.com) and Dave Rejeski nucleated the Serious Games initiative. Jesse still hopes to find a programmer who would take the 1981 Greenhouse Effect board game and turn it into an on-line game.

On 9 May 2006 The New York Times reported the decline in daily US newspaper circulation from 63 million in 1984 to 45 million in March 2006. The associated fall in demand for wood pulp affirms our vision of the great restoration of forests now underway and analysed in our numerous papers on forests and land use.

The French newspaper, Liberation, assembled a slide show of photos of plankton from the Bermuda triangle cruise of the Census of Marine Life by superb photographer and scientist Russell Hopcroft. (click “A voir” to view).

A paper we encouraged Paul Waggoner to prepare, “How can EcoCity get its food?” is published. The paper examines the ecological footprint of an American diet on the land around an American city.

In 1982 Jesse translated from Italian into English about 200 pages from the unpublished diaries of Fey von Hassell, who had grown up in Rome in the 1930s as daughter of the German ambassador.  The translation precipitated Fey’s 1987 book, “Storia Incredibile” and subsequent best-selling versions in English and German.  Fey’s story is now dramatized in a 3-hour special on Italian television, “I Figli strappati.”

The Census of Marine Life issued a press release 4 May on a cruise to look at sea bugs deep beneath the Bermuda Triangle.

Jesse’s comment about Vern Ruttan’s article on technologies that might transform the economy appeared in the spring issue of the journal Issues in Science and Technology.

While we prefer lateral suspension approach to the German approach, we are pleased to observe China speeding along the learning curve for maglev technology.