Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

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LogletLab 4

Version 4 of our LogletLab software has been released and can be accessed at www.logletlab.com. LogletLab software is designed to help users analyze and decompose socio-technical growth processes using the logistic function as well as a range of sigmoidal functions, S-curves.  This decomposition is roughly analogous to wavelet analysis, popular for signal processing and compression.

This latest version of our software offers users numerous new features including an extended selection of sigmoidal fitting functions and advanced statistical analyses. Background information can be found here: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/LogletLab/docs.html

Many thanks to Eyal Schachter and David Burg of the University of Haifa for its development.

English translation of Ausubel autobiography

In 2014, Di Renzo published in Italian Jesse Ausubel’s autobiography La liberazione dell’ambiente (autobiography) 112 pp.  We now post an English translation as The Liberation of the Environment.  The autobiography (48 pages in English) should not be confused with the short essay also titled Liberation of the Environment which opens the 1996 Daedalus special issue on environment and 1997 NAE book Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment.

Shrinking footprint of meat in US

“The Shrinking Footprint of American Meat” by Iddo Wernick and Jesse Ausubel is published by The Breakthrough Institute.   We estimate that between 1969 and 2014 the amount of cropland used for raising land meat for Americans fell by nearly a third: around 9 million acres, about the size of Maryland.  The data used for the calculation can be found here.

Using different Feed Conversion Ratios (FCRs) for the calculation yields different results for the amount of cropland used (or spared).  For a detailed discussion of the factors involved in converting animal feed into animal live weight and edible meat, see Smil, Vaclav, 2013, Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory, Wiley-Blackwell.

Ocean Exploration Forum Final Report

The Final Report of the 2016 National Ocean Exploration Forum (NOEF) has been posted on the updated NOEF website.  The site includes the reports of the small groups that developed plans for campaigns of exploration to the Arctic, Gulf of Mexico, and Southeast US Atlantic Bight as well as the slides from the orientation lectures about these regions, slides from the lectures about tools for geology, acoustics, biology, and telepresence, and the discussion papers prepared for the Forum.

A short press release describes the Final Report.

The report contains Jesse Ausubel’s keynote address to the Forum: SuBastian and the Roboats . Pp. 28-31 in Final Report of the 2016 National Ocean Exploration Forum: Beyond the Ships 2020–2025. 2017 (Slightly abridged version published in Sea Technology 58(1):7, January 2017.)

Thanks to Amelie Walker Yung for the great site redesign and to Alan Curry for overseeing the entire NOEF project.

The Forum and its Report are fruits of the Monmouth University-Rockefeller University marine science and policy initiative.

Taipei Acer Meeting

Taipei Acer Meeting

On 4 January 2017, PHE Researcher Iddo Wernick delivered the keynote address ‘Creating a circular economy: The challenges and opportunities presented by Technology Metals for future business‘ kicking off a conference on the topic of Sustainable Resource Management organized by Acer Inc., in Taipei, Taiwan.  Iddo also gave a talk on ‘Conflict Minerals and Tantalum’ from the perspective of Supply Chain managers in the electronics industry.  Below are some pictures of the event.