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Jesse Ausubel’s autobiography, La liberazione dell’ambiente, is now available at Amazon Italy and on sale in bookstores throughout Italy. Here’s a photo of Jesse with publisher Sante di Renzo, editor Maria Pia Felici, and the designer of La liberazione dell’ambiente, with photos of copies on sale in bookstores in Rome and Florence May 2014

Mark Stoeckle is interviewed by Jenny Marder for PBS News Hour on DNA barcoding and taxonomy’s future

Together with long-time colleague Nebosja Nakicenovic, Jesse Ausubel will give the William and Myrtle Harris Distinguished lectures in Science and Civilization on “Cars and Civilization” at the California Institute of Technology on 30 April 2014.

 

 

Di Renzo has now published Jesse Ausubel’s short autobiography.

The book spans Jesse’s roots, childhood, and education, and then the major chapters of his career: climate change, industrial ecology, Census of Marine Life, DNA barcoding, Encyclopedia of Life, and Deep Carbon Observatory.  Some college humor and an operatic spy story fill out the picture.

For a little more information, please see the 26 February 2014 post.

Including tax and shipping to the USA, the cost on a Mastercard or Visa is EUR 26.48

 

 

The Breakthrough Institute has announced that on 22 June in California it will award Jesse Ausubel the Breakthrough Paradigm Prize for 2014.   “This annual Prize honors those whose work has made a major contribution to realizing a future where all the world’s inhabitants can enjoy secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling lives on an ecologically vibrant planet.”  Jesse was chosen “in recognition of your scholarship describing how to save nature through the use of technology. Your research and writings on population, technology, energy, materials, agriculture, and pollution have inspired a generation of scholars and analysts focused on reducing humankind’s negative impacts on the nonhuman world. “  Thanks to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, co-founders of the Breakthrough Institute.

https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/jesse-ausubel-announced-as-2014-breakthrough-paradigm-award-winner

The Roman publisher Di Renzo commissioned Jesse Ausubel to write for its series of short autobiographies, I Dialoghi. Jesse’s 112-page autobiography, La liberazione dell’ambiente (The Liberation of the Environment), will be published in April 2014.  Jesse is pleased to be listed after Noam Chomsky and Desmond Morris but before one of his heroes, Giordano Bruno (whose volume is an imaginary interview).  Jesse’s story spans his youth and career. Thanks to the outstanding editor and translator at Di Renzo, Maria Pia Felici.

William Garrison (University of California, Berkeley) and David Levinson (University of Minnesota) have published a second edition of their masterly book, The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment.

Among other good works, the U MN group maintains a useful page about the Kepler of transportation science, the late Yacov Zahavi:  https://www.surveyarchive.org/zahavi.html

Zahavi had a tremendous, lasting influence on the thinking of Jesse Ausubel and several close associates (Cesare Marchetti, Arnulf Gruebler) and protégés (David Victor, Andreas Schafer) who have regularly cited his work, as for example in:

JH Ausubel, C Marchetti. The evolution of transport. The Industrial Physicist 7(2): 20-24, 2001.

JH Ausubel, C Marchetti, PS Meyer. Toward green mobility: The evolution of transport. European Review  6(2): 143-162, 1998.

We celebrate recent achievements in biodiversity informatics.

 Enjoy exploring the new GBIF interface for the global mapping of occurrence records. Try zooming and using the time slider:  https://www.gbif.org/occurrence .   Congratulations to Donald Hobern and company.

The “TraitBank” of the Encyclopedia of Life now operates, developed with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  For example, insert “sharks” in the taxon box and click on “total life span” in the menu of traits, and you will receive a list of the life spans of 100+ sharks.  https://eol.org/data_search

 Tony Rees, one of the builders of the Ocean Biographical Information System, has created the wonderful Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera, especially notable for information on phyla, classes, orders, families, and genera: https://www.obis.org.au/irmng/index.html/document_view

 OBIS itself continues to grow and now has more than 37 million records on more than 120,000 species from more than 1300 data sets https://iobis.org/about/statisticsCongratulations to Ward Appeltans and company.

 PHE researchers Mark Stoeckle and Cameron Coffran developed software, TreeParser, that helps generate Klee diagram “heat maps” of genetic biodiversity (freely available on the PHE website https://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/klee.php ).  TreeParser uses data from GenBank and from the Barcode of Life public data portal (https://www.boldsystems.org/), , which now has over 1.7 m public records. Congratulations to Sujeevan Ratnasingam and Company.

 The progress in biodiversity informatics during the past decade is wonderful.  None of these things existed a decade ago.

 

John Steele, great marine ecologist and former director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, passed away on 5 November 2013. On 11 January 2014, WHOI celebrated his career, described at this website
https://hughsteele-public.sharepoint.com/

John and Jesse Ausubel co-authored the 1993 paper Flat Organizations for Earth Sciences.

John’s insights were crucial to the early definition of the Census of Marine Life research program.  Some of these were articulated in the National Research Council (Ocean Studies Board) report, Assessing the Global Distribution and Abundance of Marine Organisms, Workshop, Monterey, California, January 1998.