News

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.

 

 

A preprint is now available of  Living in a Material World, an essay written by PHE researcher Iddo Wernick that will appear in the Winter 2014 issue of Issues in Science and Technology.

Mark Stoeckle is interviewed by Erika Engelhaupt for January 2, 2014 Science News Blog about the recently published discovery of Japanese cockroaches (Periplaneta japonica) living in rodent traps on Manhattan’s High Line.

In 1981, geologist John Saul wrote what may be a classic paper on diamonds and deep gas, which we now post to our site.  The full reference is: John M. Saul, The Origin of Diamonds and the Deep Gas Hypothesis, Proceedings of the XVIII International Gemmological Conference, Journal of the Gemmological Society of Japan, Vol.8, no1-4 (Dec. 1981) pp.79-85.
 

The current issue of GeneWatch includes an interesting array of reports on where DNA barcoding is and where it might go, including PHE-er Mark Stoeckle’s essay “DNA Barcoding Ready for Breakout“.

On 5 December 2013 the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach hosted Jesse to lecture on the Census of Marine Life. Artist Sofia Kostyrko also gave a tour of the marvelous collection of portraits of “oceanauts” that she has painted, including a portrait of Jesse, now on exhibit at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California.