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Obituary: Dr James (Jim) Ascough III

September 15, 2017

A tribute in memory of Dr. James (Jim) C. Ascough II

Timothy R.Green, Olaf David, Holger R.Maier

This is a tribute to Dr. Jim Ascough, who was an enthusiastic member, officer and medalist of the International Environmental Modelling & Software Society (iEMSs). Sadly, Jim died of a heart attack on 1 December 2016. This shocked his family, friends and colleagues, who knew Jim as an active person who rarely lacked energy for any endeavor. Jim is survived by his wife, Dr. Lois Deer-Ascough (Deer-Ascough et al., 1995; Ascough et al., 1998), son TJ (age 22) and daughter Katie (age 18).

Outside of work, Jim was fully engaged as a husband and father, who expressed his love to his family in words and actions. Even during the work day, it was not uncommon to hear Jim talking on the phone to one of his kids or his wife. He was an active participant in their school and athletic activities, even coaching soccer and playing tennis with his children. The family took vacations together, attended church regularly, and participated in many outdoor activities, like hiking in the Rocky Mountains.

Modelling and more… a new(ish) blog

April 5, 2017

Interested in an easy-to-read digest of new developments in modelling and associated areas such as stakeholder engagement, scoping, model integration, and research implementation? Check out the Integration and Implementation Insights blog (http://I2Insights.org).

At one year old with more than 120 posts, the blog is proud to have had contributors from 21 countries and readers from 165. Click on “modelling” in the tag cloud to find all the contributions on that topic, including:

Contributions are very welcome! The focus of the blog is on methods and concepts for:

  • synthesizing and sharing diverse knowledge from disciplines and stakeholders;
  • understanding and managing what we do not and cannot know;
  • engaging policy makers and practitioners to implement research findings.

 Use the blog to advertise your latest peer-reviewed paper and to get feedback on a newly emerging idea. For more information contact: Gabriele.Bammer@anu.edu.au

Other examples are below, follow the “Read more” link.

Full catalog of past iEMSs conference papers is now online

February 20, 2017

A message from the President.

One of the major initiatives I have undertaken as iEMSs President has been to consolidate all of our past iEMSs conference papers and abstracts into single highly indexed paper management system. The provider of the system is a company called BePress, in Berkeley, California. My institution, Brigham Young University (BYU), has graciously given us free use of their expensive license to the BePress system. I’ve been assured that both BYU and BePress are committed to supporting our society in this way for as long as we find it useful.

Posting the past conference papers to this system is not a trivial task because each one needed to be entered manually. Two very patient students here at BYU spent a few months painstakingly entering all of the 2016 and 2014 papers. So what a relief it was when we discovered that Ioannis Athanasiadis had already done this same task for the papers from 2012 and prior – manually entering them into another database from which we were able to export them and then re-import them into BePress. This cut our work from several more months to just a few days of scripting!

The result is that all the papers are now in this system and Google has got them fully indexed, and now people around the globe are finding YOUR abstracts and papers and are downloading them and reading them (and hopefully citing them!). In January 2017 there were 1879 downloads from this database!

If you want to see what this looks like, follow this link to see an interactive map showing and other metrics for the downloads: 

You can also browse the entire collection here: http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/iemssconference/

Dan Ames,
President