Atlantic geology hits Wikipedia

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WikiProject Geology is one of the gathering places for geoscientists in Wikipedia.Regular readers of this blog know that we're committed to open scientific communication, and that we're champions of wikis as one of the venues for that communication, and that we want to see more funky stuff happen at conferences. In this spirit, we hosted a Wikipedia editing session at the Atlantic Geoscience Society Colloquium in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, this past weekend. 

As typically happens with these funky sessions, it wasn't bursting at the seams: The Island of Misfit Toys is not overcrowded. There were only 7 of us: three Agilistas, another consultant, a professor, a government geologist, and a student. But it's not the numbers that matter (I hope), it's the spirit of the thing. We were a keen bunch and we got quite a bit done. Here are the articles we started or built upon:

The birth of the Atlantic Geoscience Society page gave the group an interesting insight into Wikipedia's quality control machine. Within 10 minutes of publishing it, the article was tagged for speedy deletion by an administrator. This sort of thing is always a bit off-putting to noobs, because Wikipedia editors can be a bit, er, brash, or at least impersonal. This is not that surprising when you consider that new pages are created at a rate of about one a minute some days. Just now I resurrected a stripped-down version of the article, and it has already been reviewed. Moral: don't let anyone tell you that Wikipedia is a free-for-all.

All of these pages are still (and always will be) works in progress. But we added 5 new pages and a substantial amount of material with our 28 or so hours of labour. Considering most of those who came had never edited a wiki before, I'm happy to call this a resounding success. 

Much of my notes from the event could be adapted to any geoscience wiki editing session — use them as a springboard to get some champions of open-access science together at your next gathering. If you'd like our help, get in touch.

Rock Hack 2014

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We're hosting another hackathon! This time, we're inviting geologists in all their colourful guises to come and help dream up cool tools, find new datasets, and build useful stuff. Mark your calendar: 5 & 6 April, right before AAPG.

On 4 April there's the added fun of a Creative geocomputing course. So you can learn some skills, then put them into practice right away. More on the course next week.

What's a hackathon?

It's not as scary — or as illegal — as it sounds! And it's not just for coders. It's just a roomful of creative geologists and friendly programmers figuring out two things together:

  1. What tools would help us in our work?
  2. How can we build those tools?

So for example, we might think about problems like these:

  • A sequence stratigraphy calibration app to tie events to absolute geologic time
  • Wireline log 'attributes'
  • Automatic well-to-well correlation
  • Facies recognition from core
  • Automatic photomicrograph interpretation: grain size, porosity, sorting, and so on
  • A mobile app for finding and capturing data about outcrops
  • Sedimentation rate analysis, accounting for unconformities, compaction, and grain size

I bet you can think of something you'd like to build — add it to the list!

Still not sure? Check out what we did at the Geophysics Hackathon last autumn...

How do I sign up?

You can sign up for the creative geocomputing course at Eventbrite.

If you think Rock Hack sounds like a fun way to spend a weekend, please drop us a line or sign up at Hacker League. If you're not sure, please come anyway! We love visitors.

If you think you know someone who'd be up for it, let them know with the sharing buttons below.

The poster image is from an original work by Flickr user selkovjr.

Scientists not prospects

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If you've never worked on 'the dark side' — selling technical products and services — you may not think much about marketing. If you work for an energy company, and especially if you're a 'decision maker' (wait, don't we all make decisions?), you may not realize that it's all aimed at you. Every ad, every sponsored beer, every trade show booth and its cute bunnies. The marketers are the explorers, and you are the prospect.

My question is: are you OK with their exploration methods?

The cost of advertising

Marketing futurists have been saying for ages that interruption advertising is dead. Uncurated, highest-bidder, information-free ads, 'inserted' (that's what they call it) into otherwise interesting and useful 'content' do not work. Or at least, people can't agree on whether they work or not. And that means they don't. 

The price of print advertising does not reflect this, however. Quite the opposite. Here's what a year of premium full-page ads will cost you in three leading publications: 

Still not bad compared to Wired ($1.67 million). You start to understand why companies hire marketing people. Negotiating volume pricing and favourable placements is a big deal, think of the money you can save. What a shame ads bring nothing at all to our community. All that money — so little impact. Well, zero impact. 

Conferences are where it really gets serious. Everything has a price. Want to buy 250 gallons of filtrate, I mean 'sponsor a coffee break'? That will be $5000 but don't worry, you get a little folded card with your name on it (and some coffee stains). How about a booth in the exhibition? They are only $23 per sq ft (about $250/m2), so that big shiny booth? That'll be about $75,000. That's before you bring in carpet, drywall, theatrical lighting, displays, and an espresso machine.

No wonder one service company executive once told me: "It's not a waste of money. It's a colossal waste of money." He said they only went because people would talk if they didn't.

Welcome to the oil industry

Walking around the trade show at SEG the other week, we were not very surprised to be accosted by a troop of young women dressed in identical short, tight dresses, offering beer tickets. Where's the beer? At their booth, obviously, about half a kilometre away (Manhattan distance). Apparently the marketing department assumed that no-one in their right mind would visit their booth on the basis of their compelling products or their essential relationships with an engaged and enthusiastic user community. Come to think of it, they were probably correct.

One innovative company has invented time travel, but unfortunately only to 1975. At least, that's the easiest way to explain the shoeshine stand at Ovation's booth. You can imagine the marketing meeting: "Let's get some women in short skirts, and get them to shine people's shoes!" I expect someone said, "Wait, isn't this a technical conference for subsurface scientists, shouldn't we base our marketing strategy on delighting the industry with our unbeatable services?" — and after a moment's reflection, the raucous laughter confirming that yes, the sexy shoeshine stand was indeed an awesome idea.

Let's be clear: marketing, as practised in this industry, is a waste of money. And this latter kind of marketing — remarkable for all the wrong reasons — is an insult to our profession and our purpose. 

Are we cool with this?

Last year I asked whether we (our community of technical practitioners and scientists) are okay with burning 210 person-years of productivity at a major conference and having very little to show for it at the end. 

Today I'm asking a different question: are we okay with burning millions of dollars on glossy ads, carpeted booths, nasty coffee, and shoeshine stands? Is this an acceptable price for our attention? Is the signal:noise ratio high enough?

I am not sure where I'm going with all of this — I am still trying to figure out what I think about it all. But I know one thing: I can't stand it. I will not step into another exhibition. I am withdrawing my attention — which I suppose means that yours is now worth a tiny bit more. Or less.

Update on 2013-10-16 17:10 by Matt Hall

Anyone involved in marketing that has actuallyl read this far without surfing off in disgust might like to carry on reading the follow-up to this post — Do something that scares you.

What we built at the weekend

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10 days ago we wrapped up the Geophysics Hackathon in Houston. I wrote a bit about it right after the event, but now I've gathered the evidence and can share more of the awesome. First of all — what did everyone build in the 2 days? 

Team 1: Velocity modelling in iOS

Essau Worthy-Blackwell (Southwestern Energy), Jacob Foshee (independent iOS dev), Evan Bianco (Agile), and Ben Bougher (independent, mostly helping Agile) built 2 tools exploring velocity modelling and depth conversion. One was a desktop tool (in Python), the other was an iOS app — watch this.

Team 2: LAS soup demux

Joe Jennings (Colorado School of Mines), Mike Stone (Lukoil), and Karl Schleicher (University of Texas at Austin) built a tool in Python for coping with messy data. Karl is a champion of open data, and needs a tool for quickly exploring large repositories. You can see their progress in the code in GitHub — feel free to help them out!

Team 3: A 1D forward model

Duncan Child (Spectraseis) joined Chris Chalcraft, Paul Garossino, and James Alison from OpenGeoSolutions to help out with his pumped up Java and JSON wrangling skills. Greg Partyka even popped in to help. Here is Blockfilter in GitHub.

Everyone's a winner

As well as being a fun way to get to know people, and create something new together, the event was a (very low key) contest. We had some experienced and perceptive judges to pick some winners and decide how the exactly 3 prizes would be distributed among the exactly 3 teams:

  • Team 3 were awarded with some Raspberry Pi starter kits, to recognize their solid idea, well-constructed code, and respect for work-life balance (hey, it was the weekend!). It was fun peeking over their shoulders occasionally.

  • Team 2 had the most commercially viable product, and as such went away with 2 books: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder. Thanks to sponsor SURGE Accelerator, the team also won the chance to talk to a business mentor about their ideas.

  • Team 1 delivered the shiniest product at the end of the weekend, with the iOS app and a desktop clone. They each won one of Google's latest Nexus 7 tablets, to continue with their app-building skills.

What will you build?

Thanks again to the daredevils who showed up, the judges — especially Maitri Erwin, who helped out in lots of ways all weekend — and of course the sponsors: OpenGeoSolutions, Enthought, and dGB Earth Sciences. If you missed the event, dear reader, I hope you'll come along next time to share ideas, test workflows, and build new things.

Standards, streamers, and Sherlock

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Yesterday afternoon at the SEG Annual Meeting I spent some time with Jill Lewis from Troika and Rune Hagelund, a consultant. They have both served on the SEG Standards Committee, helping define the SEG-D and SEG-Y standards for field data and processed data respectively. The SEG standards are — in my experience — almost laughably badly implemented by most purveyors of data. Why is this? Is the standard too inflexible? Are the field definitions unclear? The confusion can lead to real problems: I know I've inadvertently loaded a seismic survey back to front. If you feel passionately about it, the committee is always looking for feedback.

Land streamerI wandered past a poster yesterday morning about land streamers. The last I'd seen of this idea — dragging a train of geophones behind a truck — was a U of C test at Priddis, Alberta, by Gabriella Suarez and Rob Stewart. I haven't been paying much attention, but this was the first commercial implementation I'd seen – a shallow acquifer study in Sweden, reported by Boiero et al. The truck has the minivibe source right behind it, and the streamer after that. Quicker than juggies!

I don't know if this is a function of my recent outlook on conferences, but this was the first conference I've been to where all of the best things have been off-site. Perhaps the best part of the week was last night — a 3-hour geek-fest with Evan, Ben Bougher, Sam Kaplan, and Bernal Manzanilla. The conversation covered compressive sensing, stochastic resonance, acoustic lenses, and the General Inverse-Problemness of All Things.

As I mentioned last week, I hung out every day in the press room, waiting for wiki-curious visitors. We didn't have many drop-ins (okay, four), but I had some great chats with SEG staff, my friend Mike Stone, and a couple of other enthusiasts. I also started some fun projects to move some quality content into SEG Wiki. If you're at all interested in seeing a vibrant, community-driven space for geophysical knowledge, do get involved.

I bought some books in the Book Mart yesterday: Planning Land 3D Seismic Surveys by Andreas Cordsen et al., 3D Seismic Survey Design by Gijs Vermeer, and Fundamentals of Geophysical Interpretation by Larry Lines and Rachel Newrick. We're increasingly interested in modeling, and acquisition is where it all begins; Lines and Newrick was mostly just a gap on the shelf, but it also covers some topics I have little familiarity with, such as electromagnetics. Jennifer Cobb, SEG publications manager, showed me the intriguing new monograph by geophysical legend Enders Robinson and TLE Editor Dean Clark — I can't quite remember the title but it had something to do with Sherlock Holmes and Albert Einstein — a story about scientific investigation and geophysics. Looking forward to picking that up.

That's it for me this year; I'm writing this on the flight home. Evan is staying for the workshops and will report on those. As usual, I'm leaving with a lot of things to follow up on over the next weeks and months. I'm also trying to sift my feelings about the Annual Meeting, and especially the Exhibition. So many people, so much time, so much marketing...

Past, present, future SEG

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Today was the first day of the SEG Annual Meeting in Houston. 

Last night we wandered around the icebreaker, still buzzing from the hackathon. The contrast was crushing. The exhibition is gigantic — it's an almost overwhelming amount of marketing. My thoughts on what the exhibition hall is, and what it represents, are not fully formed and might be a bit... ranty, so I will save them for a more considered post. 

As usual, SEG kicked off with a general session — much better attended this year, but also much less ambitious. At least 300 members came to hear outgoing president David Monk's perspective on SEG's future. His address mostly looked backwards, however, at the trends over the last few years. I guess the idea is to extrapolate from there... But maybe we can do even better than recent years? We mustn't forget to do completely new and unexpected things too. 

At the end of his slot, Monk showed some animated renderings of SEG's new building in Tulsa. The movie was accompanied by an almost comically strident anthem — evidently it is a big deal. As well as having a smart new office, the real estate will turn in some smart new revenue from other tenants. Ground was broken on Friday, and the opening is expected to be in December 2014. As you see, the architects understood industrial geophysics quite well, opting for a large black box. 

At the end of the day, Canada strode home to yet another SEG Challenge Bowl victory as the University of Manitoba fought off the Autonomous University of Mexico and Colorado School of Mines to prove that, while Texas might be the home of the industry, Canada is the home of exploration geophysics. 

Where's all the geophysics? Evan is compiling some technical highlights from the day as I type. Stay tuned for that. 

If you're at the conference, tell us what you've enjoyed most about the first 24 hours.

Garage geoscience

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The Geophysics Hackathon 2013 is over. It was awesome. You should have been there.

The backers

I didn't make a big effort to find sponsors, because I didn't need to — just like the participants, they self-select. dGB Earth Sciences, Enthought, and OpenGeoSolutions are the leaders in the business of open geophysical software. Their support and encouragement means a lot to me personally, and is having a huge impact on our community. Please support them when you have the chance. We need companies like these.

The hackers

There was not too much of a plan. We were keen to allow organic collaboration to happen. So the hackers arrived on Saturday morning, and spent an hour or two matching projects to interests and skills. They settled down to work at about 10:30, and the creative buzz in the room was palpable.

The projects that emerged were:

  • Data viewers for amorphous well data masses, addressing uncertainty due to data disorganization
  • A seismic signal processing sandbox in the web browser, addressing resolution uncertainty
  • Mobile and desktop apps for on-the-fly time–depth transformation, with error bars

On Sunday we ended up in START Houston's garage space, with the doors open to the beautiful fall morning. It had the ambience of a picnic. A sunny Sunday morning with cinnamon coffee, breakfast tacos, Python, and geophysics — what more could you ask for?

The geeks among you might be interested to know what sort of hardware the hacking geophysicists were developing their ideas on. Turns out it was perfectly evenly distributed: 4 each of Mac, Windows, and Linux. Of the Linux distros, there was 1 each of Centos, Ubuntu, crunchbang, and OpenSuse.

At the request of Chris Chalcraft, I also did an impromptu poll of code editor software. This was similarly diverse:

The other backers

Chris Krohn has been a true champion of the event. On Saturday, she brought new SEG president-elect Chris Liner to visit the event — his natural curiosity and enthusiasm are infectious, and lifted everyone present. I hope he's able to realize some of his vision during his presidency. (You do read his blog, right?)

Today she returned with Dennis Cooke and Peter Annan. They all graciously acted as judges. The other judges were Paul de Groot and Eric Jones, two of our generous sponsors, and Maitri Erwin, one of Agile's closest friends. Though they couldn't stick around, we also had visits from Zane Jobe and Joe Dellinger — much appreciated votes of support.

We'll be blogging about the SEG Annual Meeting all week... when the dust has settled a bit, we'll tell you more about the projects the hackers built. It's amazing what you can do in 2 days.

Looking forward to SEG 2013

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The SEG Annual Meeting is coming! The program starts tomorrow with the DISC, and continues over the weekend with various other courses. It's not part of the conference, but we're looking forward to the Geophysics Hackathon, obviously. Curious? You're welcome to drop in.

The meeting boasts 124 technical sessions totalling over 1000 PowerPoint presentations. If you haven't looked at the list of expanded abstracts yet, I can't blame you, it's a massive amount of content and the website experience is, er, not optimal — and there's no helpful mobile app this year. [Update: The app came out today! Go get it, it's essential. Thank you Whitney at SEG for letting us know.] I've tried to pick out a few sessions that seem really exciting below.

Worst. App. Ever.Each day at 10:30 am, I will be doing a guest presentation at the Enthought booth, showing some novel geophysics tools that I've been making. They are powered by Python and Enthought's Canopy environment. Come by and I will show you that you can too! However, I need somebody to please go to this exhibition booth 'browser' and show me where the Enthought booth is. Worst. App. Ever.

And each day at 11 am, there's a 2-hour mini-wikithon. Stop by the Press Room for a quick tour of SEG Wiki, and find out how you can help make it better.

Monday

With no technical presentations on Monday morning, it is safe to assume that most delegates will be wandering around the exhibition hall. A few may trickle over to the unenticing Opening Session which Matt and I found was horribly attended last year and the year before. Matt at least will be there, mostly out of morbid curiosity.

Continuing the Hackathon's theme on error and uncertainty, I will be diving into the session on Monday afternoon called

From 3-6 pm be sure to check out the always popular SEG Student Challenge Bowl. The global finals, are hosted by the crowd-pleasing past SEG president (and fellow Canadian) Peter Duncan. Top pairings from Universities across the world duking it out in a button-pushing quiz show. Come out, cheer on the students and test your own geophysics trivia from the audience.

Tuesday

The sessions that look appealing to me on Tuesday are

Wednesday

Agile's good friend Maitri Erwin is the instigator behind the Women's Networking Breakfast. All are welcome; consider yourself lucky to connect with Maitri. As for talks, I will try make an appearance at

The first one I know quite a bit about, but can always use a refresher, and the second one I know very little about, but it's been a hot topic for 3 or 4 years now. If we aren't worn out at the end of the day, we might find some tickets to the Bayou Bash.

Thursday & Friday

There are over a dozen workshops on both Thursday and Friday. As far as I can tell, they are basically more talks, each around a central theme. Don't ask me how this is in any way distinguishable from the technical program, and there is still a full suite of technical sessions conflicting on Thursday morning. It's a shame because I'm curious to attend the session Fractures, shale and well-log characterization but I don't want to miss Workshop 2, Grand challenges, which takes place all day on Thursday. Then on Friday there's Characterizing fractures (Workshop 15).

There are many other events going on, so if you see something good, make sure you tweet the rest of us about it: @EvanBianco, @kwinkunks, @maitri, @toastar, and lots of others — follow hashtag #SEG13. (Not #SEG2013, that's all marketing wonks).

If you'll be at the Annual Meeting, do look out for us, we'd love to meet you. If you won't be there, tell us what you'd like to hear about. News from the exhibition? Our favourite talks? Detailed minutes from the committee meetings? Let us know in the comments.

Ten ways to make a difference

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SEG WikiAfter reading my remarks yesterday about geoscience wikis, perhaps you're itching to share some of what you know. Below are ten quick ways to get started. And if you're going to SEG next week, you're in luck: you'll find a quick way to get started. 

Ten things you can do

First, if you really just want to dive in, here are ten easy things you can do in almost any wiki. Let's use SEG Wiki as an example — but this applies equally well to SubSurfWiki, PetroWiki, or Wikipedia.

  1. Read it — find a page or category that interests you, and start exploring the content
  2. Edit it — nothing tricky, but if you find a typo or other small error, hit Edit and fix it (you can do this without logging in on Wikipedia, but most other wikis require you to make an account first. This isn't usually a deliberate effort to put you off — allowing anonymous editing results in an amazing amount robot spam. Yes, robot spam.)
  3. Share it — like most of the web, wikis need to be shared to survive. When you find something useful, share it.
  4. Add a profile — if you're an SEG member, you already have an account on SEG Wiki. Why not add some info about yourself? Go log in to SEG.org then click this link. Here's mine. 
  5. Add a sandbox — Edit your user page, add this: [[/Sandbox/]], then save your page. You'll see a red link. Click on it. Try some editing — you can do anything you like here. Again, here's mine — click Edit and copy my code. 
  6. Fix equations — most of the equations in the SEG Encyclopedic Dictionary are poorly formatted. If you know LaTeX, you can help fix them. Here's one that's been fixed. Here's a bad one (if it looks OK, someone beat you to it :)
  7. Add references — Just like technical papers, wikis need citations and references if they are to be useful and trusted. Most articles in SEG Wiki have citations, but the references are on another page. Here's one I've fixed. 
  8. Add a figure — Again, the figures are mostly divorced from their articles. The Q article shows one way to integrate them. Some articles have lots of figures. 
  9. Improve a definition — Many of the Dictionary definitions are out of date or unhelpfully terse. Long articles probably belong in the 'main' namespace (that is, not the Dictionary part) — so for example I split Spectral decomposition into a main article, apart from the short dictionary definition.
  10. Add an article — This may seem like a big step, but don't be shy. Be bold! We can worry later if the new article needs to be split or combined or renamed or reformatted. The point is to start.

Wiki markup takes a little getting used to, but you can get a very long way with a little know-how. This wiki markup cheatsheet will give you a head start.

One place you can start

SEG Annual MeetingAt the SEG Annual Meeting next week, I'll be hanging about the Press Room from 11 am till 1 pm every day, with John Stockwell, Karl Schleicher and some other wiki enthusiasts. We'd be happy to answer any questions or help you get started.

Bring your laptop! Spread the word! Bring a friend! See you there!

Make some geophysics!

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Last month we announced the Geophysics Hackathon. It's one month away today, so I thought I'd post a quick update with the latest developments.

First: good news. The event will be completely free to attend.

Second, I wanted to clear something up. The hackathon is not about hacking, as in gaining illicit access to other people's computers. That would be bad. Today, 'hacking' has reverted to its original MIT meaning, and tends to mean rapid prototyping and tool creation — playing! — with software, with hardware, or with life in general. 

START Houston

We'll be camped out at START Houston, a progressive co-working and incubation space in the East Downtown area of Houston. This is exciting because START is plugged right in to the most innovative, fast-moving, energetic people in Houston. Some of them even work in the energy business! 

What you can hack

You can come to the hackathon and do anything you like — closed or open source, on your own or in a team, web or mobile or desktop or mainframe. But we are holding a contest, for those that are interested. The contest has some rules. But the first rule of the day is, you don't have to enter the contest. If you prefer, just come and learn something new — I will be there to get you started. Stuck for ideas? There are loads on the wiki page.

Prizes

I'm rather excited about the prizes. I don't want to let the cat completely out of the bag, but we have some Nexus 7 tablets to give away, some Raspberry Pi kits, lots of must-read books, and several years' worth of access to MyBalsamiq — a cloud-based user-interface design tool.

Huge thanks to Enthought and Balsamiq for helping to make all this awesome happen.

Join us! Sign up...

As of right now, there are 16 people coming to the two days. Can you help us get to 25? Send this post to someone you know would be into it... and come along yourself. If you know geophysics or seismic interpretation, or you have a good head for business, or you like math and stats, or you know how to code — you'll fit right in. See you there!