News of the month

News of the week was maybe a little ambitious, so we're going to scale back to a monthly post. The same sort of news — technology with subsurface application. Whatever catches our beady eyes, really. Seen something cool? Tip us off.

First, a quick plug. Matt's writing course is on offer again at the CSPG-CSEG-CWLS GeoConvention in Calgary in May. It's a technical writing course, but it's not really about technical writing—it's about get more people writing more stuff. For fun, for science, for whatever. See the conspicuous ad (right) for more info. 

OK, two quick plugs. Dropbox just updated their web interface. If you're not a Dropbox user already, you are missing out on an amazing file storage and transfer tool. Files are accessible from anywhere, and can be shared with a simple web link. We use it every single day for personal and project stuff. Get an account here or click on the illusion.

The technology is coming

A few weeks ago we posted a video of a new augmented reality monocle. Now, news is growing that Google's mysterious X lab is developing some similar-sounding glasses. The general idea is that they connect to your Android phone for communications services, and sit on your face labeling things in the real world, in real time. Labeling with ads, presumably.

As the new iPad now totes a screen with more pixels than the monitor you’re looking at, it’s clear that mobile devices are changing everything there is to change about computing. 

Another SGI ICE, NASA's Pleiades is one of the top ten clusters in the world at 1.4 Pflops. It has a staggering 191TB of memory. Image: NASA.

Not a total flop

Remember SGI? You know, giant blue refrigeratory thing with 12GB of RAM in the back of the viz room, cost about $1M? Completely wiped out by the Linux PC about 10 years ago? Well, not completely: SGI just sold to  Total E&P a giant computer. Much bigger than a refrigerator, and much more expensive than $1M. At 2.3 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) this new ICE X machine will be easily one of the most powerful computers in the world.

If the press release is anything to go by, and it probably isn't, Total seems to have reservoir modeling in mind, not just seismic processing. I wonder if they have a mixing board yet? 

Nova Scotia deepwater on fire

Not literally, but there's a small new flame at any rate. Shell Canada went large in January's bid round on four deepwater blocks off Nova Scotia, committing to almost $1B in exploration expenditures over the next five years. They won parcels 1 to 4 for $1.8M, $303M, $235M, $430M respectively, totalling $970M. This is terrific news for Nova Scotia, and for Canada.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. SGI and ICE X are registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. The psychobox illusion is a trademark of Dropbox.com. Offshore Nova Scotia map modified from CNSOPB.

News of the week

Our regularly irregular news column returns! If you come across geoscience–tech tidbits, please drop us a line. 

A new wiki for geophysics

If you know Agile*, you know we like wikis, so this is big news. Very quietly, the SEG recently launched a new wiki, seeded with thousands of pages of content from Bob Sheriff's famous Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Geophysics. So far, it is not publicly editable, but the society is seeking contributors and editors, so if you're keen, get involved. 

On the subject of wikis, others are on the horizon: SPE and AAPG also have plans. Indeed members of SEG and AAPG were invited to take a survey on 'joint activities' this week. There's a clear opportunity for unity here — which was the original reason for starting our own subsurfwiki.org. The good news is that these systems are fully compatible, so whatever we build separately today can easily be integrated tomorrow. 

The DISC is coming

The SEG's Distinguished Instructor Short Course is in its 15th year and kicks off in 10 days in Brisbane. People rave about these courses, though I admit I felt like I'd been beaten about the head with the wave equation for seven hours after one of them (see if you can guess which one!). This year, the great Chris Liner (University of Houston prof and ex-editor of Geophysics) goes on the road with Elements of Seismic Dispersion: A somewhat practical guide to frequency-dependent phenomena. I'm desperate to attend, as frequency is one of my favourite subjects. You can view the latest schedule on Chris's awesome blog about geophysics, which you should bookmark immediately.

Broadband bionic eyes

Finally, a quirky story about human perception and bandwidth, both subjects close to Agile's core. Ex-US Air Force officer Alek Komar, suffering from a particularly deleterious cataract, had a $23k operation to replace the lens in one eye with a synthetic lens. One side-effect, apart from greater acuity of vision: he can now see into the ultraviolet.

If only it was that easy to get more high frequencies out of seismic data; the near-surface 'cataract' is not as easily excised.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. 

News of the week

Some news from the last fortnight or so. Things seem to be getting going again after the winter break. If you see anything you think our readers would be interested in, please get in touch. 

Shale education

Penn State University have put together an interactive infographic on the Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania. My first impression was that it was pro-industry. On reflection, I think it's quite objective, if idealized. As an industry, we need to get away from claims like "fracking fluid is 99% water" and "shale gas developments cover only 0.05% of the state". They may be true, but they don't give the whole story. Attractive, solid websites like this can be part of fixing this.

New technology

This week all the technlogy news has come from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's mostly about tablets this year, it seems. Seems reasonable—we have been seeing them everywhere recently, even in the workplace. Indeed, the rumour is that Schlumberger is buying lots of iPads for field staff.

So what's new in tech? Well, one company has conjured up a 10-finger multi-touch display, bringing the famous Minority Report dream a step closer. I want one of these augmented reality monocles. Maybe we will no longer have to choose between paper and digital!

Geophysical magic?

A tiny press story piqued our interest. Who can resist the lure of Quantum Resonance Interferometry? Well, apparently some people can, because ViaLogy has yet to turn a profit, but we were intrigued. What is QRI? ViaLogy's website is not the most enlightening source of information—they really need some pictures!—but they seem to be inferring signal from subtle changes in noise. In our opinion, a little more openness might build trust and help their business. 

New things to read

Sometimes we check out the new and forthcoming books in Amazon. Notwithstanding their nonsensical prices, a few caught our eye this week:

Detect and Deter: Can Countries Verify the Nuclear Test Ban? Dahlman, et al, December 2011, Springer, 281 pages, $129. I've been interested in nuclear test monitoring since reading about the seismic insights of Tukey, Bogert, and others at Bell Labs in the 1960s. There's geophysics, nuclear physics and politics in here.

Deepwater Petroleum Exploration & Production: A Nontechnical Guide Leffler, et al, October 2011, Pennwell, 275 pages, $79. This is the second edition of this book by ex-Shell engineer Bill Leffler, aimed at a broad industry audience. There are new chapters on geoscience, according to the blurb.

Petrophysics: Theory and Practice of Measuring Reservoir Rock and Fluid Transport Properties Tiab and Donaldson, November 2011, Gulf Professional Publishing, 971 pages, $180. A five-star book at Amazon, this outrageously priced book is now in its third edition.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Low-res images of book and website considered fair use.

How to keep up with Agile*

I mentioned the other day that there are a few ways to keep up with this blog. I thought I'd list some of them out, in case you have not yet found one you like. 

The easiest thing for many is probably to get the email updates. They go out early in the morning the day after we put up a new post. We do not use your email address for anything else and would certainly never share it. To get these, just enter your email address in the box to the right →

If you already get them, don't worry, nothing has changed.

For many diehard blog readers, the only way is the RSS feed. You can access this from the link in the box on the right too. Just copy the URL of the feed [http://feeds.feedburner.com/agilegeoscience] into an RSS reader, sometimes called an aggregator. There are dozens — here's a list. Lots of people like Google Reader. Some people don't.

Visit our Twitter account to see what it's all about — no account requiredEvery new post is tweeted by the Twitter account @agilegeo. This is more or less all this Twitter account does, at least for now, so it's high signal-to-noise (if you consider our posts and comments signal, that is). These tweets also post to our Facebook page, so you can Like us to see the new posts in your Facebook feed.

We've started playing with Google+, but it's quite different from Facebook and Twitter, so is taking some getting used to. If you use Google+, follow Agile, me or Evan to get a smattering there. And Evan and I usually post about new writing in our LinkedIn profiles too, if you know us personally.

Lastly, there's always the trusty bookmark. Just remember to hit it occasionally. 

Thank you for reading! Seriously. Thank you.

News of the week

The news is back! A few stories have caught our beady geoscientific eyes over the last couple of weeks... If you see anything you think we missed, drop us a line!

Spotfire is free*

*kind of. This is huge. One of the limits on adoption of the amazing Spotfire — the best tools we've ever used for data exploration, and a must-have tool for reservoir engineers — has been cost. But TIBCO is now offering Silver Spotfire, cloud-friendly versions for very reasonable dollars, starting at free! So if you have never tried it, now's your chance. It's very easy: install it, Ctrl-C a data table from MS Excel, and Ctrl-V into Spotfire, and you're away.

World's cheapest Lidar

Most geoscientists are happier holding a pencil than a mouse, so the news of gadgets like tablets coming to subsurface interpretation is always welcome. Though 3D interaction tools like gloves and wands, when they appeared about a decade ago, turned out to be utterly useless, perhaps Microsoft's Kinect can kill the mouse? For example, how about using a sandpit as an input device, like SandyStation?

If you're not sure about that, try this: a glaciologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz used a Kinect as a makeshift Lidar. Though it can only 'see' up to about 5 m, it's extremely fast, accurate, and cheap.

Six years of geo-floss

Geoscientific, free, libre, open source software, or geo-FLOSS, is, like, a 'thing'. The movement continues to grow and blossom at events like the awesome workshop we reported on in June, and the recently announced workshop at the 2012 EAGE Conference and Exhibition next June in Copenhagen. If you work on, use, care about, or are just curious about open source software in exploration geoscience, then we hope to see you there.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Image of Spotfire considered fair use.

News of the week

Newsworthy items of the last fortnight or so. We look for stories in the space between geoscience and technology, but if you come across anything you think we should cover, do tell. 

Newfoundland blocks announced

Back in May we wrote about the offshore licensing round in Newfoundland and Labrador on Canada's Atlantic margin. The result was announced on Wednesday. There was no award on the northern blocks. The two parcels in northwest Newfoundland, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, were awarded to local outfit Ptarmigan Energy for a total work commitment of $2.002 million. The winning bids in the Flemish Pass area were won by a partnership of Statoil (at 50%), Chevron (40%) and Repsol (10%). The bids on these parcels were $202,171,394 and $145,603,270. Such arbitrary-looking numbers suggest that there was some characteristically detailed technical assessment going on at Statoil, or that a game theorist got to engineer the final bid. We'd love to know which. 

CanGeoRef for Canadian literature

CanGeoRef is a new effort to bring Canadian geoscience references in from the cold to the AGI's GeoRef bibliographic database. The Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences is coordinating the addition of literature from the Survey, various provincial and territorial agencies, as well as Canadian universities. Better yet, CanGeoRef has a 30-day free trial offer plus a 15% discount if you subscribe before December. 

In related news, the AGI has updated its famous Glossary of Geology, now in its 5th edition. We love the idea, but don't much like the $100 price tag. 

Tibbr at work

Tibbr is a social media engine for the enterprise, a sort of in-house Facebook. Launched in January by TIBCO, it's noteworthy because of TIBCO's experience; they're the company behind Spotfire among other things. It has some interesting features, like videocalling, voicemail integration and analytics (of course), that should differentiate it from competitors like Yammer. What these tools do for teamwork and integration is yet to be seen. 

The 3D world in 3D

Occasionally you see software you can't wait to get your hands on. When Ron Schott posted this video of some mud-cracks, we immediately started thinking of the possibilities for outcrops, hand specimens, SEM photography,... However, the new 123D Catch software from Autodesk only runs on Windows so Matt hasn't been able to test it yet. On the plus side, it's free, for now at least.

To continue the social media thread, Ron is very interested in its role in geoscience. He's an early adopter of Google+, so if you're interested in how these tools might help you, add him to one of your circles or hangout with him. As for us, we're still finding our way in G+.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these people or organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Unless we say we think they're great.

News of the week

This news feature has settled down into a fortnightly groove. News of the week sounds good, though, so we'll keep the name. Filtered geoscience tech news, every other Friday. Got tips?

Is it hot in here?

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, sponsored a major study at Southern Methodist University into the geothermal potential of the United States, and the results are in. This was interesting to us, because we've just spent a couple of weeks working our first geothermal project. Characterizing hot rocks is a fascinating and fairly new application of seismic technology, so it's been as much research exercise as interpretation project. From the looks of this beautiful map—which you must see in Google Earth—seismic may see wide application in the future. 

And the possibilties in Google Earth, along with Google SketchUp, for presenting geospatial data shouldn't go unnoticed!

CLAS arrives in OpendTect

A log analysis plug-in for dGB Earth Science's open-source integrated interpretation tool OpendTect was announced at EAGE conference earlier this year, and now it's available. The tool was developed by Geoinfo, a small Argentinian geoscience tech shop, in partnership with dGB. So now you can compute all your seismic petrophysics right in OpendTect.

On a sort-of-related note, Bert Bril, one of dGB's founders, just launched his blog, I can't believe it's not SCRUM, about agile software development. He even posts about geophysics. Yay!

Agile* apps

We're still regularly updating our completely free apps for Android. If you have an Android phone or tablet, go ahead and give them a spin. Volume* (right) is on version 3.1 already, and now does gas volumetrics, including B_g computation, and can grab any of the major crude oil benchmark prices for a quick-look value. And AVO* is just about to get a boost in functionality with an LMR plot; watch this space. Don't hold back if you've got requests. 

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these people or organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Unless we say we think they're great.

News of the week

Help us stay on top of the latest and greatest: if you hear about something that might make geophysics even awesomer for all of us, drop us a line! In the meantime, here's some news that caught our attention...

Free software goodness

Innovative Australian software shop DownUnder GeoSolutions, aka DUG, is now offering DUG Insight to students for free! As if one amazing free (as in beer) seismic visualization and interpretation tool wasn't enough—you do have OpendTect, right?—now there's another. Just email them a copy of your student ID, and they'll get you started. 

NEWSFLASH  Hard-up students might also like this: Nature Geoscience for $10 a year! 

S-ray vision

OK, it doesn't sound quite as cool as X-ray vision, but S-band microwaves really can see through walls. Sort of. Boffins at MIT demonstrate their claims in this video... it's not geophysics, but another hard inverse imaging problem.

Petrophysics for Dummies

Occasionally while wandering lost in the interweb you stumble on gold. This is gold. Graham Davies was a geoscientist at Enterprise Oil, the plucky British independent exploration company I did my first internship at. He's been recording petrophysics tutorials, and they're 100% brilliant. "Even if you've never heard of petrophysics before," claims Davis.

What the heck is the geoblogosphere?

Not really a geotechnical story, but some readers might be interested to know more about geoscience blogs. A recent research paper, Geißler et al 2011, is a good place to start. The authors, who include übergeoblogger Callan Bentley of the structural geology blog Mountain Beltway, do a terrific job of exploraing the reasons for blogging, the perceptions of employers and supervisors, and every other angle you can think of. 

NEWSFLASH The 315th Where on (Google) Earth geomorphological puzzle went unsolved for 11 days, but was finally solved this morning. Congratulations to Ron Schott, the next episode is yours to host.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these people or organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. 

News of the week

Some news and views from the world of geoscience this last fortnight.

Open source GIS on a thumb drive

If you ever wanted to get into open source geospatial software but didn't know where to start, check this out. Last month OSGeo, the open source geospatial foundation, released version 5 of their OSGeo-Live project. This is a bootable disk image containing 47 pieces of free software, including several full GIS, world maps, and quick-start guides. Amazing!

Probability and panic

The L'Aquila earthquake of April 2009 killed 308 people. Six seismologists are now on trial for manslaughter, not so much because they failed to predict the quake, but because they allegedly downplayed the risk of a severe event. Most geoscientists believe that we cannot predict earthquakes today; these seismologists are effectively accused of trying to predict a non-earthquake. We don't know, but suspect their intent was misinterpreted—always a danger when specialists communicate with non-specialists. There is no daily coverage of the trial that we are aware of, but there are occasional reports in the press. In this short video, Giustino Parisse explains why he is one of the plaintiffs.

Magical geobloggery

If you're new to blogs—maybe you got a tablet recently and are discovering how easy it is to read the web these days—you might not be aware that there's a lot of geology in the blogosphere. Finding writers you want to read isn't easy though. You could scroll down this page and look for our BLOGROLL for some leads, or head over to Highly Allochthonous and read the latest Accretionary Wedge, a regular meta-post. This month: practical advice for the lifelong learner. 

Communicating rocks

We recently learned of this terrific new book from University of Houston professor Peter Copeland (thanks to his colleague, Rob Stewart, for the tip!). We haven't actually got our hands on it yet, but the Amazon preview has whet our appetites for geo-communication tips galore. The publisher, Prentice Hall, has kept the price to a reasonable amount, close to $35. Get your copy now!

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Public domain map image from the USGS.