Touring vs tunnel vision

My experience with software started, and still largely sits, at the user end. More often than not, interacting with another's design. One thing I have learned from the user experience is that truly great interfaces are engineered to stay out of the way. The interface is only a skin atop the real work that software does underneath — taking inputs, applying operations, producing outputs. I'd say most users of computers don't know how to compute without an interface. I'm trying to break free from that camp. 

In The dangers of default disdain, I wrote about the power and control that the technology designer has over his users. A kind of tunnel is imposed that restricts the choices for interacting with data. And for me, maybe for you as well, the tunnel has been a welcome structure, directing my focus towards that distant point; the narrow aperture invokes at least some forward motion. I've unknowingly embraced the tunnel vision as a means of interacting without substantial choices, without risk, without wavering digressions. I think it's fair to say that without this tunnel, most travellers would find themselves stuck, incapacitated by the hard graft of touring over or around the mountain.

Tour guides instead of tunnels

But there is nothing to do inside the tunnel, no scenery to observe, just a black void between input and output. For some tasks, taking the tunnel is the only obvious and economic choice — all you want is to get stuff done. But choosing the tunnel means you will be missing things along the way. It's a trade off.

For getting from A to B, there are engineers to build tunnels, there are travellers to travel the tunnels, and there is a third kind of person altogether: tour guides take the scenic route. Building your own tunnel is a grand task, only worthwhile if you can find enough passengers to use it. The scenic route isn't just a casual lackadaisical approach. It's necessary for understanding the landscape; by taking it the traveler becomes connected with the territory. The challenge for software and technology companies is to expose people to the richness of their environment while moving them through at an acceptable pace. Is it possible to have a tunnel with windows?

Oil and gas operating companies are good at purchasing the tunnel access pass, but are not very good at building a robust set of tools to navigate the landscape of their data environment. After all, that is the thing that we travellers need to be in constant contact with. Touring or tunneling? The two approaches may or may not arrive at the same destination and they have different costs along the way, making it different business.

On being the world's smallest technical publishing company

Four months ago we launched our first book, 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics. This little book contains 52 short essays by 37 amazing geoscientists. And me and Evan. 

Since it launched, we've been having fun hearing from people who have enjoyed it:

Yesterday's mail brought me an envelope from Stavanger — Matteo Niccoli sent me a copy of 52 Things. In doing so he beat me to the punch as I've been meaning to purchase a copy for some time. It's a good thing I didn't buy one — I'd like to buy a dozen. [a Calgary geoscientist]

A really valuable collection of advice from the elite in Geophysics to help you on your way to becoming a better more competent Geophysicist. [a review on Amazon.co.uk]

We are interested in ordering 50 to 100 copies of the book 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics [from an E&P company. They later ordered 100.]

The economics

We thought some people might be interested in the economics of self-publishing. If you want to know more, please ask in the comments — we're happy to share our experiences. 

We didn't approach a publisher with our book. We knew we wanted to bootstrap and learn — the Agile way. Before going with Amazon's CreateSpace platform, we considered Lightning Source (another print-on-demand provider), and an ordinary 'web press' printer in China. The advantages of CreateSpace are Amazon's obvious global reach, and not having to carry any inventory. The advantages of a web press are the low printing cost per book and the range of options — recycled paper, matte finish, gatefold cover, and so on.

So, what does a book cost?

• You could publish a book this way for $0. But, unless you're an editor and designer, you might be a bit disappointed with your results. We spent about $4000 making the book: interior design about $2000, cover design was about $650, indexing about $450. We lease the publishing software (Adobe InDesign) for about $35 per month.
• Each book costs $2.43 to manufacture. Books are printed just in time — Amazon's machines must be truly amazing. I'd love to see them in action. 
• The cover price is $19 at Amazon.com, about €15 at Amazon's European stores, and £12 at Amazon.co.uk. Amazon are free to offer whatever discounts they like, at their expense (currently 10% at Amazon.com). And of course you can get free shipping. Amazon charges a 40% fee, so after we pay for the manufacturing, we're left with about $8 per book. 
• We also sell through our own estore, at $19. This is just a slightly customizable Amazon page. This channel is good for us because Amazon only charges 20% of the sale price as their fee. So we make about $12 per book this way. We can give discounts here too — for large orders, and for the authors.
• Amazon also sells the book through a so-called expanded distribution channel, which puts the book on other websites and even into bookstores (highly unlikely in our case). Unfortunately, it doesn't give us access to universities and libraries. Amazon's take is 60% through this channel.
• We sell a Kindle edition for $9. This is a bargain, by the way—making an attractive and functional ebook was not easy. The images and equations look terrible, ebook typography is poor, and it just feels less like a book, so we felt $9 was about right. The physical book is much nicer. Kindle royalties are complicated, but we make about $5 per sale. 

By the numbers

It doesn't pay to fixate on metrics—most of the things we care about are impossible to measure. But we're quantitative people, and numbers are hard to resist. To recoup our costs, not counting the time we lovingly invested, we need to sell 632 books. (Coincidentally, this is about how many people visit agilegeoscience.com every week.) As of right now, there are 476 books out there 'in the wild', 271 of which were sold for actual money. That's a good audience of people — picture them, sitting there, reading about geophysics, just for the love of it.

The bottom line

My wife Kara is an experienced non-fiction publisher. She's worked all over the world in editorial and production. So we knew what we were getting into, more or less. The print-on-demand stuff was new to her, and the retail side of things. We already knew we suck at marketing. But the point is, we knew we weren't in this for the money, and it's about relevant and interesting books, not marketing.

And now we know what we're doing. Sorta. We're in the process of collecting 52 Things about geology, and are planning others. So we're in this for one or two more whatever happens, and we hope we get to do many more.

We can't say this often enough: Thank You to our wonderful authors. And Thank You to everyone who has put down some hard-earned cash for a copy. You are awesome. 

The Agile toolbox

Some new businesses go out and raise millions in capital before they do anything else. Not us — we only do what we can afford. Money makes you lazy. It's technical consulting on a shoestring!

If you're on a budget, open source is your best friend. More than this, it's important an open toolbox is less dependent on hardware and less tied to workflows. Better yet, avoiding large technology investments helps us avoid vendor lock-in, and the resulting data lock-in, keeping us more agile. And there are two more important things about open source: 

• You know exactly what the software does, because you can read the source code
• You can change what the software does, becase you can change the source code

Anyone who has waited 18 months for a software vendor to fix a bug or add a feature, then 18 more months for their organization to upgrade the software, knows why these are good things.

So what do we use?

In the light of all this, people often ask us what software we use to get our work done.

Hardware  Matt is usually on a dual-screen Apple iMac running OS X 10.6, while Evan is on a Samsung Q laptop (with a sweet solid-state drive) running Windows. Our plan, insofar as we have a plan, is to move to Mac Pro as soon as the new ones come out in the next month or two. Pure Linux is tempting, but Macs are just so... nice.

Geoscience interpretation  dGB OpendTect, GeoCraft, Quantum GIS (above). The main thing we lack is a log visualization and interpretation tool. Beyond this, we don't use them much yet but Madagascar and GMT are plugged right into OpendTect. For getting started on stratigraphic charts, we use TimeScale Creator. 

A quick aside, for context: when I sold Landmark's GeoProbe seismic interpretation tool, back in 2003 or so, the list price was USD140 000 per user, choke, plus USD25k per year in maintenance. GeoProbe is very powerful now (and I have no idea what it costs), but OpendTect is a much better tool that that early edition was. And it's free (as in speech, and as in beer).

Geekery, data mining, analysis  Our core tools for data mining are Excel, Spotfire Silver (an amazing but proprietary tool), MATLAB and/or GNU Octave, random Python. We use Gephi for network analysis, FIJI for image analysis, and we have recently discovered VISAT for remote sensing images. All our mobile app development has been in MIT AppInventor so far, but we're playing with the PhoneGap framework in Eclipse too. 

Writing and drawing  Google Docs for words, Inkscape for vector art and composites, GIMP for rasters, iMovie for video, Adobe InDesign for page layout. And yeah, we use Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org too — sometimes it's just easier that way. For managing references, Mendeley is another recent discovery — it is 100% awesome. If you only look at one tool in this post, look at this.

Collaboration  We collaborate with each other and with clients via Skype, Dropbox, Google+ Hangouts, and various other Google tools (for calendars, etc). We also use wikis (especially SubSurfWiki) for asynchronous collaboration and documentation. As for social media, we try to maintain some presence in Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but our main channel is Twitter.

Web  This website is hosted by Squarespace for reliability and reduced maintenance. The MediaWiki instances we maintain (both public and private) are on MediaWiki's open source platform, running on Amazon's Elastic Compute servers for flexibility. An EC2 instance is basically an online Linux box, running Ubuntu and Bitnami's software stack, plus some custom bits and pieces. We are launching another website soon, running WordPress on Amazon EC2. Hover provides our domain names — an awesome Canadian company.

Administrative tools  Every business has some business tools. We use Tick to track our time — it's very useful when working on multiple projects, subscontractors, etc. For accounting we recently found Wave, and it is the best thing ever. If you have a small business, please check it out — after headaches with several other products, it's the best bean-counting tool I've ever used.

If you have a geeky geo-toolbox of your own, we'd love to hear about it. What tools, open or proprietary, couldn't you live without?

Update on Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 10:24 AM by Matt Hall

Just heard about this awesome list by John Stevenson, a postdoc at Edinburgh University, UK. Thanks to Jon Tennant, aka @protohedgehog, for the tip. Don't know how I missed that...

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.

McKelvey's reserves and resources

Vincent McKelvey (right) was chief geologist at the US Geological Survey, and then its director from 1971 until 1977. Rather like Sherman Kent at the CIA, who I wrote about last week, one of his battles was against ambiguity in communication. But rather than worrying about the threat posed by the Soviet Union or North Korea, his concern was the reporting of natural resources in the subsurface of the earth. Today McKelvey's name is associated with a simple device for visualizing levels of uncertainty and risk associated with mineral resources: the McKelvey box.

Here (left) is a modernized version. It helps unravel some oft-heard jargon. The basic idea is that only discovered, commercially-viable deposits get to be called Reserves. Discovered but sub-commercial (with today's technology and pricing) are contingent resources. Potentially producible and viable deposits that we've not yet found are called prospective resources. These are important distinctions, especially if you are a public company or a government.

Over time, this device has been reorganized and subdivided with ever more subtle distinctions and definitions. I was uninspired by the slightly fuzzy graphics in the ongoing multi-part review of reserve reporting in the CSPG Reservoir magazine (Yeo and Derochie, 2011, Reserves and resources series, CSPG Reservoir, starting August 2011). So I decided to draw my own version. To reflect the possiblity that there may yet be undreamt-of plays out there, I added a category for Unimagined resources. One for the dreamers.

You can find the Scalable Vector Graphics file for this figure in SubSurfWiki. If you have ideas about other jargon to add, or ways to represent the uncertainty, please have a go at editing the wiki page, the figure, or drop us a line!