Follow the SEG conference

The eighty-first annual meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) will be held in San Antonio next week. The technical session will hold over 600 oral poster presentations, and the exposition hall will be hosted by more than 350 companies, government agencies, research and educational institutions. More than 8000 people from 85 countries will attend.

Whether you are roaming on-site, or stuck in your office, find out what people are saying, what's happening, and get involved in the conversation. You can follow live updates throughout the week by coming back to this post or searching for the hashtag #SEG11 using Twitter's search.

If you are going to the conference, consider sharing your ideas and engaging with this community. Or tell us what you think by leaving a comment.

Click here for all the posts about SEG 2011

This business of cards

At Recovery 2011, I enjoyed observing the idiosyncratic and almost compulsive act of eyes wandering from eyes, zeroing in on nametags, and the customary exchange of business cards. It is the default behavior when we are bombarded with too many strangers, all of whom deserve and desire our attention. To lessen the chore of post-processing all of these interactions, I think I will give Google Goggles a go to turn this pile of paper into digital contacts.

This got me wondering about the tools we have for making deeper connections. New digital business cards are more than geeky toys. Through cardcloud, card exchanges are paperless, and with added benefits of storing the geographic location of the encounter, and implanting social networking usernames and links right onto your cards. If you like to jot down notes on the back of paper cards, here too, you can flip them over and type your text in; "hire this guy", "he owes me a lunch next time". Not only does it stitch to all your electronic devices, but I think the virtual business card space can a be more inviting calling card for your profession.

Business cards may not be going paperless just yet, but there are many ways of bringing the digital world to these tangible bits of stationery. QR codes and RFIDs, are linking technologies so that business cards can carry digital content. Online profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, and About.me add depth, but how about functional or personalized business cards to really stand out?   

Have you changed the scope of your business card to align with the way you work?

Scale

One of the most persistent themes in geoscience is scale. Some properties of the earth are scale independent, or fractal; the shapes of rivers and coastlines, sediment grain shapes, and fracture size distributions might fall into this category. Other properties are scale dependent, such as statistical variance, seismic velocities (which are wavelength dependent), or stratigraphic stacking patterns.

Scale independent phenomena are common in nature, and in some human inventions. For example, Randall Munroe's brilliant comic today illustrating the solutions to tic-tac-toe (or noughts-and-crosses, as I'd call it). It's the optimal subset of the complete solution space, which shows its fractal nature completely.

The network of co-authorship relationships in SEG's journal Geophysics is also scale-free (most connected authors shown in red). From my 2010 paper in The Leading Edge.