News of the month

Like the full moon, our semi-regular news round-up has its second outing this month. News tips?

New software releases

QGIS, our favourite open source desktop GIS too, moves to v1.8 Lisboa. It gains pattern fills, terrain analysis, layer grouping, and lots of other things.

Midland Valley, according to their June newsletter, will put Move 2013 on the Mac, and they're working on iOS and Android versions too. Multi-platform keeps you agile. 

New online tools

The British Geological Survey launched their new borehole viewer for accessing data from the UK's hundreds of shallow holes. Available on mobile platforms too, this is how you do open data, staying relevant and useful to people.

Joanneum Research, whose talk at EAGE I mentioned, is launching their seismic attributes database seismic-attribute.info as a €6000/year consortium, according to an email we got this morning. Agile* won't be joining, we're too in love with Mendeley's platform, but maybe you'd like to — enquire by email.

Moar geoscience jobs

Neftex, a big geoscience consulting and research shop based in Oxford, UK, is growing. Already with over 80 people, they expect to hire another 50 or so. That's a lot of geologists and geophysicists! And Oxford is a lovely part of the world.

Ikon is opening a Canada office in Calgary. Ikon Science Canada Ltd is born! Contact Rob Dudley on rdudley@ikonscience.com for more info.

— Ikon Science America (@IkonAmericas) August 24, 2012

Ikon Science, another UK subsurface consulting and research firm, is opening a Calgary office. We're encouraged to see that they chose to announce this news on Twitter — progressive!

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. Except QGIS, which we definitely do endorse, cuz it's awesome. 

What technology?

This is my first contribution to the Accretionary Wedge geology themed community blog. Charles Carrigan over at Earth-like Planet is hosting this months topic where he posts the question, "how do you perceive technology impacting the work that you do?" My perception of technology has matured, and will likely continue to change, but here are a few ways in which technology works for us at Agile. 

My superpower

I was at a session in December where one of the activities was to come up with one (and only one) defining superpower. A comic-bookification of my identity. What is the thing that defines you? The thing that you are or will be known for? It was an awkward experience for most, a bold introspection to quickly pull out a memorable, but not too cheesy, superpower that fit our life. I contemplated my superhuman intelligence, and freakish strength... too immodest. The right choice was invisibility. That's my superpower. Transparency, WYSIWYG, nakedness, openness. And I realize now that my superpower is, not coincidentally, aligned with Agile's approach to technology. 

For some, technology is the conspicuous interface between us and our work. But conspicuous technology constrains your work, ordains it even. The real challenge is to use technology in a way that makes it invisible. Matt reminds me that how I did it isn't as important as what I did. Making the technology seem invisible means the user must be invisible as well. Ultimately, tools don't matter—they should slip away into the whitespace. Successful technology implementation is camouflaged. 

I is for iterate

Technology is not a source of ideas or insights, such as you'd find in the mind of an experienced explorationist or in a detailed cross-section or map. I'm sure you could draw a better map by hand. Technology is only a vehicle that can deliver the mind's inner constructs; it's not a replacement for vision or wisdom. Language or vocabulary has nothing to do with it. Technology is the enabler of iteration. 

So why don't we iterate more in our scientific work? Because it takes too long? Maybe that's true for a hand-drawn contour map, but technology is reducing the burden of iteration. Because we have never been taught humility? Maybe that stems from the way we learned to learn: homework assignments have exact solutions (and are done only once), and re-writing an exam is unheard of (unless you flunked it the first time around).

What about writing an exam twice to demonstrate mastery? What about reading a book twice, in two different ways? Once passively in your head, and once actively—at a slower pace, taking notes. I believe the more ways you can interact with your media, data, or content, the better work will be done. Students assume that the cost required to iterate outweighs the benefits, but that is no longer the case with digital workflows. Embracing technology's capacity to iterate seemlessly and reliably is what a makes a grand impact in our work.

What do we use?

Agile strives to be open as a matter of principle, so when it comes to software we go for open source by default. Matt wrote recently about the applications and workstations that we use. 

News of the month

A few bits of news about geology, geophysics, and technology in the hydrocarbon and energy realm. Do drop us a line if you hear of something you think we ought to cover.

All your sequence strat

The SEPM, which today calls itself the Society for Sedimentary Geology (not the Society of Economic Palaeontologists and Mineralogists, which is where the name comes from, IIRC), has upgraded its website. It looks pretty great (nudge nudge, AAPG!). The awesome SEPM Strata, a resource for teaching and learning sequence stratigraphy, also got a facelift. 

Hat-tip to Brian Romans for this one.

Giant sand volcano

Helge Løseth of Statoil, whom we wrote about last week in connection with the Source Rocks from Seismic workflow, was recently in the news again. This time he and his exploration team were describing the Pleistocene extrusion of more than 10 km³ of sand onto the sea-floor in the northern North Sea, enough to bury Manhattan in 160 m of sand.

The results are reported in Løseth, H, N Rodrigues, and P Cobbold (2012) and build on earlier work by the same team (Rodrigues et al. 2009). 

Tape? There's still tape??

Yes, there's still tape. This story just caught my eye because I had no idea people were still using tape. It turns out that the next generation of tape, Ultrium LTO-6, will be along in the second half of 2012. The specs are pretty amazing: 8 TB (!) of compressed data, and about 200 MB/s (that's megabytes) transfer rates. The current generation of cartridges, LTO-5, cost about $60 and hold 3 TB — a similar-performing hard drive will set you back more than double that. 

The coolest cluster

Physics enables geophysics in lots of cool ways. CGGVeritas is using a 600 kW Green Revolution Cooling CarnotJet liquid cooling system to refrigerate 24 cluster racks in GRC's largest installation to date. In the video below, you can see an older 100 kW system. The company claims that these systems, in which the 40°C racks sit bathed in non-conductive oil, reduce the cost of cooling a supercomputer by about 90%... pretty amazing.

Awesomer still, this server is using Supermicro's SuperServer GPU-accelerated servers. GPUs, or graphics processing units, have massively parallel architectures (over 1000 cores per server), and can perform some operations much faster than ordinary CPUs, which are engineered to perform 'executive' functions as well as just math.

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. The cartridge image is licensed CC-BY-SA by Wikimedia Commons user andy_hazelbury. The CarnotJet image is from grcooling.com and thought to be fair use.

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

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.