News of the month

Another month flies by, and it's time for our regular news round-up! News tips, anyone?

Knowledge sharing

At the start of the month, SPE launched PetroWiki. The wiki has been seeded with one part of the 7-volume Petroleum Engineering Handbook, a tome that normally costs over $600. They started with Volume 2, Drilling Engineering, which includes lots of hot topics, like fracking (right). Agile was involved in the early design of the wiki, which is being built by Knowledge Reservoir. 

Agile stuff

Our cheatsheets are consistenly some of the most popular things on our site. We love them too, so we've been doing a little gardening — there are new, updated editions of the rock physics and geophysics cheatsheets.

Thank you so much to the readers who've let us know about typos! 

Wavelets

Nothing else really hit the headlines this month — perhaps people are waiting for SEG. Here are some nibbles...

• We just upgraded a machine from Windows to Linux, sadly losing Spotfire in the process. So we're on the lookout for another awesome analytics tool. VISAGE isn't quite what we need, but you might like these nice graphs for oil and gas.
• Last month we missed the newly awarded exploration licenses in the inhospitable Beaufort Sea [link opens a PDF]. Franklin Petroleum of the UK might have been surprised by the fact that they don't seem to have been bidding against anyone, as they picked up all six blocks for little more than the minimum bid.
• It's the SEG Annual Meeting next week... and Matt will be there. Look out for daily updates from the technical sessions and the exhibition floor. There's at least one cool new thing this year: an app!

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. 

Wiki maniacs wanted

Jimmy Wales, saluting the crowd at Wikimania 2012Jimmy Wales (right) believes profoundly in the Wikimedia Foundation's mission:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

If that mission sounds a bit grand, that's because it is. The amazing thing about this crusade, possibly the most altruistic and ambitious goal ever undertaken, is that you can help. The grand mission, should you choose to accept it, belongs to you—and to every other highly privileged, highly educated person you know.

Wikipedia needs you

One of the most surprising things I heard last week at Wikimania was that the number of active editors is falling, down 4000 since 2011 at 85 000. You can help fix it: 

• Create an account to watch pages, change the look and behaviour of Wikipedia, and edit articles without revealing your IP address.
• Next time you see something wrong or incomplete, edit it! Just click Edit.
• Help improve articles on your home town, your hobbies, and your profession.
• Pick a subject you care about (Well logging?) and look for red links, which are articles in need of creation.
• Join a project like WikiProject:Geology to collaborate with other editors.
• The Wikimedia Foundation runs on donations. Donate!
• If you want somewhere to practise, use your Wikipedia Sandbox (requires an account), or poke around on SEGwiki or SubSurfWiki, where you're always welcome.

Imagine a world in which you can contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we have.

Update on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 at 12:03 PM by Matt Hall

I made a handy cheatsheet, in case you're not familiar with the markup language in MediaWiki-based wikis. It looks scary at first, but once you get accustomed to it, it's fast and easy to use. 

Almost anything is possible in wiki markup, but these are the easy things. If there's something else you wish was on there, leave a suggestion in the comments for this post.

Wiki maniacs unite

Last year, we decided to go to at least one non-geoscience conference every year. The idea is to meet other communities, learn about other fields, have some new ideas, and find more ways to be useful. So far, Evan and I have been to symposiums on mathematics, geothermal energy, being more awesome, and science online. Continuing in this vein, I just got home from Wikimania 2012 — the international conference about all things wiki.

Strictly speaking, Wikimania is about the Wikimedia movement, the global effort to "give to every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge". This quest is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization of professional enthusiasts. Their most conspicuous project is Wikipedia, but it's far from being the only one. Have you heard of Wikimedia Commons? Wikisource? Wikibooks? Read all about them.

The conference was unlike anything I've ever been to. Despite attracting over 950 delegates, it felt more like a meeting of colleagues and friends than a conference of professionals and strangers. I've never felt such a strong undertow of common purpose, and quiet, deliberate action. The phrase intentional community was made for this group.

In short, Wikipedia looks even more awesome from the inside than it does from the outside.

If you too are a Wikipedia enthusiast, here are some things I learned:

• The number of active editors has fallen by 4000 since 2011, to 85k
• During the conference, the number of articles in English Wikipedia passed 4 million
• Developers are working hard to make Wikipedia easier to edit, and big changes are coming
• Wikipedia Zero is an important effort to make the site available to everyone
• Developers are working on making Wikipedia available via SMS and other channels
• Wikis—both private and public—are everywhere: schools, museums, libraries, galleries, academia, government, societies, and corporations

Next time, I'll list a few ways you can get more involved.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC-BY-SA by User:Awersowy. 

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

Dips from pics

In collaboration with the Geological Survey of Canada, Pangaea Software have built a very nifty tool, Orion, for computing dip from satellite images and digital elevation models. With these two pieces of data, and some assumptions about scale, it's possible to deduce the dip of strata without getting your boots muddy. Matt heard all about this tool from the GSC collaborator, Paul Budkewitsch, at the 3P Arctic conference in Halifax last week; here's their abstract. 

Ocean bottom investment

CGGVeritas has made a commitment to manufacture 800 new Trilobit four-component deepwater nodes for seismic acquisition, to add to its existing pool. The device has three oriented accelerometers plus a hydrophone in addition to an onboard battery and recording system. This all-in-one design can be deployed on the seabed by most ROVs, making it easy to place near platforms and other infrastructure that towed streamer and cable systems cannot access. 

Arguably the industry leader in cableless systems is FairfieldNodal, who are already deploying more than a thousand nodes. It's great to see a big player like CGGVeritas coming to compete with this potentially transformative technology.

Update for Insight Earth

Colorado-based software company TerraSpark has just announced the release of Insight Earth 1.6, an integrated volume interpretation tool. Enhancements include a more interactive data import and export interface, improved velocity modeling, and upgrades to the automated fault extraction. In a January post, Evan highlighted an article by Stan Hammon of TerraSpark on the computational and psychological factors affecting intellegent design. It's inspired stuff.

Re-introducing SubSurfWiki

AgileWiki is now SubSurfWiki, at subsurfwiki.org. Please change your bookmarks! We felt that it was a little too Agile-centric and want to appear as open web-space for anything subsurface. We want it to grow, deepen and diversify, and above all be useful. So check it out and let us know if you have any feedback on utility, appearance and content.

More news... If you like this, check out previous news posts from Agile*

Orion is a trademark of Pangaea Software. Insight Earth is a trademark of TerraSpark. SubSurfWiki is a trademark of Agile Geoscience. The satellite image is copyright of Google. 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.