The blog post

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People sometimes eye Evan and I with suspicion when they ask about what we do. Even after a whole year of Agile, I admit I am sometimes at a loss for a snappy answer. In a nutshell, I'd say:

We solve geoscience problems for geoscientists. We like fast and useful solutions, not perfect or expensive solutions—we don't believe in perfect or expensive solutions. We love the things you might not have time for: data, technology, and documentation.

Above all, we love to help people. And that's what the blog is for: we want to be useful, mostly relevant, perhaps interesting, occasionally insightful. And we live on the edge of the continent and don't want to fall off, small and forgotten, into the North Atlantic. For us, the blog is a portal to Houston, Calgary, Aberdeen, Perth, and the rest of our world.

Is it worth it? Well, that depends how you measure 'worth it'. I reckon we spend 8 to 16 hours on an average of 3 weekly posts to the blog, so it's a substantial investment for us. A lot of it ends up in the wiki, or in a paper, or elsewhere; it's definitely a good catalyst for thinking, making useful stuff, and starting conversations. I don't think the blog has generated business purely on its own yet, but it has helped keep our profile up, and made us easier to find. 

Who reads it? We don't know for sure, but we have some clues. Our website has been visited almost exactly 30 000 times this year. We currently get about 800 visits a week, from about 550 unique visitors (shown in the chart above). Of those, about 30% are in the US, 20% are in Canada, 9% in the UK, then it's Australia, Germany, India, and Norway. The list contains 136 countries. This last fact alone fills us with joy, even if it's wrong by a factor of two.

How do the readers find us? About 140 people subscribe to our feed by email, which means they get an email alert the morning after we publish a post. Each week, only about 20 people come to us via Google, with search terms like seismic rock physics, agile geophysics, and tight gas vs shale gas. Since we announce new posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (and now Google+ too), we get visitors from those sources too: they send about 24%, 18%, and 6% of our traffic respectively (G+ has too little data). The average visitor looks at 2.2 pages and stays for 3 mins and 2 seconds. But hey, 3 minutes is a long time on the Internet. Right?

If you were looking for some juicy geoscience, not this navel gazing, then check out our recent Greatest Hits, and have an amazing New Year! See you in 2012.

Blog traffic data are summarized from Google Analytics and are for interest only—the data are prone to all sorts of errors and artifacts. What's more, I do not have data for the first 6 weeks or so of traffic. Pinches of salt all round.

I is for integrated trace

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A zero-phase wavelet has peaks and troughs that line up with interfaces, and has side-lobe events not associated with physical boundaries. Because of this, we see that seismic amplitude is only, at best, a proxy for earth's material contrasts (as shown below by the impedance log) and can be difficult to interpret. The largest positive amplitude corresponds to a downward increase in impedance, and the largest negative amplitude corresponds to a downward decrease in impedance.

Now consider the integral of the seismic trace. In the illustration, I have coloured the positive amplitude values blue, and the negative amplitude values red, for each time sample. The integral is literally the sample-by-sample cumulative sum of amplitudes. Notice how the shape of the trace integral now looks similar to the impedance log (far left). The inflections correlate to the bed boundaries; the integration has done a 90 degree phase rotation of the data. The integrated trace looks more like the geologic contrasts. To think of it another way, if the derivative of impedance is reflectivity, then the derivative of the integrated trace is the seismic trace.  

Impedance_Int_tr_Inversion.png

In the final column on the right, the integrated trace has been scaled so that the relative variations approximately match the absolute variations of the actual acoustic impedance log. This curve is merely a squeeze and bulkshift of the integrated trace, to align with the impedance of the background lithology. In practice, scaling seismic measurements to geologically realistic ranges requires the knowledge of rock properties from nearby well logs. The trace on the far right is a rudimentary geology-from-seismic transformation of the data. Although the general shape of the 3-layer model is reconstructed, there are some complications. The first and third layer is too soft, the middle layer is too hard (and wobbly). The appearance of a high impedance doublet is because the seismic is band-limited. 

It is important to note that a trace integral does not yield a seismic estimate of impedance, it is only a proxy. Consider it a starting point for seismic inversion, not a substitute for it. In oil sands, for instance, Matt showed how the integrated trace gives a considerably more robust estimate of impedance for reservoir characterization compared to a more time consuming and expensive seismic inversion process.

Integrated trace is not meant to be the final product in a reservoir characterization workflow, but it is a seismic attribute that you should be working with anytime you are are trying to do inversion. It should be a starting point, a sanity check, because it is fast to run, easy to understand, completely deterministic (no guess work). If it is not available on your standard interpretation software, Geocraft is one place where you can do it.

2011 retrospective

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The year is almost over so we thought we'd highlight some of our favourite and our most popular posts from the year. We've posted something like 150 or so missives to this blog this year — nothing to boast about, but when we look over our work we do feel like we've achieved something. We've made a lot of new friends and acquaintances, which has been the greatest part of it. We've also learnt a lot about geoscience, especially when we've posted things at the edges of our knowledge... luckily we don't mind learning in plain sight! 

Most popular

One of the eye-opening things about running a website is the incredible statistics available from Google Analytics. There's no personal information, of course, but where readers clicked from, what they read, and for how long, where they went next, what browser they use... and that doesn't scratch the surface. After the main page, the most popular stops are: 

After the cheatsheet posts, the most-visited posts are:

Most commented

I have not been very rigorous and filtered our own comments here—we try to respond to every comment. Except the comments about Paul Smith shoes and Breitling watches, which I delete immediately (if you don't have a blog, you are perhaps blissfully unaware of the tedious amount of robo-spam that blogs and wikis attract—lucky for you!). Apart from the Where on (Google) Earth game posts, some of the most commented posts were:

Most favourite

Evan and I have posts we loved to write and share. For what it's worth, here they are:

Evan Matt
Species identification in the rock kingdom Pseudogeophysics
The Rock Physics Workshop series Things not to think
Shattering shale Learn to program

That's it! It's almost the end of a hair-raising year for both Evan and I, and one of the most satisfying parts of it has been meeting and conversing with you, dear reader. Thank you for investing your attention in us now and then.

And have a wonderful Christmas, Newtonmas, or whatever you celebrate round your way. Cheers!

News of the week

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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.

I dare you

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It has taken me almost a week to decompress from the session with Seth Godin I wrote about last week. I haven't been procrastinating, just overwhelmed. The three days were full of Seth's stories; vivid, succinct, entertaining, and persuasive. The aggregate of his ideas hit me hard, in my stomach, like a swinging wrecking ball of change. Though I'm still reeling, I feel inspired to share at least a few points that are sticking. If they seem but partly formed, it's because they are.

We are creatures of inertia

We move and accelerate with linear momentum, which makes it very hard for us to turn. In fact, the more momentum we have, the more difficult it is. There is a revolution going on right now that is changing our economy and changing our lives; the connection revolution. This revolution won't last forever, maybe 15 years, and it will be marked by notions of flipping scarcity and abundance.

Strategy, skills, and caring

Any task worth doing, or innovation to be made, pulls from three sides of a triangle. Seth described that you first need a strategy; a plan, or methodology. Second, you need the skills to execute. Third, and most importantly, you need to care so much about your goal that you are willing to fail at it. A hefty portion of time was spent navigating through our preponderance of fear, and the excuses we use to convince ourselves from caring enough. I'm going to apply more of my skills to the things that deeply interest me, things that I am more likely to care a lot about. Often times, as an industry collective, or as individuals, we are afraid to destroy what is perfect in order to enable what is possible.

Ship-it

The ship-it point is the moment in time when a project is finished and it released it out into the world. Seth offered a persuasive plan that gets serious about shipping. The process of writing down your goals, and documenting your daily progress is not enough. It requires a thoughtful step by step analysis of all the factors that might get in the way. I'm going to work harder next year in going through this process, writing out my expectations by hand, and documenting my progress toward acheiving them. I will ship more in 2012.

Small, remarkable things

The food at meetings and conferences is usually not memorable, but the lunch on the last day was different. He brought in "the best thai food in New York"—one item was a best selling item not even listed on the menu. "Don't throw the plastic bowls away," he shouted to the group over lunch, "I'll be taking them home to wash and return them." Well, I made sure to eat every last morsel in my bowl, not only because it was delicious, but I couldn't stand the thought of Seth having to scrape my bowl clean in his kitchen sink! That was just one of the many small gestures, that were remarkable, and it was heartwarming. 

And another thing that sticks, were the nametags that he printed up. My first name is printed in large bold font, and in parentheses undernearth, I dare you.

Petroleum cheatsheet

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I have just finished teaching one semester of Petroleum Geoscience at Dalhousie University. It's not quite over: I am still marking, marking, marking. The experience was all of the following, mostly simultaneously:

  • scarily exposing
  • surprisngly eye-opening
  • deeply exhausting
  • personally motivating
  • professionally educational
  • ultimately satisying
  • predominantly fun

Lucrative? No, but I did get paid. Regrettable? No, I'm very happy that I did it. I'm not certain I'd do it again... perhaps if it was the very same course, now that I have some material to build on. 

One of the things I made for my students was a cheatsheet. I'd meant to release it into the wild long ago, but I'm pleased to say that today I have tweaked and polished and extended it and it's ready. There will doubtless be updates as our cheatsheet faithful expose my schoolboy errors (please do!), but version 1.0 is here, still warm from the Inkscape oven.

This is the fifth cheatsheet in our collection. If you find a broken link, do let us know, as I have moved them into a new folder today. Enjoy!

Where are you headed?

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Read this book!I am sitting in the Halifax airport waiting to board my plane to New York. I'm going to a different kind of conference, er... course, er... workshop. In fact I don't really know what to call it. Maybe it is a class. A three-day class for getting stuff done, for getting moving.

Myself and 60 other participants will be spending a three-day session with Seth Godin. Seth is an entrepreneur, a best-selling author of 14 books, and a self-proclaimed agent of change. Matt and I are both avid daily readers of his blog, which, judging by its immense popularity, you might be too (to find it you need only type 'seth' into Google). I am surprised by how often his writing and his teaching feels relevant to what Matt and I are trying to do at Agile*. Relevant to professionalism, to spreading ideas, to doing necessary work.

I cannot contain my excitement... and I am a little scared. It's strange meeting someone who I know a bit about, whose words I read every day, but who knows nothing about me. I was told that about 500 people applied to attend this event, but fewer than 70 got the chance to buy a ticket. As sort of a personal manifesto, I decided to share my application here. If nothing else, it is a proclamation of how I have come to see myself, and where I wish to head. Admittedly, Seth probably doesn't care too much about the details of my technical expertise, but I thought he certainly would care about our approach to business, communication, and connecting. This is what I shared with him to get in, so might as well share it here. In his characteristically cut-to-the-chase vein, he asked only two questions:

What do you do? (in 100 words or less)

I am a consultant who does geology, geophysics, and 3D computer modeling for energy companies. I am partnered with another guy and we have formed a renegade start-up, bootstrapping a business venture together. We both work remotely from small towns in Nova Scotia and are experimenting with new media approaches for connecting our industry.

My work is a blend of billable contract work and open knowledge sharing.

We blog about things that interest us in science, geology, and the energy industry. We make science apps for mobile devices for knowledge sharing and spreading ideas. We also curate an all-access wiki for underground science. We are also compiling a book that will be crowd sourced from industry experts.

Where are you headed? (Most important question, what can I help you do?)

Mine is an industry where innovation happens slowly, yet it is one of the most technologically and computationally advanced fields. Change is discouraged by corporate hierarchies getting in the way of progress.

I want to better understand my role in this revolution. I have the freedom and flexibility to implement ideas, and I am building the courage and insight to be positively disruptive.

I am an advocate of openness and sharing, especially when it comes to applied science. I want to explore how deep our market is, because knowledge sharing should be done by scientists, not by IT departments.

We've been hacking away for about 10 months with many projects on the go. Some of them will be revenue generating, some of them will be attention generating, some of them will fail. You can help by giving perspectives, spotting points of resistance with my projects, how to know when I am stretching too thin, and how my work can be even more creative.

Being a technology geek and consultant it is humbling to read the bios of some of the other people starting a movement, actualizing inspiration. I am certainly going to be the only petroleum geophysicist there. Other attendees include a physicist studying organization behaviour at Google, an economist at the US national defence fund, a women's rights social entrepreneur, and one of the founders of Tom's shoes. People, strangers from different businesses and different niche’s coming together to create something. Breathe the same air, share the same joys and fears of a precious opportunity that lay ahead. What a crazy idea. I love it. Exposing what we are good at to the world.

I have no idea what to expect, it is already surreal, and I can hardly wait.

Giftological and giftophysical goodness

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The giving season cometh — are you angling for a lump of coal again? Coal balls — for the geologist who has been extra good this year. How do you measure geological goodness anyway? Number of samples taken maybe, or papers written, talks presented, blog posts posted, students instructed, children impressed with the volcano–earthquake–dinosaur trifecta.

If you're looking for things to light up a geo-nerd you care for, here are some ideas.

Comestibles

  • Single malt whisky comes from Scotland, like water, rocks, and tough folk. What could be more geoloigcal? Don't know where to start? Look out for Bruichladdich ROCKS.
  • The SoCal Beer Company brews a nice-looking Seismic IPA but <cry> I can't find a shipper.
  • There's always chocolate pebbles, or Brighton Rock.

Gadgets

T-shirts

If the geos you know just like to read, keep them quiet with our reading list. If you're still stuck, there are lots more ideas in last year's giftology post — that Triceratops is still for sale!

Rock sweets image from flickr user su-lin and licensed CC-BY-NC-ND. Low-res T-shirt image considered fair use.