Back to school

/

My children go back to school this week. One daughter is going into Grade 4, another is starting kindergarten, and my son is starting pre-school at the local Steiner school. Exciting times.

I go all misty-eyed at this time of year. I absolutely loved school. Mostly the learning part. I realize now there are lots of things I was never taught (anything to do with computers, anything to do with innovation or entrepreneurship, anything to do with blogging), but what we did cover, I loved. I'm not even sure it's learning I like so much — my retention of facts and even concepts is actually quite bad — it's the process of studying.

Lifelong learning

Naturally, the idea of studying now, as a grown-up and professional, appeals to me. But I stopped tracking courses I've taken years ago, and actually now have stopped doing them, because most of them are not very good. I've found many successful (that is, long running) industry courses to be disappointingly bad — long-running course often seems to mean getting a tired instructor and dated materials for your $500 per day. (Sure, you said the course was good when you sis the assessment, but what did you think a week later? A month, a year later? If you even remember it.) I imagine it's all part of the 'grumpy old man' phase I seem to have reached when I hit 40.

But I am grumpy no longer! Because awesome courses are back...

So many courses

Last year Evan and I took three high quality, and completely free, massive online open courses, or MOOCs:

There aren't a lot of courses out there for earth scientists yet. If you're looking for something specific, RedHoop is a good way to scan everything at once.

The future

These are the gold rush days, the exciting claim-staking pioneer days, of massive online open courses. Some trends:

There are new and profound opportunities here for everyone from high school students to postgraduates, and from young professionals to new retirees. Whether you're into teaching, or learning, or both, I recommend trying a MOOC or two, and asking yourself what the future of education and training looks like in your world.

The questions is, what will you try first? Is there a dream course you're looking for?

Six books about seismic interpretation

/

Last autumn Brian Romans asked about books on seismic interpretation. It made me realize two things: (1) there are loads of them out there, and (2) I hadn't read any of them. (I don't know what sort of light this confession casts on me as a seismic interpreter, but let's put that to one side for now.)

Here are the books I know about, in no particular order. Have I missed any? Let us know in the comments!

Introduction to Seismic Interpretation

AAPG
Amazon.com
Google Books

Bruce Hart, 2011, AAPG Discovery Series 16. Tulsa, USA: AAPG. List price USD 42.

This 'book' is a CD-based e-book, aimed at the new interpreter. Bruce is an interpreter geologist, so there's plenty of seismic stratigraphy.

A Petroleum Geologist's Guide to Seismic Reflection

William Ashcroft, 2011. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. List price USD 90.

I really, really like this book. It covers all the important topics and is not afraid to get quantitative — and it comes with a CD containing data and software to play with. 

Interpretation of Three-Dimensional Seismic Data

Alistair Brown, AAPG Memoir. Tulsa, USA: AAPG. List price USD 115.

This book is big! Many people think of it as 'the' book on interpretation. The images are rather dated—the first edition was in 1986—but the advice is solid.

First Steps in Seismic Interpretation

SEG
Amazon.com
Google Books

Donald Herron, SEG. Tulsa, USA: SEG. List price USD 62.

This new book is tremendous, if a little pricey for its size. Don is a thoroughly geophysical interpreter with deep practical experience. A must-read for sub-salt pickers!

3D Seismic Interpretation

Bacon, Simm and Redshaw, 2003. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge. List price USD 80.

A nicely produced and comprehensive treatment with plenty of quantitative meat. Multi-author volumes seem a good idea for such a broad topic.

Elements of 3D Seismology

Chris Liner, 2004. Tulsa, USA: PennWell Publishing. List price USD 129.

Chris Liner's book and CD are not about seismic interpretation, but would make a good companion to any of the more geologically inclined books here. Fairly hardcore.

The rest and the next

Out-of-print and old books, or ones that are less particularly about seismic interpretation:

An exciting new addition will be the forthcoming book from Wiley by Duncan Irving, Richard Davies, Mads Huuse, Chris Jackson, Simon Stewart and Ralph Daber — Seismic Interpretation: A Practical Approach. Look out for that one in 2014.

Watch out for our book reviews on all these books in the coming weeks and months.

Dream geoscience courses

/

MOOCs mean it's never been easier to learn something new.This is an appeal for opinions. Please share your experiences and points of view in the comments.

Are you planning to take any technical courses this year? Are you satisfied with the range of courses offered by your company, or the technical societies, or the commercial training houses (PetroSkills, Nautilus, and so on)? And how do you choose which ones to take — do you just pick what you fancy, seek recommendations, or simply aim for field classes at low latitudes?

At the end of 2012, several geobloggers wrote about courses they'd like to take. Some of them sounded excellent to me too... which of these would you take a week off work for?

Here's my own list, complete with instructors. It includes some of the same themes...

  • Programming for geoscientists (learn to program!) — Eric Jones
  • Solving hard problems about the earth — hm, that's a tough one... Bill Goodway?
  • Communicating rocks online — Brian Romans or Maitri Erwin
  • Data-driven graphics in geoscience — the figure editor at Nature Geoscience
  • Mathematics clinic for geoscientists — Brian Russell
  • Becoming a GIS ninja — er, a GIS ninja
  • Working for yourself — needs multiple points of view
What do you think? What's your dream course? Who would teach it?

First class in India

/

I wrote this post yesterday morning, sitting in the Indira Ghandi International Airport in Delhi, India.

Where am I?

I'm in India. Some quick facts:

I met some of these recent graduates last week, in an experimental corporate training course. Cairn India has been running a presentation skills course for several years, provided by a local trainer called Yadhav Mehra. Yadhav is a demure, soft-spoken man, right up until he stands up in front of his students. Then he becomes a versatile actor and spontaneous stand-up, swerving with the confidence of a Delhi cab driver between poignant personal stories and hilarious what-not-to-do impressions. I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of courses before, but Yadhav really made me see ‘training’ as a profession in itself, with skills and standards of its own. I am grateful for that.

How did I end up here?

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Last fall, Susan Eaton—whom I’d met in the pub after teaching for the first time—wrote a nice piece about my then-new writing course. One of my long-lost PhD supervisors, Stuart Burley, read this article in his office at Cairn India in Delhi, and it triggered a thought. He had Yadhav, a pro trainer, helping his super-bright geoscience and engineering grads with their presentation skills, but they also needed coaching in writing. 

Their education provides them with...

the traditional written communication vernacular employed in the physical sciences, in which exposition is lengthily embellished with extraneous verbiage, and the passivum, or passive voice in its not uncommon appellation, is unfailingly and rigorously exercised.

You get my point. Stuart’s thought was: let’s do combine the two courses!

What happened?

The great thing about Stuart is that, along with breadth of experience and penetrating geological insight, he’s practical—he gets stuff done. (Like almost everything else in my dim-witted student days, I didn’t appreciate how valuable this was at the time.) So the three of us planned a 3-day course that combined my day's worth of writing coaching with Yadhav's two-day presentation course. Yadhav brought some didactic rigour, and I brought some technical depth. Like all collectable first edition, it had some rough edges, but it went beautifully. Students wrote an extended abstract for a conference paper on Tuesday, then presented their paper on Thursday—they made a great effort, and all did brilliantly.

I hope we run the course again—I'd love to see it reach its full potential. 

In the meantime, if you're interested in exploring ways to get more people in your organization writing a little better, or a little more often, do get in touch! You can find out more here. 

Reuse and recycle

/

I have recently started teaching an undergraduate course at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The regular professor is on sabbatical, so this is a part-time gig, and a one-off. It's hard work, and shockingly poorly paid, but a lot of fun; I'm fortunate to have a fairly small group of bright, motivated students. 

One of the things that's surprised me is how little decent-quality and openly-licensed material there is on the internet for teaching technical courses like this. I can find images as well as the next person, and 'fair use' is acceptable for teaching I suppose, but often I'm left with a low-resolution image that doesn't quite show what I want. Thus I'm creating a lot of stuff from scratch, which is fine because I enjoy it, but it's time-consuming and, besides, I may never teach this course again.

So... I am uploading the drawings I make to SubSurfWiki.org, where you can find and download them, and use or abuse them for whatever you like without permission (they are all licensed CC-BY so you only have to give attribution). They are in Scalable Vector Graphics format, so you can edit them with a vector graphics tool like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. 

Note: There are some issues with displaying SVG files in some browsers. They sometimes look weird or even broken. You should be able to download the files and use them in a vector graphics tool without any trouble. The only other option is to use the Portable Network Graphics files instead, as I often upload those too; look for the same name, with a PNG extension. 

Learn to program

/

This is my contribution to the Accretionary Wedge geoblogfest, number 38: Back to School. You can read all about it, and see the full list of entries, over at Highly Allochthonous. To paraphrase Anne's call to words:

What do you think students should know? What should universities be doing better? What needs do you see for the rising generation of geoscientists? What skills and concepts are essential? How important are things like communication and quantitative skills versus specific knowledge about rocks/water/maps?

Learn to program

The first of doubtless many moments of envy of my kids' experience of childhood came about two years ago when my eldest daughter came home from school and said she'd been programming robots. Programming robots. In kindergarten. 

For the first time in my life, I wished I was five. 

Most people I meet and work with do not know how to make a computer do what they want. Instead, they are at the mercy of the world's programmers and—worse—their IT departments. The accident of the operating system you run, the preferences of those that came before you, and the size of your budget should not determine the analyses and visualizations you can perform on your data. When you read a paper about some interesting new method, imagine being able to pick up a keyboard and just try it, right now... or at least in an hour or two. This is how programmers think: when it comes to computers at least, their world is full of possibility, not bound by software's edges or hardwired defaults.

Stripped down cameraI want to be plain about this though: I am not suggesting that all scientists should become programmers, hacking out code, testing, debugging, and doing no science. But I am suggesting that all scientists should know how computer programs work, why they work, and how to tinker. Tinkering is an underrated skill. If you can tinker, you can play, you can model, you can prototype and, best of all, you can break things. Breaking things means learning, rebuilding, knowing, and creating. Yes: breaking things is creative.

But there's another advantage to learning to program a computer. Programming is a special kind of problem-solving, and rewards thought and ingenuity with the satisfaction of immediate and tangible results. Getting it right, even just slightly, is profoundly elating. To get these rewards more often, you break problems down, reducing them to soluble fragments. As you get into it, you appreciate the aesthetics of code creation: like equations, computer algorithms can be beautiful.

App Inventor blocks editorThe good news for me and other non-programmers is that it's never been faster or simpler to give programming a try. There are even some amazing tools to teach children and other novices the concepts of algorithms and procedures; MIT's Scratch project is a leader in that field. Some teaching tools, like the Lego MINDSTORMS robotics systems my daughter uses, and App Inventor for Android (right), are even capable of building robust, semi-scientific applications. 

Chances are good that you don't even need to install anything to get started. If you have a Mac or a Linux machine then you already have instant access to scripting-cum-programming languages like the shell, AWK, Perl and Python. There's even a multi-language interpreter online at codepad.org. These languages are very good places to start: you can solve simple problems with them very quickly and, once you've absorbed the basics, you'll use them every day. Start on AWK now and you'll be done by lunchtime tomorrow. 

For what's it's worth, here are a few tips I'd give anyone learning to program:

  • Don't do anything until you have a specific, not-too-hard problem to solve with a computer
  • If you can't think of anything, the awesome Project Euler has hundreds of problems to solve
  • Choose a high-level language like Python, Perl, or perhaps even Java; stay away from FORTRAN and C
  • Buy no more than one single book, preferably a thick one with a friendly title from O'Reilly
  • Don't do a course before you've tinkered on your own for a bit, but don't wait too long either (here's one)
  • Learn to really use Google: it's the fastest way to figure out what you want to do
  • Have fun brushing up on your math, especially trig, time series analysis, and inverse theory
  • Share what you build: help others learn and get more open

Bust out of the shackles of other people's software: learn to program!