Aid Going To Philippines In Haiyan’s Wake, But Not Reaching Those Who Need It [Huffington Post]

A team from Médecins Sans Frontières, complete with medical supplies, arrived in Cebu island Saturday looking for a flight to Tacloban, but hadn’t left by Tuesday. A spokesman for the group said it was “difficult to tell” when it would be able to leave.

“We are in contact with the authorities, but the (Tacloban) airport is only for the Philippines military use,” Lee Pik Kwan said in a telephone interview.

An Associated Press reporter drove through Tacloban for about 7 kilometers (4 miles) and saw more than 40 bodies. There was no evidence of any organized delivery of food, water or medical supplies, though piles of aid have begun to arrive at the airport. Some people lined up to get water from a hose, presumably from the city supply.

(Emphases mine.) You’d think world governments would have some sort of emergency plan and network figured out after the Boxing Day tsunami, Katrina and Tōhoku, but Infrastructure And Preparation (Or Lack Thereof).

The Cliff Mass Weather Blog suggests that resources are deployed on forecast, NOT on disaster. Hey, what a great idea! Why didn’t all the great government powers of the world think of that one before?

Donations:

I’ve become a post-disaster waiter, as in someone who waits for a few weeks until the government-NGO machine sorts itself out following the initial shock and when the dammed-up aid starts flowing. Once those initial funds, food and supplies actually begin to get to survivors more efficiently, that’s when you are doing the most, short of being there. Weeks, months, years later, long after the media has forgotten about Haiyan and the disaster porn fades.

Then again, I know some organizations are doing their damndest right now. My top two are Médecins Sans Frontières (or Doctors Without Borders) and the UN-sponsored World Food Programme (WFP). Please donate to MSF and click on the radio button that says “earmark my donation for the Emergency Response Fund” and/or at WFP’s Typhoon Haiyan page. WFP is big on nutritional efficiency (check out their school meals program that has my forever support), so I believe it when they say that “for every $100 you give, WFP can provide 1,000 packs of [high-energy] biscuits.”

Other than that, missions and personal sources are the way to ensure that money will make it to the intended. You know how I feel about Judeo-Christian charity (“here’s a cot and two hot ones in exchange for your religious and cultural identity”), but a couple of friends have suggested truly Christ-like ones that I will share with you here the moment I have permission. Please talk to your friends and neighbors about a joint donation effort or seek out some vetted charities in your area. Charity Navigator is another good place to look.

Information and mapping efforts:

* Digital Globe needs your help mapping the devastated areas on fresh satellite imagery!

The scale of the storm“s destruction has been massive. In addition to collecting imagery, we need volunteers to help us map the devastation. In support of such efforts, DigitalGlobe has activated a crowdsourcing campaign, open to anyone willing to help … For this campaign, we will be releasing the crowd produced results to the open source community.

* Ushahidi is collecting crowdsourced information from the affected areas. You can follow them on Twitter. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team is on it again, so if you have an OpenStreetMap account, please (make one and) step in and help by adding any information or map data. The GISCorps is helping as well.

What else? You tell me.

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Image: Phillippines Typhoon Haiyan Appeal by CAFOD Photo Library (CC 2.0)

In an attempt to describe the good stuff from this year’s SEG annual meeting, I left out that the unnecessary aspects of vendor marketing continues, as if such schlock makes any difference to those of us who really use the tools. All the way from the outrageous and costly flash on the main exhibits floor with a ratio of 3-4 marketers for every geoscientist to the booth babes (admittedly lots fewer and less egregious compared with previous years and other technology conferences), do we, as in exploration geophysicists and not-uninformed buyers at a trade show, need it? Matt Hall summed up many of my feelings towards these phenomena in his most recent Agile post. You should read the whole thing, but here are my favorite bits:

What a shame ads bring nothing at all to our community. All that money ” so little impact. Well, zero impact.

One innovative company has invented time travel, but unfortunately only to 1975. At least, that’s the easiest way to explain the shoeshine stand at Ovation’s booth.

Let’s be clear: marketing, as practised in this industry, is a waste of money. And this latter kind of marketing ” remarkable for all the wrong reasons ” is an insult to our profession and our purpose.

Are we okay with burning millions of dollars on glossy ads, carpeted booths, nasty coffee, and shoeshine stands? Is this an acceptable price for our attention? Is the signal:noise ratio high enough?

I almost touched on this with my closing remarks on the SEG Women’s Network breakfast: “[We are a] growing group of women and men who understand the importance of removing unnecessary [obstacles and] sexism in our industry as well as supporting and promoting professionals because that is what we are professionals.”

Let’s go there:

Every individual and company in the entire industry wants to “remain relevant” and fears being “left behind.” But, I don’t know what relevance and keeping up mean when the same products are being marketed to and purchased by all of us. Granted, the majors have tons of money and people to research and write their own special plugins for these off-the-shelf products, but in the end, the underlying engines are the same, so how are we being competitive when we’re all standardized to the same tools?

As for marketing products with the aid of the scantily-clad, male and female geoscientists are professionals who can be won over with great new algorithms and excellent services; catering to the lowest common denominator among us may net a company lots of money (and that’s all they care about), but with changing industry demographics, fewer folks are likely to take that company seriously. Look, I hold nothing against scantily-clad women and men, but there is a time and place for that, and it is not a professional industry gathering. And, come on, shoe-shining? My husband says it’s a lot worse in defense-sector trade shows and I have personally seen it get icky at COMDEX and IITSEC, but there is none of it at Strata, OSCON, etc. The latter is Tim O’Reilly‘s direct and respectful influence on his company’s conferences. Therefore, I challenge SEG, its board and incoming president to discourage such practices (a great precedent is past president Klaas Koster who launched and still supports the SEG Women’s Network). In fact, the shoe-shining women from this year were brought to the Women’s Network’s attention and not much was done after we translated the message upward. If the conference organizers don’t care enough to set a respectful tone, I really don’t expect it from vendors.

Being an extrovert who can easily control my level of social involvement as needed, I will continue to attend industry events – to say hello to technology vendors, find out what’s new, easily run into friends from all over the world whom I rarely get to talk to and pick up a book or two – but playing dodgeball* to get from one end of the confusingly-laid-out floor to the other is a huge price to pay for finding out what is Really new.

Ultimately, it’s a result of any industry conference becoming an end in itself. The conference happens because they are paid a lot by vendors to make it happen. But, when it results in the society and science being relegated to the background – where, as Amanda Knowles puts it, “stumbling upon the golden nugget of a good technical talk comes at the expense of sitting through five bad ones” – you really have to reconsider why you’re paying your dues AND your attendance fees AND your travel costs.

Our professional-scientific society has reached a point at which it has to seek identity and true purpose. Who do we want to be as a society? What do we want this conference to say about us? There’s the thousand-megawatt-flashy exhibits floor run by the vendors who want to buy us and private hallway/barroom discussions among the cognoscenti. And then there’s the sad Book Mart in back, the deserted SEG Foundation booth, the press room in godknowswhere on the third floor, a low signal-to-noise ratio in the talks and a couple of nice but heavily-vendor-sponsored parties. Even if most of us work for corporations, our purpose as a society is important and achievable, if we continue to amplify the stuff of lasting value like vetted talks, open discussions, working workshops, hackathons, professional networking, parties when they are free of awkwardness and, especially, the science and people of exploration geophysics, i.e. the society itself.

*Patches O’Houlihan says: “If you can dodge a booth babe, you can dodge a ball!”

Just got an email that asked “What did you miss at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists Annual Meeting?” so you know I had to ask the title of this post. A lot of the great things I saw at this year’s SEG conference happened off the main floor:

1. The first geophysics hackathon: The two-day hackathon held by Agile Geoscience and its outcome are detailed very well by Matt Hall in these posts. What I got out of it was somewhat different from what other participants did. I left programming (Fortran, Visual C++, MFC) behind a decade ago for full-time seismic interpretation, reservoir characterization and technology development. Getting my first flavor of Python in 2003, spending a lot of time with geographers and digital map developers in 2009-10 and, lately, a strong desire for more open, nimble and intelligent geophysical apps have me interested in coding again.

The hackathon introduced me to the mechanics of Scientific Python or SciPy, “open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering,” and very powerful and visual scientific-programming interfaces – Enthought Canopy, Continuum’s Anaconda and iPython Notebook. After playing with some online examples of SciPy and NumPy, I was able to understand the syntax behind and reproduce Zoltan Sylvester’s grain settling code as well as generate some geologic surfaces. Granted, I have a long way to go before quickly translating geophysical formulae from mathematical notation to code and There Will Be Debugging, but it’s a start.

Grain Settling brought to life by NumPy and iPython Notebook

The best part was just being around scientist-programmer hybrids to talk open-source tools and rocks in a creative, comfortable and open co-working space in East Downtown Houston called StartHouston. Every single day, I work with at least a dozen brilliant scientists and engineers on pushing the geologic and geophysical frontier, but all the data is proprietary and analysis performed on bulky, commercial software in offices and meeting rooms, i.e. the physical, technological and intellectual opposite of Open. As Gaël Varoquaux says in this timely post on publishing scientific software, “the public availability of code is a cornerstone of the scientific method, as it is a requirement to reproducing scientific results … like [Galileo’s] telescope, it also builds upon scientific progress and shapes our scientific vision.” Thanks to the Concentric Circles Of Awesomeness known as dGB Earth Sciences, Enthought, and OpenGeoSolutions for sponsoring this weekend of innovation and great food (tacos, banh mi, po boys and mole enchiladas – don’t ever change, EaDo!) and current and former luminaries of the SEG for observing and offering support.

I got to judge the hackathon entries along with Enthought’s Eric Jones, dGB’s Paul de Groot and SEG’s Chris Krohn, Dennis Cooke and Peter Annan. As a developer, expert end user and someone who works in exploration and field appraisal now, I appreciated Team OpenGeo’s app for its quick and easy forward-modeling ease, Team Sweetness’s entry for rapid velocity uncertainty estimation at the drillbit and Team Teapot Dome’s stab at parsing the contents of LAS files, the data-management bane of subsurface professionals all the way from exploration to production. More on these apps in this Agile post. Great job, Matt and Evan! Hope to be a coding team member at the next hackathon.

2. Women’s Network committee meeting and breakfast: You’ve read me on the SEG Women’s Network before. We exist because we are professional women versed in a male-dominated discipline working in an industry with, as our  keynote speaker this year described, “codes, processes and decisions made by men for men.” This year’s breakfast speaker was Sophie Zurquiyah, the Senior Executive Vice President of CGG’s Geology, Geophysics & Reservoir Division, and she gave a very honest and direct talk on how companies can promote gender diversity and individual career management. Beyond the ethical case, there is a business case for caring about the careers of female technical workers: at a time when CGG alone requires 400 functioning geoscience professionals for current and upcoming work (probably projecting across the course of the next decade), the company that grooms competent men and women in successful careers, doesn’t lose them along the way and promotes them to first-line management roles will be that much far ahead.

Sophie Zurquiyah addresses the Women’s Network breakfast

A tip that Zurquiyah reiterated over the course of her talk is one I’ve internalized only in the last few years and cannot emphasize enough now: “Take charge of your own career. State out loud what you want. You don’t get what you don’t ask for.” Just because you are a good geoscientist and do your job well doesn’t mean management is going to discover you in the lineup and shove you and your career to the oilfield Oscars. Women also have a tendency to self-limit, we second-guess ourselves while more junior men are asking their superiors how to be the next team lead, vice-president and CEO. Again, women operate in a very “narrow mudweight window” (Zurquiyah’s geomechanical term for the glass ceiling), the age-old roadblocks of biases and perceptions do still exist and men promote those they understand, i.e. other men, so manage your own career, make yourself understood and work towards that stated goal. She also reminded us that there are many men who aren’t prejudiced and egotistical, so identify such men as enablers and build a network of crucial mentors and contacts. Like with the hackathon, surround yourself with good, like-minded people.

Alex Herger, Marcia McNutt and Sophie Zurquiyah have all stressed to us that partner and family support is critical, whether you are the only breadwinner or half of a dual-career couple. Zurquiyah’s acceptance of senior positions required family flexibility, discussion and support; her husband took different types of jobs or didn’t work, depending on her career at the time, and it is ok for the leading career to alternate. The key is that work at home is shared (or outsourced), and you’re not a bad spouse and mother if you can Manage It. My mother managed the hell out of her career, our family and more back in the 1960s-90s, while fighting Arab, Indian and European gender bias almost everday, so I can’t believe we’re having the same conversation in America in 2013. Yet, when I hear that Exxon is extending benefits to married same-sex couples and that large oil companies are starting to hold their own internal women’s network gatherings at which they talk about executive career paths, work-family balance and alternate work schedules, I feel we have made great strides. As for the SEG Women’s Network committee, I am honored to do my small part alongside Eve Sprunt, Nancy House, Anna Shaughnessy, Louise Pellerin, Manika Prasad and the growing group of women and men who understand the importance of removing unnecessary sexism in our industry as well as supporting and promoting professionals because that is what we are – professionals.

This year, I am running for SEG Women’s Network treasurer, because I am good at it (thanks, Krewe du Vieux!) and feel that the more I give to this particular effort, the more it will give back. So, join the network and vote for me!

3. The SEG Integrated Quantitative Earth Workshop: The bulk of this four-hour event was the presentation of the four best talks from this summer’s Integrated Quantitative Earth Forum held in Boston, but Rocky Detomo put the WORK in workshop this time around by asking the audience to think and write about three questions during the course of each talk:

• What have you seen and suggest as an opportunity for integration?
• What data sets can be opened for analysis and easier access?
• What data standards/formats are hurdles to efficient analysis?

The four “winning” papers were Geologic Controls of AVO Systems in the Niger Delta: Impact on Exploration Evaluation by Shell’s Chris Wojcik, Integrated Stratigraphic Concepts as Functional Templates in Reservoir Models by Exxon’s Matthew Casey, Anisotropic Model Uncertainty Quantification in Seismic Tomography by Schlumberger’s Konstantin Osypov and Structural Interpration in Color by Western Geco’s Andreas Laake.

Chris Wojcik’s paper was most interesting to me. We know by now the value of Direct Hydrocarbon Indicators (DHI) in derisking prospects, but it is the non-unique anomaly presence (as well as the anomaly absence or, as Chris calls it, “the curious incident of the non-barking dog”) that begets the need to really integrate across disciplines, especially with geology, basin modeling and petrophysics, and scales within those disciplines, all the way from thin section through core and logs to seismic. The same rock taken through different pore pressure or burial history gives different results. Different rocks at similar depths and pressure-temperature regimes look the same. A response, or lack thereof, is instructive but not indicative (are you listening, geophysicists?), so it’s important to understand the variability of geological scenarios and appropriately characterize the reservoir.

NURBs, or Non-Uniform Rational B-splines, are making their way from the world of 3d modeling and animation into geomodeling, I see. It makes sense given that NURBs are easily parameterized and lend themselves to functional form modeling of geological bodies (channel complex, channel lobe, shoreface, ramp). There is then no reliance on a geocellular grid and makes static and dynamic models easier to update and less memory-intensive to run. [Exxon paper]

Konstantin Osypov gave a nice but very rapid talk on depth and structural uncertainty representation, and how it may be properly carried through the life cycle of processing and interpretation. While he didn’t say this explicitly, the way we describe and monetize a reservoir is somewhat silly in that we carry one geo-model with some attached statistical perturbation, but it is essentially one model and easy to fall in love with (are you listening, geologists?). What is an “optimistic or pessimistic geo-model” in the face of more scientific, risk-neutral geophysical models with built-in risks and uncertainties onto which you can attach reservoir properties? It’s akin to the horizon and fault clouds Matt Hall and I discussed earlier that week, i.e. a fuzzy collection of interpretations as the model object rather than one flexed surface with attached uncertainties. Reservoir volumetrics calculation and uncertainty estimation have always seemed very chicken-and-eggy to me, and there is definitely lots more to learn.

The IQ Earth initiative now has a forum and workshop as well as the new Interpretation Journal, a joint effort of SEG and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG). What is missing from the “measures of success” is an open data set curated and offered by the SEG. Statoil, as the IQ Earth initiative’s corporate sponsor, was to offer up a North Sea data set, but that was squashed by their lawyers, natch. While searching the internet for free data sets at the hackathon, I came across the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Norne Field Benchmark Project with operational data freely provided for research and public access by Statoil. Granted, it isn’t seismic, well data and static reservoir properties, but if Statoil has released Norne field production data, why not release the rest of it instead of asking SEG to get some?

4. Catching up with friends and making new ones. I finally met fellow 52 Things author Rachel Newrick, albeit very briefly, and purchased her monograph (co-authored with Larry Lines) Fundamentals of Geophysical Interpretation. Yonghe Sun, the editor of the new Interpretation Journal, and I chatted for a long while and he encouraged me to edit a special section on Inversion For Reservoir Characterization if I indeed want to see such a section in the journal.

Next year’s SEG conference is in Denver, but I am probably going to save conference time for the Canadian equivalent (CSEG). Lots of Work Work ahead this week, so hope I can write soon about Newrick’s book, fall (as in “autumn”) rituals (as in “kitsch”) at my house as well as doing and talking science in a proprietary corporate culture. A sneak peek: Competitiveness is impossible when everyone has the same technology, so be careful when you say you want to “standardize.”

The point of a Web Log is that it is a semi-continuous stream of “operational data and … times of routine events and significant incidents.” In other words, the ship is still sailing and things are happening, so say something for pete’s sake. In order to do so, however, one has to have the time and the latitude. One has to make the time and latitude, or you won’t come back here.

It was a hectic summer beginning with the celebration of my father’s birthday and D’s brother’s wedding to a warm and intelligent woman I am thrilled to have in the family. A summer wedding on the bay of Green Bay in Door County, Wisconsin followed by our own fireworks show (at which I wore a genuine article Sweater) is a nice break from the heat, humidity, traffic, traffic, office and traffic of Houston. My old industry sensei Rolf and I attended the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) Integrated Quantitative Earth conference in Boston, where I co-chaired a session on Geostatistics & Uncertainty and got to sit on a panel on talent development and sustenance in the field of exploration geoscience. I think the key points of that conference is that we a) are still trying to define what integration and quantitative mean in exploring the subsurface for hydrocarbons and b) came up with a prioritized list of recommendations for the SEG board, after I voiced the opinion that many of us are tired of attending workshops in which we take a lot of illegal notes (more on this later) and neither, ahem, work nor produce anything to show for a few days’ worth of yammering. Domingo joined me towards the end of the week and we walked and ate our way through Boston, especially the Italian North End and the Freedom Trail. Peter Clemenza was right, “Take the cannoli.” Gods, I love that stuff.

Hello, babies.

If you are ever in Boston, do not leave the city before visiting Isabella Stewart Gardner’s home-of-expensive-art-and-curiosities-turned-museum. I want to be Isabella when I grow up, even if Domingo said it was like walking around your crazy aunt’s house and he should know given he had one. Or two. No pictures allowed in the Gardner, but here is my photo set from the Museum of Fine Arts. Late in the evening, we were two of the last few remaining folks in the museum and I will always remember standing under the Morse-code chandelier in the Modern Art wing, slow dancing to a quiet Louis Armstrong number.

I also uploaded all of the pictures we took during Galacticon 3 here in Houston. Galacticon 4 is coming sooner than expected in Seattle, Washington from July 31st – August 2nd, 2015, and I hear there will be Browncoats in the midst! Gorram!

Somewhere in all of this, artist, force of nature and dear friend Greg Peters succumbed to a lifelong heart ailment at the ripe young age of 50. A fellow upper Midwesterner and someone also extremely familiar with Eastern philosophies, Greg stood for what is right and capable in this world, a literal hand of justice. One of these days it is going to hit me like a ton of bricks that he is no longer here. Hell, I still can’t believe my in-laws, Ashley and my grandma are no longer with us. Right after we got back from Boston, D fell very ill. All I am going to say about it is that, when the time comes, a strength will come to you that knows only one thing: You will do everything to hold this person back from the brink. You will not let go.

Other things fell by the wayside. The high school reunion remained unattended; in retrospect, it is just as well. Thinking back on those years, I miss my teachers the most and they are long gone. Calculus and English were never more enjoyable than at that high school, and I realize more and more each day that the education we received was world-class. What other school teaches logic, reasoning and the rules of rhetoric in junior year English to be followed up by mandatory oratory and debate participation in senior year English? Yes, we read the obligatory Shakespeare and Toni Morrison and wrote essays, but the laser focus was always on critical thought, something that stands out due to its absence in modern American secondary education. The social and political “debates” I have with folks today are telling: they are full of straw men, bandwagoning and special pleading. But, the two really frustrating situations are the blank stares when I point out logical flaws in an argument because folks don’t know they are supposed to talk logically as well as a hasty retreat to a pathetic “Well, I don’t have time to argue that anyway.” Two requests: Please brush up on your logical fallacies and dance with what you brung; in other words, don’t raise a topic if you don’t want it discussed. It is a matter of life or death, because your opinion affects other people when you cast a vote based on it.

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Tomorrow is the start of the annual Society of Exploration Geophysicists Conference for me. I will be hanging with the Agile geoscience duo Matt and Evan as well as a gang of software developers as part of a hackathon to attack uncertainty in geophysical analysis – it’s been a while since I’ve programmed seriously, but I am there as a subject matter guru, expert user, debugger and the ever-useful moral support. You can also catch me at the Rock Physics reception, the SEG Women’s Network breakfast, the “Bayou Bash” and the IQ Earth Forum this coming week.

More from the hackathon and SEG events. I am at @maitri on Twitter if something interesting goes down that #SEG2013 or #SEG13 (the super-seekrit backchannel) needs to know about.