Preprints – What’s the worst that could happen?

Early career scientists are laying the building blocks of their career. Giving away your best ideas for free and everyone to read can seem risky. Pre-prints, on the surface, may look just like that, but are they? Pre-print servers like EarthArXiv are sprouting in many scientific disciplines. They proclaim the benefits of research being cited […]

I placed 1300th on Kaggle and it’s amazing!

I placed 1360 in a deep learning competition and here’s why that is a win in my book. I spend too much time on social media, but this time I was lucky. I checked my feed on LinkedIn quickly and saw an announcement from TGS a seismic contractor. They had teamed up with Kaggle, a […]

CC-BY Loren Kerns

SEG-Y sucks! Or does it?

Many a times I have been cursing, when I got a new seismic file. Be it a 2D line, 3D cubes or pre-stack data, the standard is seldomly adhered to by most companies. The Standard SEGY as defined by the standard is now in revision 2. Most standards will likely be rev1 in these days. […]

Culture Neutral - CC-BY Karl-Ludwig Poggemann

Data Is Not Neutral

  I like data driven processes. You’ve seen me drum on about CRS and Full-Waveform Inversion. Sometimes we like to pretend that data is pure. Well , it’s noisy and full of kinks but if we process it just right, we extract the truth. Turns out that is a little bit wrong. The data collection […]

By rawpixel on Unsplash

Steal my CV!

Recently, I have updated my CV. Problem is, when I see the MS Word templates for resumes and CVs, I repulse. Few things scream 80s as much as these do. Now, let me get one thing out of the way, I have had feedback that some recruiters may prefer the 80s style. They’re used to […]

Mid Oceanic Ridge

Geophysical Assumptions

If you assume you make an ASS of yoU and ME. That may be true in personal connections, but assumptions are necessary in physics. Particularly, geophysics needs all the assumptions it can get. The subsurface isn’t exactly nice, giving us data. We can only look from one side (mostly). The Earth itself filters our signal, […]

Elephant Rocks, NZ

Uncertainty in Geoscience – Bayes and Expert opinions

In geoscience we’re not all that great with uncertainty. Since everything is uncertain, calculating the error margins in geoscience itself is often neglected. However, a geologist is perfectly suited to understand Bayes theorem, a little tool that statisticians swoon over. I haven’t been on too many field trips, however, most of the time it would […]

CC-BY-SA Pablormier DE

Making Full-Waveform Inversion Uncool again

You know what’s hype? Full-waveform inversion. If you’re in geophysics specifically involved in some sort of inversion, you want to be doing FWI. It’s what the cool kids do. You know what’s the problem? Cool kids really like to be an exclusive club. The same thing is happening in Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Fast.ai […]

Noise CC-BY Kevin Dooley

What’s with the noise?

We often only look at reflection data in a stack. But, along the way a lot of “noise” has been processed out of the seismic data to chisel out the “signal”. It’s all about signal against noise. However, one person’s noise may just be another person’s signal. Let me elaborate. If you’ve been around during […]