When I posted in LinkedIn a link to my Geophysical Society of Houston Technical Lunch in order to generate some publicity for my talk on Beam Tomography, one of the interesting comments from a colleague at a large service company was that Beam Technology is “a technology with many benefits that unfortunately is commonly regarded as old school / low tech.” I loved the comment because it allows me to talk about one of my favorite business concepts that I always look around to apply, and that … [Read more...]
The Curmudgeon’s Column: Diffraction Imaging
In the last post, I explained the title of the column comes from the book by Charles Murray The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead. With the Curmudgeon in mind, I have a few more comments to make about our life as Researchers, pushing the leading edge of technology in our industries. In small companies it helps to be a contrarian, to develop novel algorithms in areas overlooked by large research groups or the academic groups funded by them. One such technology that our group started working … [Read more...]
The Curmudgeon’s Column
Recently I gave each of my 5 kids a copy of a book I was delighted to read, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, by Charles Murray, fatherly advice to young people who enter the workforce. I identified with the Curmudgeon, hence the title of this column. Murray’s book started as postings on the internal website of the American Enterprise Institute where he works, with tips for entry level staff and interns such as: Excise the word “like” from your spoken English.Don’t … [Read more...]
The State of Our Industry
Industry Revenues On the walls of our Houston Z-Terra office, we have a lot of movie posters. It’s a tradition that started at 3DGeo when our office was across the road from Silicon Graphics, which made computers used for computer generated imagery and which had a lot of movie posters on its walls. We visited Silicon Graphics often for support. We kept the tradition at Z-Terra, and each poster comes from somebody’s favorite movies list. One of the posters is from Batman Begins and … [Read more...]
The future of our industry
At SEG 2017 in Houston I was asked by several students, including two students from Romania, if there is a future for our industry. Listening to media stories of renewable energy replacing fossil fuel energy in a utopian decade or so, and electric cars replacing internal combustion cars, the students were wondering whether getting a degree in geology or geophysics is a good long-term career choice. After giving several students several variations on the same answer, I decided to write an entry … [Read more...]