I heard a new term the other day, and realized that it probably applies to me - the definition of the term is "That person in an organization that everyone goes to with their computer problems" - the term is alpha geek.
I am currently a Research Geophysicist for Shell Oil Company, at the Bellaire Technology Center, working on AVO interpretation. Previously I have been an interpreter for West Africa, and Michigan, and for many years supervised Unix support for an exploration division.
I have been on the internet since 1992, beginning with email, and graduating to ftp and web browsing. I have had a personal internet connection since 1994. I support a number of webpages on the internet for various organizations, I maintain several FAQ's, and I help administer a mailing list.
This talk assumes that you have some knowledge of the internet, but not a whole lot. I assume that you have probably sent email at least once in your life, and have at least watched someone cruise the web. It is a measure of the pace of change that only a year ago, I would have felt very uncomfortable making these assumptions, but I do so now with a measure of confidence that they may actually be true.
What I hope you will gain from this talk is an understanding of what the internet really is, an appreciation for what you can do with it, and an understanding of how to move forward in using it for fun and profit. I will talk about a few specific resources, but not too many, since these things change quite rapidly. You also have a handout that has a URL on it - that is, a Web Address. That address contains the text of this talk, the slides you will see, plus links and other information that I will not cover tonight.
More specifically, I will very briefly give you a little background on the internet, then spend some time on E and P resources available, and wrap up with a few words on how you could become a content provider instead of just a passive consumer.
I assume that everyone at least knows what e-mail is, and has probably used it. It is basically like postal mail but faster and cheaper, and like fax except that you can actually read the result. I have "spoken" with many folks through e-mail who I will probably never meet. I once purchased some software from a company in Tasmania, and until I received the diskette, the whole transaction had been done through e-mail.
Newsgroups are, as the slide shows, like a bulletin board. You have a slow-motion conversation with a potentially large community of folks. The signal-to-noise ratio is usually quite low, but there can be useful information posted on newsgroups. I will discuss strategies for making them more useful later.
The WEB, of course, is where all the excitement is, and is what has driven the recent explosive growth of the internet. The WEB is graphical, simple, and attractive. It is a wonderful vehicle for publishing material, and making it generally available, with a distribution cost that is near zero. Much more about the WEB later.
There are other internet creatures: ftp, gopher, archie, etc., but they have basically been subsumed by the WEB and can safely be ignored. I'll also ignore IRC chat, web phone, and similar stuff - too immature.
The first thing you need to remember about e-mail is that it is not secure. E-mail works by copying a file containing your message from machine to machine until it reaches it's destination. When you send an e-mail, you have no idea whose machine it may touch on the way. So, consider e-mail to be an electronic postcard, and you can't go wrong.
If you really need to send sensitive information, you will need to encrypt it. There are both commercial, and freeware packages for encrypting and decrypting data. One of the best schemes is free, and is called PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy. One warning! Our federal government does not allow useful encryption to be exported. A university student recently cracked the maximum legal encryption in only a few hours. There are ways around the federal prohibition, so do your research.
There are some special issues around e-mail that I would like to spend a little time addressing. Hopefully, I can prevent you from making some embarrassing mistakes.
It is difficult to send graphics & binaries with email. It is certainly possible, but unless you know what you are doing, you are likely to end up with a real mess. The basic problem is that most commercial mail software, like CC:Mail and Microsoft Exchange, are really designed to be used on internal corporate networks, and were not designed to work and play well with other vendor products. Microsoft in particular has a bad habit of ignoring standards, and then declaring that whatever they have done is the standard.
More specifically, be careful when using MSmail and MSExchange - watch for ugly mime binaries being attached, and turn off ISO encoding. With Netscape watch for an HTML version of the note being attached. Be nice! In general do not use the fancy text and graphics options your mailer might supply, unless you know that all the recipients of your email can read them. Follow the KISS principle - Keep It Simple Stupid.
One of the most irritating things that happens to me is when I receive something like a binhex copy of a Microsoft Word document on my Unix box. It is totally useless. Unless you and your recipient share the same word processing software, AND share the same mail software, stick to sending ASCII text files.
The first child of the internet, back when it connected three mainframes together, was email and mailing lists. Today there are literally thousands of these virtual communities in existence. A mailing list will generally have a charter, describing what the purpose of the list is, and many times will have a FAQ - a Frequently Asked Questions list, mainly to prevent new subscribers from asking the same old questions over and over again.
There are a few email lists appropriate for our business. One general purpose one I like, is the Mercury News. I get a subset of the daily wireservice reports, based on an interest profile I set up. I have found that most of the national and international news stories I read in the Chronicle are covered by Mercury - frequently with more detail. A similar list is called Webcatcher. Subscribing to Webcatcher allows you to set up a profile used to search, once a week, for new websites that fit your profile. For example, I search on geology and seismic, among other things.
More specific to our industry, WS-USERS is a good list,
... provided as a medium for the exchange of questions, answers, and general information regarding the use of workstations in oil and gas exploration and production.
There is also a very active Gravity-Mag list, a list devoted to ArcINFO software, including a moribund sub-list for the Arc/INFO Petroleum Users Group, and Rice has a mailing list for it's Geology seminars. Of continuing interest, there is a mailing list devoted to Employment Opportunities for Earth Scientists.
Just a few words on joining an email list. Each mailing list has it's own culture, and is, in fact, a community with community norms and expectations. When you join a list, lurk for a week before joining into a discussion, just to get a feel for what is acceptable behavior on the list. Also, save the note you will receive when you subscribe. It will tell you how to unsubscribe. And if you get twisted off at something that is said on the list, remember that email strips all intonation and body language off our statements. The person may have been joking, or may not have meant what you thought they said. Finally, build yourself a nice signature file to append to the bottom of your messages. It should tell who you are and how to contact you. I have several, depending on the context. My official .sig for work use is
Alan K. Jackson - BTC - Quantitative AVO Team
Shell E&P Technology Co (a wholly owned subsidiary of Shell Oil Co)
voice :(713)544-4442 fax :(713)544-4859 snail :Box 205,Houston,Tx 77001
UUCP: ...!{uupsi}!shellus!ajackson INTERNET: ajackson@shellus.com
Newsgroups are a lot more free-wheeling than mailing lists, and the signal to noise ratio is generally not too high. But they still have value. Some that I read are
It can also be useful to subscribe to a soc.culture group. If you are working Brazil, you can pick up on news of Brazil in soc.culture.brazil, for example.
Many people have given up on newsgroups because the signal to noise is so bad. But there are strategies that can make them more useful again.
The most fun part of the internet is, of course, the World Wide Web. Its easy, the browsers are fairly intuitive, it's very visual. What I will cover here is
Quite a few years ago, the Freedom of Information Act was passed. What many people don't realize is that the act requires federal agencies to make all their non-confidential data available to the public for the cost of reproduction - not the cost of collection. This is an important distinction. Many governments try to recover all their costs when selling data. For example, the British government charges a large premium when selling copies of their digital maps, to try to recoup the huge investment made when creating the maps to begin with. Our government, on the other hand, argued that since the data was already collected using taxpayer dollars, it didn't make sense to then charge taxpayers again for access to the data.
The result of this is that most, if not all, government agencies see the internet as the perfect vehicle for cheaply meeting the requirements of the FOI act, and they are aggressively putting their digital data out onto servers for free access and down loading.
For the US government, I have provided a number of useful links on the web page I referenced earlier. Here are a few, to wet your appetite.
A good starting point is the Federal Geographic Data Committee, who are trying to be the clearing-house for mapping data available from the Feds. Other useful federal sites are the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which absorbed the old Defense Mapping Agency, and, of course, the Minerals Management Service. A good general purpose site for searching for geospatial data is Starting The Hunt maintained at the University of Arkansas.
One suggestion about looking for data from the government, is to be creative. There may be useful data where you would not normally expect it. For example, EPA is a treasure house of information that has relevance to shallow geology and outcrop, because of their concerns with waste disposal, ground water quality, and pollution. I have also found good shallow geology information associated with the search many years ago for a national low-level nuclear waste dump. The main point here is to not restrict your search to the USGS and MMS. Other agencies may have what you are looking for.
State governments can also be useful sites for data. The great state of Texas is actually quite a bit ahead of other states in this area. The state is aggressively putting digital data online. For example, Arc/INFO files of most of the roads in the state may be downloaded for free.
The state of Oklahoma is also not bad. This is a digital elevation model of the Ft. Smith area I downloaded. Louisiana, on the other hand, seems to have done very little, so far.
But what about international data? There the situation is not nearly so nice. As I noted earlier, foreign governments like to charge collection costs for their data, instead of reproduction costs, so there are very few free giveaways. To get those, you generally have to go to Universities and non-profits. The biggest international non-profit, I suppose, is the United Nations. And they do have datasets to give away. Another extremely useful international data resource is Bruce Gittings' Digital Elevation Catalog at the University of Edinburgh.
Universities are frequently good places to look for data - and nearly every university has webpages. One particularly interesting site, at least to me, is the Center for Wave Phenomena at Colorado School of Mines, where you can down load free seismic processing software, among other things,
Scout data is actually easier to find than technical data. Many times, journals or newspapers will put information online, and the major scouting organizations now have their datasets online as well (for a fee). For international scout data, there is, of course, Petroconsultants, and for domestic, Petroleum Information.
One of my favorite sites, for working Africa, is Mbendi, which has a wealth of information about Africa; who the oil ministers are, who the exploration managers are for various companies, where the refineries are, and so on.
One other useful site that you may not have thought about. If you need to investigate a company, a potential partner perhaps, the Securities and Exchange Commission now has all of their filings available online. In fact, I believe they are now requiring companies to file digitally, so they can more easily get the data up onto the internet.
I have used the web quite a lot to find and check into various vendors, especially the smaller guys. We had a situation recently where we thought we might want to receive seismic data off the boat as it was being shot, with a satellite link. The data was being compressed with special software. All I was given was the name of the software. After an hour or so of searching the web, I found the company I needed to talk to, and what is better, I was able to answer most of my questions before I called them, so that instead of starting cold, I could actually ask intelligent questions.
The internet is becoming a pretty good place to find (or advertise as) a consultant. The best site I have found for this is the Discovery Place, which has listed about 90 geological and 40 geophysical consulting firms.
Finally, you can get a lot of professional society and calendar information online. The best, I think, are the SEG pages. They have even put the cumulative publication index for all their publications online.
Another thing you can get off the web is software. There is a lot of free software out there, some of it quite good, and a lot of shareware as well. Most of this is not limited to the Oil and Gas industry, but it can be very useful stuff. I will talk about a few of the key sites.
As I mentioned above, there is a seismic processing system available from Colorado School of mines. There is also one available from Stanford. I don't know much about them, but they seem to be gaining some degree of popularity, at least in the academic community.
For windows internet software, like web browsers, mail readers, news readers, etc, there is only one place to go. That is Forrest H. Stroud's Consummate Winsock Apps List. Forrest recently graduated from the University of Texas. He began his page as a hobby, and it became so popular that he began to sell advertising. I read recently that he sold the rights to it for a rather large sum of money.
Three other major sites for freeware and shareware are
Specific to Geology and Geophysics, there is reasonably good geostatistical software available off the net, many free- and share-ware GIS and mapping packages, and a lot of miscellaneous bits of software. I found one nice page for geologic software links put up by a fellow in Switzerland. Of course, there is always Rockware, the grand daddy of low cost PC and Mac geologic software. They also offer some nice-looking freeware.
Even with all the resources I have noted above, there will be things you need that you will end up having to search for. It used to be pretty easy to search the internet, a few years ago. But as it has suffered exponential growth, it has become exponentially more difficult to find what you are looking for. What I'd like to do here is share with you some of what I have found helpful in making successful searches.
If I have trouble coming up with a targeted search string, or if I am very unfamiliar with the topic, I tend to start with Yahoo!, since they have already filtered out a lot of the uninteresting stuff. Frequently with Yahoo! you can find what I call the mother page for a topic. This is the page that someone has constructed that references all or most of the relevant pages on a given topic. This can make the search job very easy. Here is the result of a Yahoo! search on geology software. The category page links then lead to specific links that list geologic software.
My other favorite search site, is Alta Vista. It takes a bit of practise to become efficient at using Alta Vista - the big problem is that you get too many hits from your query. What I have found is that using a quoted phrase can be extremely powerful in trimming the hit list. Here I search again on geology and software, and I get about 30,000 hits - obviously too many. I try it again using the phrase geologic software, and now I'm down to 63 hits - a much more reasonable number.
Sometimes. the appropriate place to search is the newsgroups. I would go to the newsgroups if I was trying, for example, to find out if someone else had seen a bug that I am struggling with. For searching newsgroups, I like to use DejaNews.
Quickly, two general purpose tools that are nice. For looking for people, or businesses, like in the yellow pages, I generally start at Excite, I have been fairly pleased with their phone book search links. And one of my favorite pages, MapQuest! will let you get street maps for anyplace in the US, and many places overseas. Who needs a keymap!
Up to this point, I have primarily discussed the using the internet in a passive mode - gathering stuff from the internet. What I would like to touch on now, and challenge you with, is using the internet more aggressively as a tool, contributing to the internet, and becoming a content provider.
Of course the simplest mode for using the internet remains email.
I use it routinely in my day to day work to interact with partners,
with contractors, and with others. I have also dabbled a bit in
internet commerce, selling software. If you have services to
sell, you may be tempted to start e-mailing people with a
solicitation, or posting to newsgroups to try to drum up
business. Don't do it! Unsolicited
Commercial Email, also affectionately known as Spam, is a
quick way to alienate your potential customer base, and, by the
way, is also a good way to lose your internet account. Reputable
Internet Service Providers will not allow their clients to
spam. This doesn't mean you have to avoid all advertising. The
proper way to advertise, and not violate netiquette, is to
build a web page for your product or service, and then look
at the relevant newsgroups. If it seems that the group tolerates
it, post a small ad like
Please see our webpage for XYZ industries at http://somewhere.com/
In particular, sci.geo.petroleum is very forgiving of these
small notices. You can also look for webpages that have lists
of links to pages similar to yours, and email the page maintainer,
asking them to add a link to your page. Most search engines will
also allow you to add your page to their database. There are even
pages that will add your page to many search engines for you.
A topic of enduring interest in our industry is searching for a job. I don't know how effective it is to put a resume online, but it is cheap and easy, and I can't see how it could hurt. I would expect that in the next few years, it will become increasingly effective. In Computer Science, it is becoming the standard approach. There are also several sources of job listings on the internet. There is a mailing list, GEOSCI-JOBS-REQUEST@eskimo.com, a number of usenet newsgroups, and several webpages. The Discovery Place seems particularly well done. Society web pages will also usually have job postings, as does the Earthworks page.
The basic culture of the internet is one of voluntarism, the internet is not a commercial enterprise. That is why there is so much out there that is free for the taking. There is an ethic that says If I have information or data that I have gathered for my own use, and it will have value to others, why don't I share it? And this is exactly what many people have done. This is what has made the internet the wonderful tool that it is. And there is no reason why you can't contribute as well.
Here are a few ideas around being a content provider. If you are with a small company, or are a consultant, putting useful material on your website can attract traffic to the site you would not otherwise receive, and could lead to new business. Samples of some of your work, as the free offering, would also be a good way to attract new business. Advertising on the internet is cheap, but to be effective you have to attract people to your site. That means having something on your site that will show up in Yahoo and in Alta Vista that catches people's eye. Free will frequently do the trick.
What does it take to put up your own webpage? If you have an Internet account already, you probably have webspace, and may not know it. If you don't have webspace, you should change providers. You can get an account on AOL for as little as $5.00/month, with limited access, and get 10 Mbytes of webspace on the account. I have my 10Mbytes on AOL, and another 10 Mbytes on my nettap account, which costs me $18 per month. You can build webpages in your favorite text editor, or you can get a web building tool. For simple pages, I suggest using the editor, or even doing it online. Netscape has a menu-driven page builder at their site you can use to get a simple page started. It really is easy. My ten year-old built himself a webpage, using textedit.
We are at the dawn of a new age. The majority of professionals in this country already have internet access, many from both home and work. Over half the households in Texas have internet access. What is new about the internet that will affect the way we operate in the future?
All the internet has done is to make communication an order of magnitude cheaper than it used to be, which has substantially lowered many barriers to entry for various activities. We are only beginning to see the fallout from this change. It is already beginning to change how we do our work, the only thing that is certain, is that how we work in ten years will be quite different from how we work today.
