Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Chair Top 10 List

I have been Chair of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas for about a year-and-a-half now. For what it is worth, here is my top 10 list of advice for new Chairs:

Make a list of deadlines, mine has about 150 items

Support, expand and involve your external advisory board - they can move the world

Every time you complete a complicated task, write a note titled "for next time" about how you could do it better

Start a blog to capture all the stuff you need to share,here is mine

Choose committee members carefully, dysfunctional committees are bad news

Make a 4-year teaching plan for the department, here is mine

Put together an advisory group of senior faculty 

Mainly watch and learn for a year, then initiate change where needed

Clarify, streamline and simplify processes

Communicate and delegate

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Simon Klemperer

Dear Prof. Liner:

I just wanted to take a break from updating my lectures on migration to say how much I am enjoying “Elements” to teach my Reflection Seismology class. Beautifully clear, with an original take on numerous concepts and very different in philosophical approach from a more “conventional” text like Sheriff & Geldart.

But I had to go online to find your contact info, and because I have a butterfly mind I also now have a .pdf of Greek Seismology and encourage you, should there be a v. 2.1, to correct the typo on page 6: “There was also earlier experimental work by Hook, Galileo and others” to give Hooke his due terminal e (he does indeed feature in my lectures for “ut tensio, sic vis”)

And finally, I am intrigued by Spice: is it available for academics to play with? One of my students is making seismic-stratigraphic interpretations, and I would be fascinated to see whether anything new came out of the data.

Regards,

Simon Klemperer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Simon Klemperer
Professor of Geophysics, and of Geological Sciences
Department of Geophysics, Stanford University,
Mitchell Building 353, 397 Panama Mall, Stanford CA 94305-2215       
telephone: (650) 723 8214   (department manager: 498-6877)    fax : (650) 725 7344
sklemp@stanford.edu             https://pangea.stanford.edu/researchgroups/crustal/
http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=lkUWQmQAAAAJ
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


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Dear Simon,

Thank you for the very kind note. It is not often that one gets such a complimentary email. So glad you are enjoying the Elements book, I assume you are reading the 3rd edition. It is much improved from the 2nd edition.

I would love to make the correction you mention to the Earthquake book. But, alas, the source file is in word 6 or word 95 (which may be the same thing), and current Word versions will not open it. So we are stuck with the PDF only.

Yes, spice will be available in the next release of seismic unix. The source file is attached. If you are familiar with SU, adding this to your install should not be too much trouble. A typical processing flow would go like this:

   succwt < in_su_data   fmax=100 noct=5 nv=10 \
   | suspice  seth=1 amax=35 amin=1,5,10 ta=0,2,4 > out_spice_data

Hope you find spice useful. I have found it takes very good quality data before spice works well. But when it works, it is remarkable.

Best regards,

Chris

ps. If you don't mind, I'll post your letter and my response to my seismos blog.


Prof. Christopher L. Liner
Department of Geosciences Chairman
Storm Endowed Chair of Petroleum Geology
University of Arkansas
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