Summer Research Workshop Research Articles

Assessment of the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL): Impact on the Research Productivity and Careers of Academic Librarians

Objective – This article reports the survey findings from a mixed-methods assessment of the six-year Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL). The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) provided funding for IRDL from 2014-2019; during this time, 124 academic and research librarians participated in a year-long continuing education program for novice researchers. This article assesses the effectiveness of IRDL in meeting short-term and long-term goals related to research productivity, job performance, and identity as a researcher. Beyond the assessment of IRDL itself, the study addresses the implications of IRDL for creating effective research continuing education programs and institutional support for librarian research. Methods – In the first part of a two-phase study, we surveyed all 124 librarians who completed the in-person summer research workshop and year-long online follow-up program. The lead researcher invited those who completed the survey to participate in the study's second phase, a focus group or an in-depth interview. Results – Eighty-nine participants responded to the survey, for a 72% response rate. The results show that IRDL was successful in helping a majority of participants complete their IRDL project and conduct new research. Participants reported work-related benefits of participating in the program, including tenure, rank promotion, merit-based salary increases, and new employment opportunities. IRDL contributed to developing personal learning networks, research collaborations, and a sense of identity as a researcher. IRDL increased the research confidence of the participants by providing them with research methods instruction, coupled with an opportunity to practice what they have learned during a year-long support program. Conclusion – This assessment study confirms that IRDL is an effective program for novice librarian-researchers who want to improve their research skills, develop new research relationships among their peers, and advance in their careers. It also provides insight into the conditions for a successful continuing education and research support program. Many librarians experience anxiety about conducting and disseminating their research; IRDL demonstrates the importance of placing novice researchers in a supportive environment, where research is viewed as a positive experience that is directly related to professional success. These experiences lead to increased confidence and identity as a researcher, which contributes to increased research productivity.

President's Page: Synergies in geophysical, medical, and space imaging — The next 20 years

Almost exactly 20 years ago, in July 2001, I organized and chaired the first SEG Summer Research Workshop on the topic of “Synergies in Geophysical, Medical and Space Imaging” (see The Leading Edge [TLE], 21, no. 6, 599-606). At the virtual SEG Annual Meeting in October 2020, special sessions were held on “Planetary Geophysics” and “Geophysics in Medicine.” Recently, I have been asked by SEG President Maurice Nessim to help lead two task forces to advance the use of applied geophysics in both the medical and space sciences. It is therefore an excellent time to share some thoughts on the next 20 years of collaboration possibilities in these areas.

CRITICAL EVENT PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE: KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE 2006 SLOAN RESEARCH WORKSHOP BY JON LINKS

At the intersection of online education and preparedness, Johns Hopkins University’s (JHU) Center for Public Health Preparedness provides all-hazards preparedness and response training for public health and public safety professionals. This report comes from Jonathan Links’ keynote address to the Sloan Summer Research Workshop in Baltimore, Maryland in August 2006.

Your Foundation donations at work!

During the year, it is important to thank our donors and recognize the impact of their gifts. SEG programs enjoy philanthropic support from individuals, corporations, affiliate sections, and societies. Today, our 16 Foundation programs are serving new members and new constituencies. The new Halliburton EVOLVE program will kick off this summer and ultimately will serve a combination of early-career professionals and students. Two new funds are open to serve students this year — the Near Surface Research Award Fund and the new Summer Research Workshop Travel Grant. Both of these will be managed by SEG's Student and Early-Career Program staff.

Subsalt exploration and development — Introduction

This special section on subsalt imaging originated from a summer research workshop on the same topic held 26–29 July 2010 in Lake Tahoe, Calif. The title of the workshop, “Subsalt exploration and development: Four years later … what’s new in acquisition, imaging and interpretation,” describes exactly the variety of topics presented. In some sense, this section attempts to cover most of these topics. Though not all topics or presentations given at the workshop made it into this special section, a great majority of the ideas discussed are represented here. Several papers were also submitted to this special section that were not presented at the workshop. The section opens with a general review of subsalt imaging meant to be accessible by a wide audience. Leveille et al. address the question of what subsalt imaging is and discuss the physics of the subsalt imaging problem, focusing on the illumination issue. It also provides a review of the main imaging algorithms, the various imaging conditions, and the velocity updating tools. Six general case history papers follow the review paper. In the first paper, to learn about the accuracy of anisotropic deep-water Gulf of Mexico model building and depth-imaging tools that are used for the processing and imaging of acquired field data, Hoxha et al. create a 3D VTI anisotropic earth model and a 3D seismic data set representing typical subsalt Gulf of Mexico geology called Tempest. The Tempest reverse time migration PSDM is being used to learn about the differences between the exact geological model and the reverse time migration PSDM image, helping in the interpretation of real reverse time migration prestack depth migrated data. Following this, Zhou et al. analyze …

Systematic Mentoring on Three Continents

© 2011 The Society for Investigative Dermatology www.jidonline.org 549 interested in dermatological research. The first has been developed in collaboration with the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV), entitled ESDR/EADV Summer Research Workshop. The inaugural workshop took place in Vienna, Austria, in 2010, with 25 participants from 12 countries. It comprised direct teaching and practical laboratory work focusing on common laboratory methods in dermatology. A similar approach will be taken for future courses. The second program, which will launch in 2011, is the ESDR Academy for Future Leaders in Dermatology. This annual meeting will bring together renowned scientists from dermatology and basic science with the brightest young dermatologists working in the field. Selected participants will have the opportunity to interact with senior scientists in their fields of interest. The ESDR anticipates that this will foster excellence in academic dermatology throughout Europe. All these programs are outlined in detail on the ESDR’s website (http://www.ESDR.org). These recent initiatives show that the ESDR is fully embracing its role as an organization that mentors young colleagues early in their research careers.

Highlights of the 2009 SEG Summer Research Workshop on CO2 Sequestration

The 2009 SEG Summer Research Workshop on “CO2 Sequestration Geophysics” was held 23–27 August 2009 in Banff, Canada. The event was attended by over 100 scientists from around the world, which proved to be a remarkably successful turnout in the midst of the current global financial crisis and severe corporate travel restrictions. Attendees included SEG President Larry Lines (University of Calgary) and CSEG President John Downton (CGG Veritas), who joined SRW Chairman David Lumley in giving the opening welcome remarks at the Sunday Icebreaker. The workshop was organized by a committee of technical experts representing a good mix of industry, academic, and government research organizations (see box). The format consisted of four days of technical sessions with over 60 talks and posters, plus an optional preworkshop field trip to the Columbia Ice Fields to view firsthand the effects of global warming on the Athabasca glacier (Figures 1–2). Group technical discussion was encouraged by requiring each presenter to limit themselves to 15 minutes of presentation followed by a 15–minute open discussion period. Technical contributions focused on the current and future role of geophysics in CO2 sequestration, highlighting new research and field-test results with regard to site selection and characterization, monitoring and surveillance, using a wide variety of geophysical techniques. While there are too many excellent contributions to mention all individually here, in this paper, we summarize some of the key workshop highlights in order to propagate new developments to the SEG community at large.

Testing for Racial Discrimination in Bail Setting Using Nonparametric Estimation of a Parametric Model

Testing for Racial Discrimination in Bail Setting Using Nonparametric Estimation of a Parametric Model Shawn D. Bushway School of Criminal Justice University at Albany and Jonah B. Gelbach ∗ Yale Law School Class of 2013 October 28, 2010 Abstract Black defendants are assigned systematically greater bail levels than whites accused of similar offenses and, partly as a result, have systematically lower probabilities of pre-trial release. We construct a simple model of optimal bail setting that allows us to measure how much of the bail difference is due to judicial bias against blacks, holding constant defendant heterogeneity that judges observe, regardless of whether we also observe it. We show how to use nonparametric methods to consistently estimate the model’s key parameter by using the judge’s first-order condition to form an auxiliary projection relationship involving defendants’ conditional choice probabilities. While the behavioral model requires parametric assumptions, they have a substantial payoff: under these assumptions, we need not make any assumptions at all on the conditional distribution of heterogeneity observed by judges but not researchers. We implement the model using 2000 and 2002 data for five counties, from the State Courts Processing Statistics. While our point estimates are somewhat imprecise, they suggest that in several counties, judges value blacks’ lost freedom from a typical pre-trial jail stay by thousands of dollars less than they value whites’ lost freedom. We thank participants at the 2010 Institute for Research on Poverty Summer Research Workshop and seminar participants at the University of South Florida, George Mason University Law School, Syracuse University, and the Florida State University College of Law. We are also grateful for financial support through NSF award number SES0718955.

Introduction to this special section—Rock physics

Rock physics addresses the relationship between measurements of elastic parameters made from surface, well, and lab equipment; and intrinsic properties of rocks, such as mineralogy, porosity, and pore shapes; pore fluids; pore pressures; permeability; viscosity; stresses; and overall architecture such as laminations and fractures. Rock physics provides the understanding necessary to optimize all imaging and characterization solutions based on elastic data and was the subject of the SEG Summer Research Workshop held in Galway, Ireland in 2008. This workshop included sessions on laboratory methods, rock physics of reservoir rocks, rock physics of carbonate rock, rock physics of unconventional and fractured reservoirs, mudrock rock physics and pore- pressure prediction, 4D (time-lapse) rock physics, theoretical rock physics and anisotropy, and upscaling and integration. Several presentations from the workshop are available at http://research.seg.org/2008_SRWS_Ireland.htm.

Introduction to this special section: Subsalt exploration

Salt basins occur worldwide (Figure 1), and large hydrocarbon deposits are often associated with the presence of salt structures due to favorable conditions for accumulation and trapping of oil and gas. Because of the cost and difficulty of drilling subsalt, it is important to be able to image subsalt prospects correctly. However, the large velocity contrast between the salt and sediments, and the complexity of many salt bodies, make subsalt imaging a difficult task. A step-change in technology is therefore required, and two recent workshops have been held to address the issues. The “Workshop on Subsalt Imaging Problems: Practical Problems Seeking Solutions” was held at the Colorado School of Mines in 2005, during which presenters from oil and service companies focused on the difficulties of subsalt imaging (Leveille et al., TLE 2005). The 2006 SEG/EAGE Summer Research Workshop on “Subsalt Exploration and Development: Imaging, Interpretation, and Drilling—What have we learned?” covered a wide range of sal...

Report on EAGE Vienna 2006 workshop on marine multi-azimuth seismic

The EAGE conference in Vienna, June 2006 was the venue for a workshop on one of the most interesting developments in seismic technology in recent years. The subject was multiazimuth and wide azimuth seismic surveying in the marine environment, with emphasis on its application in deepwater environments. The timing of this workshop was particularly appropriate with the introduction, since 2004, of several new technologies and methodologies to image below complex overburden in major deepwater oil and gas provinces. The workshop brought together a range of presenters from E&P companies and seismic contractors to present the state of play in the technology and discuss challenges for the future. It was the first of several sessions on the subject in 2006. The EAGE workshop was followed by the SEG/EAGE Summer Research Workshop on subsalt imaging and a special session on multi-azimuth and wide azimuth seismic at the SEG convention in October. Below is a summary of the EAGE Multi-Azimuth workshop as an introduction to the papers in this special edition of First Break. The perspectives provided in the two authors’ keynote papers as coordinators of the workshop form the basis of this article.

Subsalt Exploration and Development: Imaging, Interpretation, and Drilling—What have we learned? 2006 SEG/EAGE Summer Research Workshop

This year's Summer Research Workshop organized by SEG and EAGE under the title “Subsalt Exploration and Development: Imaging, Interpretation, and Drilling—What have we learned?” took place on 10–14 July 2006 in Snowbird, Utah, USA. The workshop was attended by approximately 150 geophysicists and geologists representing the whole spectrum of oil and gas companies, geophysical contractors, and academia. The workshop featured many presentations highlighting the current state-of-the-art in subsalt exploration. The large majority of the presentations focused on the use of surface seismic data to guide subsalt exploration and development. However, there were significant contributions that discussed the role of geology, geomechanics, and borehole data in constraining model building under salt bodies characterized by complex geometries (Figure 1).

Travel grants send students to SRW and Annual Meeting

Thanks to a donation from the Colorado School of Mines, the SEG Foundation was able to expand its 2006 travel grant program to include the Summer Research Workshop (SRW) in Snowbird, Utah, USA. The Foundation appreciates Ken Larner and Biondo Biondi for their roles in bringing the SRW Travel Grants to the Foundation. Although the time frame for applying was brief, the Foundation received 13 applications for the SRW travel grants. Nine of the 13 applicants were awarded SRW travel grants by the committee. Unfortunately, only six of the recipients were able to obtain visas and coordinate their flight schedules in a timely manner with the Foundation office. Five of the six SRW travel grant students are citizens of a country other than the United States. Only two of the five are studying in universities outside the United States.

The low-frequency gas shadow on seismic sections

About six years ago, Greg Partyka and his colleagues at Amoco Research showed how an old technique (the Fourier transform) could be used effectively for seismic interpretation and visualization. This idea has come to be known as spectral decomposition. In recent years, many spectral decomposition techniques have been developed and utilized for stratigraphic analysis and direct hydrocarbon detection. With the refined spectral decomposition techniques now available, the low-frequency shadow beneath gas reservoirs is another old idea that has renewed importance and interest in the exploration community. Almost a decade ago, Dan Ebrom studied a variety of possible mechanisms for the low-frequency shadow and why it might be associated with hydrocarbons. He presented his analysis at the 1996 SEG Summer Research Workshop.

Extracting information from geophysical, medical, and space images

The fourth session of the 2001 SEG Summer Research Workshop, “Image Processing II—Extracting Information from Images,” complemented “Image Processing I—Forming and Enhancing Images” by focusing on methods for analyzing images for important features and extracting qualitative and quantitative results. All three disciplines that participated in the workshop—geophysics, medicine, and space-based remote sensing—have an escalating need to automatically extract information from digital images and speakers in all three fields testified to the commonality of techniques and synergies among disciplines.

Challenges of complex media

The third session of the 2001 SEG Summer Research Workshop on “Synergies in Geophysical, Medical, and Space Imaging” discussed imaging in complex media—a challenge in all sciences. Just consider imaging the living human body where parts are always moving! Presentations in this session focused on imaging applications in which the big challenge is to create an image, rather than to extract quantitative information from the image.

Synergies in time-lapse seismic, medical, and space imaging

The session “Time-Lapse Imaging and Monitoring” was a highlight of SEG's 2001 Summer Research Workshop, Synergies in Geophysical, Medical, and Space Imaging, because it dealt with techniques that allow various types of image data to be effectively analyzed at repeated snapshot times. The potential payoffs for time-lapse monitoring are impressive—millions of dollars of additional production from oil fields, improved medical diagnoses, and the opportunity to observe important geologic processes on and beneath the earth's surface as they are occurring. This has perhaps been the ultimate dream of earth scientists ever since the origins of this discipline. The basic concept is simple—compare data sets of the same volume or surface acquired at different calendar times. However, as the papers in this session revealed, executing this simple strategy is challenging and many key problems must still be addressed.

Multicomponent technology: the players, problems, applications, and trends: Summary of the workshop sessions

The 2000 SEG/EAGE Summer Research Workshop drew a large proportion of participants from contracting firms (Figure 1a). The affiliation of first authors was also largely from contractors (Figure 1b), with the remainder of participants and first authors being evenly distributed between oil companies and academia. If these statistics can be taken as a genuine cross-section of the geophysical community, they indicate that contractors have the most interest in multicomponent technology. It would also appear that they perform most of the research work. More than 40% of the papers presented in the workshop were related to processing, model building, and imaging with PS waves, thus indicating where the current emphasis on research and applications lies. Less emphasis was observed in other important areas of application for multicomponent technology, such as lithology, fluids, fracture characterization and time-lapse studies.

Introduction to “Recent Advances in Shear Wave Technology for Reservoir Characterization: A New Beginning?”

Ninety-nine professionals, the majority of whom have significant experience with shear waves, gathered in October 2000 at the SEG-EAGE Summer Research Workshop in Boise, Idaho, U.S. The 63 papers presented raised many hotly debated technical issues. More general issues also emerged during the discussions: What is the application domain of a technology heralded as one that will profoundly influence the future of our profession? Why has multicomponent technology not been the commercial success we were hoping for, despite the heavy investments? What is needed to make this technology more beneficial to interpreters and decision makers? And many more. The history of the year 2000 SEG-EAGE Summer Research Workshop is worth telling. It began in a modest way, when Geco-Prakla decided to release two 2-D multicomponent data sets (one land, the other marine) for a public benchmarking of the methodology. That was …

Report on EAEG-SEG Summer Research Workshop

The joint EAEG-SEG Summer Research Workshop, held 24–27 July 1994 in Noordwirjkerhout, The Netherlands, had the theme “Construction of 3-D velocity‐depth models for structural targets.” Each of the half‐day sessions focused on a specific topic: (1) Estimation of layer velocities; (2) Estimation of reflector geometries; (3) 3-D prestack depth migration; (4) 3-D model representation and visualization; (5) Integration of inversion methods and case histories; and (6) SEG-EAEG 3-D wavefield modeling projects. Each session included six papers and a discussion. A panel discussion at the end of the workshop recapped the shared views and concerns of the participants.