How should we, in the upstream petroleum industry, react to claims that carbon dioxide emissions are causing climate change? 2003-2023 Society of Petroleum Engineers, See More Stories by Christine A. Ehlig-Economides, Ehlig-Economides, C.A., and Halepaska, J.C.: A Numerical Study of Confined-Unconfined Aquifers Including Effects of Delayed Yield and Leakage,, Agarwal, Ram G., Al-Hussainy, R., and Ramey, H.J. In what I would call, in a nod to Thiels definite vs indefinite optimism, definitely-maybe optimism. In essence, this means that usually the time isn't right for most innovations. Tariq, Syed M., and Ramey, H.J. In this case, the flowmeter acquires data while the well is flowing, which is what it is intended to do. Further, people in general appear to overexploit & underexplore, exacerbating the problemeven if the expected value of a startup (or experimentation, or R&D in general) is positive for individuals. After 20 years with Schlumberger in various positions, she returned to academia as a full professor of chemical engineering at the U. of Houston, where she has served as Director of the Petroleum Engineering Program as an adjunct professor since January 2000. Machine learning, deep learning, is one of the hot topics of our time, but a lot of the math was worked out decades agobackpropagation, for example, in the 1980s and 1990s. The first Kafka of Betrachtung is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany. So, what Babbage should have aimed for is not making a practical thinking machine which could churn out naval tables, but demonstrating that a programmable thinking machine is possible & useful, and currently limited by the slowness & size of its mechanical logicso that transistors could be pursued with higher priority by governments, and programmable computers could be created with transistors as soon as possible, instead of the historical course of a meandering piecemeal development where Babbages work was forgotten & then repeatedly reinvented with delays (eg. A further application of criterion 4 arises if theoretical infeasibility is demonstratedBut it is well to look on such negative proofs with caution. Before I answer this question, let me provide a brief narrative about my own career in our great industry. The difficulty is in coping with failure: even good options may fail many times in a row, and bad options may succeed, so options cannot simply be ruled out after a failure or two, and if one is too hasty to write an option off, one may take a long time to realize that, losing out for many turns. Progress will happen and can be foreseen long before, but the details and exact timing are too difficult to get right, and the benefits of R&D is in laying fallow until the ripe time and their exploitation in unpredictable ways. This has historically been less typical in the venture world, but, increasingly, as entrepreneurs take on more established industriesparticularly those that are regulatedbringing a view of the market that is unconstrained by previous professional experiences may in fact be a plus. This technological advancement is believed to be able to address the knowledge gap in neurophysiology and neurological disorder. However, they also brought us cyber warfare, hackers, identity theft, cyber stalking, and a host of other bad things. While I was at Stanford, my student colleagues included Syed Tariq and Hugo Sandal,4 two other Ramey students who wrote the first papers using the Stehfest algorithm5,6 to numerically transform analytical models for well testing from Laplace space into real space. Privately, given the skewed returns, diminishing utility, the oversized negative impacts (a bad startup can ruin ones life and drive one to suicide), the limited number of startups any individual can engage in (yielding gamblers ruin)26, and the fact that startups & VC will capture only a minute percentage of the total gains from any success (most of which will turn into consumer surplus/positive externalities), the only startups that make any rational sense, which you wouldnt have to be crazy to try, are the overdetermined ones which anyone can see are a great idea. Pity the Scientist Who Discovers the Discovered, ignoring both mail order & Internet all the way until bankruptcy in 2010, eBay sellers like us so much theyre making their own promotional materials, The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion, Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?, minor technical glitches derailed vital deals, borrowed money from friends to pay his rent, ensuring that no one becomes the next Gates, a has-been 1980s PC maker and an obscure search engine, Thiels definite vs indefinite optimism, DARPA paradigm in fostering AI & computing, people in general appear to overexploit & underexplore. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. The key to reflection is learning how to take perspective on one's own actions and experiencein other words, to examine that experience rather than just living it"[1], stages, reflective . September 5, 2005 By Christine A. Ehlig-Economides The Way Ahead "All the problems of the world could be settled if people were only willing to think. AI researcher Donald Michie, claimed in 1970, based on a 1969 poll, that a majority of AI researchers estimated 10100 years for AGI (or 19792069) and that There is also fair agreement that the chief obstacles are not hardware limitations.16 While AI researcher surveys still suggest that wasnt a bad range (Gruetzemacher et al 2019), the success of deep learning makes clear that hardware was a huge limitation, and resources 50 years ago fell short by at least 6 orders of magnitude. Ehlig-Economides has published more than 50 papers, has authored two patents, and has lectured or consulted in more than 30 countries. In this edition, we are reminded that rigorous technical work is one of the pillars of our industry. If you knew for certain that Facebook would be as huge as it was, what stocks, exactly, could you have invested in, pre-IPO, to capture gains from its growth? Smartphones are an even bigger example of this. The different pathologies might be: small ones will collectively try lots of strange or novel ideas but will fail by running underpowered poorly-done experiments (for lack of funding & expertise) which convince no one, suffer from small-study biases, and merely pollute the literature, giving meta-analysts migraines. He is the reason I have had the courage and motivation to continue contributing to an industry that has never been all that eager to take women seriously, and I am the reason he became interested in petroleum engineering. Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding, Build something people want is not enough, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases16, Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves, Technological convergence in drug discovery and other endeavors, Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact, Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology, How DFS, poker, basketball, Starcraft and strong opinions, weakly held (SOWH) can help your startup, An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron, How Bubbles and Megaprojects Parallelize Innovation, Market Research, Wireframing, and Design, Spend twice as much effort every time you attempt to solve a problem, Why didnt electricity immediately change manufacturing? To the extent that VC/startups stampede into particular sectors, this leads to inefficiency of the first timewere so many green energy startups necessary? It can reasonably be said that time was unripe for digital computing as an industrial technology. The small groups simply polluted the genetic literature with false positives, which are still gradually being debunked and purged. One of the most basic reasons to begin self-reflection in your daily routine is that it can assist you in making sense of daily events. And the Media Lab wasnt the only one, General Magic (1989), had an almost identical vision of a networked future powered by small touchscreen devices. A predictable waste of money, perhaps, but thats how the incentives work out. Today, I am not really a proponent of type-curve matching per se, but rather with using the derivative response to recognize flow regimes.13 We now can use data processing originally designed for convolution or deconvolution of downhole pressure and flow-rate data for analysis of production data.14 This approach is particularly effective in wells with permanent gauges. Reflection can be valuable when the workgroup uses it to learn more about impact and to catalyze action toward a destination. Example: in retrospect, we know everyone wanted computers, OSes, social networksbut the history of them is strewn with flaming rubble. Well start off renting people a doomed format in a way inferior to our established competitor Blockbuster (which will choose to commit suicide by ignoring both mail order & Internet all the way until bankruptcy in 2010)8; this will (somehow) let us pivot to streaming, where we will license all our content from our worst enemies, who will destroy us the instant we are too successful & already intend to run streaming services of their ownbut thats OK because well just convince Wall Street to wait decades while giving us hundreds of billions of dollars to replace Hollywood by making thousands of film & TV series ourselves (despite the fact that weve never done anything like that before and there is no reason to think we would be any better at it than they are)., Or Github: Well offer code hosting services like that of SourceForge or Google Code which requires developers to use one of the most user-hostile DVCSes, only to FLOSS developers who are notorious cheapskates, and charge them a few bucks for a private version., SpaceX: Orbital Sciences Corporation has a multi-decade headstart but are fat and lazy; well catch up by buying some spare Russian rockets while we invent our own futuristic reusable ones. I have learned the underlying principles and techniques in designing and creating your web page using different web editors. A typical reflection paper is between 300 and 700 words long. Reflection Paper About Technology Reflection Paper #1 It is 2017 and it is safe to say that technology has integrated into daily routines. I once was shown some data acquired in a water-injection well that was abruptly shut in from a flow rate of 30,000 BOPD. (Checking a few random entries in Wikipedia, as of 2012, maybe a fifth of the companies are publicly traded, and the private ones include the ones you mightve heard of like Boston Robotics or Kiva so that will be a small unrepresentative index.) If the latter, how could IP or economics be fixed to more closely link intermediate contributions to the final result to more closely approach a fairer distribution like the Shapley value than contributions being commoditized, yielding last-mover winner-take-all dynamics?. We may not understand, we may not see, But we must trust, have faith, and believe. I was still commuting to Connecticut on the weekends and really did not know what was going to transpire on my return. Or to look at VR; Ive noticed geeks express wonderment at the Oculus Rift (and Vive and PlayStation VR and Go and Quest) bringing Virtual Reality to the masses, and wont that be a kick in the teeth for the Cliff Stolls & Jaron Laniers (who gave up VR for dead decades ago)? Mark Zuckerberg, in 2004, wanted nothing more than to sell Facebook for a few million dollars so he could work on his P2P filesharing program, Wirehog, commenting that the sale price just needed to be large enough to propel Wirehog. Youtube was a dating site. Whatever the evidence, the fundamental question VCs are trying to answer is: Why back this founder against this problem set versus waiting to see who else may come along with a better organic understanding of the problem? At that time, my technical interest was in layered reservoir testing.12 In layered reservoir tests, the combination of pressure and flow rates measured at different levels in the well in response to changes in the surface flow rate permit characterization of commingled zones on a zone-by-zone basis. previous similar startups failed). Businesses wont be able to get enough of it; employees will love to hate it., English Wikipedia: Well compete with Microsoft Encarta, the Encyclopedia Britannica, H2G2, Everything2, Interpedia, The Distributed Encyclopedia Project (TDEP), TheInfo, & GNUs GNE by letting literally anyone edit some draft articles for Nupedia.9, Zoom: Skype has a literally 15-year headstart, but we can do so much better, and maybe something will make everyone suddenly want to video-conference after all this time avoiding it as much as possible?. It was not much but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week. 2. Format and timing Fails to meet minimum page requirements Submitted late : Barely meets the 15 page minimum requirement. Although, I have used technology in my classroom before, now I. The study is a descriptive one based on qualitative research. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential. Put simply, it's not the time lead or the technology; it's what a firm does with its time lead and . Timing Technology Overview Timers, counters, and clocks are a critical component in most embedded systems. (And what about Douglas Engelbart, or Alan Kay/Xerox PARC, who explicitly aimed to skate towards where the puck would be?) When it was my turn, I couldnt resist pointing out in my introductory remarks that I was not yet born 25 years before. It is not always as easy a task as it sounds. Is this impossibly rare? In the 1980s, famed technologist Stewart Brand visited the equally-famed MIT Media Lab (perhaps the truest spiritual descendant of the MIT AI Lab) & Nicholas Negroponte, publishing a 1988 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. A more practical approach is to embrace uncertainty, taking a reinforcement learning perspective. We tried something, or somebody else tried something, and it didnt work. Similarly, the benefit of taking Moores law seriously is that one can plan ahead to take advantage of it24 even if one doesnt know exactly when, if ever, it will happen. This balances overall exploitation & exploration to progress as fast as possible, showing the usefulness of technological forecasting on a global level despite its uselessness to individuals. Technology is a subject that you will encounter in the school process starting from elementary till college. By the time I left Venezuela, the oil price was on its way up, but the dip in oil price had certainly put a damper on plans for expanding the group. and what it isn't. Learning for the sake of learning. . Translation, Katsuki Sekida, Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Records, 2005., Which as a side note is wrong; compiled predictions actually indicate that AI researcher forecasts, while varying anywhere from a decade to centuries, typically cluster around 20 years in the future regardless of researcher age. Youve invented taxis & buses. o Activity Report: Technology and Past ( interviews with elders) o Nature's Longest Threads by Janaki. Before that, everyone relied strictly on finding a straight line on a Horner plot3 (Fig. You cant imitate a successful entrepreneur, the time is past. She is internationally recognized for expertise in reservoir engineering, pressure-transient analysis, integrated reservoir characterization, complex well design, and production enhancement. They use their discretion to surface proposals that have at least one champion, regardless of whether there are any detractorsThe results show that there is greater ex ante uncertainty in the ARPA-E research portfolio compared to proposals with the highest mean scores (Model1). The concept behind antireflection technology is to control the light used in an optical device in such a manner that the light rays reflect from surfaces where it is intended and . Ehlig-Economides, C.A., Mowat, G.R., and Corbett, C.: Techniques for Multibranch Well Trajectory Design in the Context of a Three-Dimensional Reservoir Model, paper SPE 35505 presented at the European 3D Reservoir Modeling Conference in Stavanger, 1617 April 1996. ): you will not be the next Bill Gates, because Bill Gates was not the first and only Bill Gates, he was, pace Stiglers Law, the last Bill Gates13; many people made huge fortunes off OSes, both before and after Gatesyou may have forgotten Wang, but hopefully you remember Steve Jobs (before, Mac) and Steve Jobs (after, NeXT). In hindsight the things that worked look like good ideas and the ones that failed look stupid, but sadly its not that obvious at the time. The question constantly asked of anyone who claims to know a better way (as futurologists implicitly do): If youre so smart, why arent you rich? The lesson I draw is: it is not enough to predict the future, one has to get the timing right to not be ruined, and then execute, and then get lucky in a myriad ways. After that, an explosion of new models presented on log-log coordinates appeared in the mushrooming well-test literature. See also An Oral History of Nintendos Power Glove, and Polygons oral history of the Kinect, All the money in the world couldnt make Kinect happen: For a moment a decade ago, the game industry looked like a very different place.. It wont have cut and paste. Is this even nonpublic knowledge at all? The tempting deals are the bad ideas that look like good ideas, yet they ultimately contain some hidden flaw that reveals their true badness. How do you time your startup? If you were sure of that back then, or even mostly persuaded, and if a lot of others were as well, what good fortune you could have harvested. Three-dimensional-seismic-data acquisition and interpretation and borehole images became widespread while I worked in integrated reservoir characterization. Michie went on to point out that in a previous case, Charles Babbage, his work was foredoomed by it being an unripe time due to hardware limitations and represented a complete waste of time & money17. In fact, timing is a science. and less Total page count over 20. As a research manager with training and experience in pharmaceutical chemistry, a lively interest in medicine, and rapport with the medical community, Hrlein was well positioned to survey the field where chemistry and medicine joined battle against disease. In particular, VCs are trying to determine whether this founder will be able to create a compelling story around the company mission in order to attract great engineers, executives, sales and marketing people, etc. Critical problems are the research questions, cast in terms of the concrete particulars of currently available knowledge and technique and of specific exemplars or models (eg. Why are success and failure so intertwined in the tech industry? In Schlumberger at that time, there were two alternative technologies competing with pressure-transient-test analysis using the derivative. 2 Err Again, self reflection is not about building your "best life", it's about figuring out what type of person you want to become. Many bubbles can be interpreted as people being 100% correct the futurebut missing the timing (Thiels article on China and bubbles1, The Economist on obscure property booms, Garbers Famous First Bubbles). It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being and one of good omen; thus it is declared in the Odes, in the Annals, in the biographies of illustrious men, and in other texts of unquestioned authority. Its not enough to theorize about the possibility or prototype something in the lab if there is then no followup. Bitcoin is a topical example: its still in the early stages where it looks either like a genius stroke to invest in, or a fools paradise/Ponzi scheme. Counting for inflation, probably more money was spent [than] than Facebook just spent on Oculus. A kind of definition of Value of Information: If you do not work on an important problem, its unlikely youll do important work. Theyd been known for decades. Hrleins efforts to translate success in certain areas (vitamin deficiency disease, chemotherapy of protozoal infections) into optimism about possibilities in other areas (cancer, antibacterial chemotherapy) was characteristic. 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