In the last presidential column I wrote, I reminded you that the CSEG executive elections will soon be upon us and solicited nominations from the membership. If you know of some dynamic individual who can make an impact on our society please consider approaching that individual and nominating them for a position. With the current economic environment the society is headed for challenging times and needs the best from our membership. Recognizing how the economic downturn has negatively impacted our membership the Doodletrain committee this year created special pricing for our unemployed members so they can remain current with their knowledge and skills.
In contrast to previous years, the CSEG will probably run a slight deficit this year. We have consciously chosen to continue providing the same level/quality of services to our members as in previous years without increasing membership fees. In previous good years we have been able to build up a surplus which we can draw upon now. However, we are looking at trying to increase revenues and trim spending where the impact is minor. For example, we are looking at member / non-member pricing at various society events. This has already been implemented this fall for luncheons and are considering this for other activities as well.
The Society has been involved in a number of new technical initiatives over the last several months. The CSEG sponsored a microseismic workshop at Canada Olympic Park which sold out. There were attendees from Calgary, B.C., Ontario, the United Kingdom and Kuwait. The workshop included 50 talks in 10 sessions including acquisition, processing, error analysis, engineering and interpretation of microseismic data. Kudos to the organizing committee of Paul Anderson, Dave Eaton, Mike Jones, Rob Kendall, Jennifer Leslie-Panek, John Logel, Shawn Maxwell and Chris Neal.
The SEG started a new Special Lecture Program in which some of the best talks are from the last SEG convention, are presented in other venues. The CSEG has chosen to host a number of these as Lunchbox talks. The first one will feature Bob Hardage speaking on November 18th on ‘Expanding Seismic Stratigraphy to the Full-Elastic Wavefield’. This will be followed by Sergey Fomel speaking on ‘Predictive Painting of 3D Seismic Volumes’ on December 8, 2009. Please see http://cseg.ca/technical/category/lunchbox/ for more information. In addition to our regular CSEG luncheon we will also run a joint luncheon with the CSPG on November 23rd. This will be presented by Tom Brent with the title Reflection Seismic Data from Legacy Hydrocarbon Exploration of Cenozoic and Older Basins of the Canadian High Arctic’. Many thanks to our Director of Education Jennifer Leslie-Panek and Assistant Director of Communication John Fernando for making all these additional functions happen.
Over the past couple of years we have been holding joint conventions with the CSPG. The feedback we have received indicates that our membership prefers this to a convention solely focused on geophysics. Informally, the CWLS has participated in the last couple of conventions. Over the summer we have been negotiating to make this relationship more formal bringing them into JACC. I hope to report in the coming months that we have successfully done so. As part of these discussions we have also been examining other opportunities for cooperation. One initiative that has been suggested is to publish an online joint Canadian Geosciences Journal. Ever since we stopped publishing the Canadian Journal of Exploration Geophysics, our Society has lacked a peer reviewed journal. A number of years ago, it was identified that we would like to provide a forum to publish peer reviewed articles focusing on Canadian geophysical problems. We examined what it would take to publish peer reviewed articles in the Recorder but found out that it was quite complex to actually do this. By publishing an online joint geosciences journal we could address this need in a cost effective fashion. At this point we are trying to understand the need for such a journal and so would be happy to receive any feedback from the membership on the merits of such an initiative.
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