That’s it

Just received my second jab of Pfizer vaccine on Wednesday. But what is up with all those empty chairs? I spoke with the injector afterwards and asked her about it. She said that they are dimensioned for 1500 people per day, but currently only had about 400 through the doors each day. She hoped it was just due to holidays, but I am afraid it is just laziness or ignorance on behalf of the invited. I hope I am wrong. It really is flabbergasting to think about about the level hesitancy there is with these vaccines. We are so fortunate in Denmark, that all who wants a vaccine can have one. What about some consideration for all the places around the world where there is dire need for vaccines. The main argument I read in the news is that people are concerned over long-term health issues if thry receive a vaccine. What a lame excuse…

What about the long-term health concerns of catching COVID-19? That has actually been seen in all to many cases and this is okay to you? What the hell?

And even if you are dumb enough to think that the health risk is somehow lower for catching COVID-19, then you should still feel obliged to do it for the most vulnerable and those who actually are allergic to vaccines. Vaccination is such a rare instance of doing what is best for you is also what is best for society at large. Win-win. It is as simple as that.

I am not going to convince anyone with this rant. It is just not very constructive. If you know of anyone who are either a sceptic or hesitant, please urge them to listen to the latest podcast episode from Sam Harris. In contrast to his other episodes, this one is free in order to increase awareness about the misinformation regarding the vaccines and COVID-19 that keeps circulating social media. The link is here.

https://samharris.org/podcasts/256-contagion-bad-ideas/

Peace out and happy vaccination everyone ☺️

Back with a bang!

“Guess who’s back, guess who’s back,….”

Those are the wise words delivered by the biggest music star of my childhood – Eminem. And like Eminem, I am also back working again (in the office!). And with a pleasant surprise. My paper on choosing between gaussian simulation and multiple-point geostatistical simulation has now been published in the paginated issue. The research tries to provide insight to how information content of ones data can inform the process of choosing which modeling tool should be applied in a given case. It attracted some nice attention at the recent geostats conference, where the question was also flipped by the brilliant Mohan Srivastava who asked whether one could also consider what kind of data information would be required if one had already decided in advance the modeling technique to be used. Interesting question, but I assume it is more relevant for most people to decide on a modeling tool once the data is collected and not prior to it. But maybe in the future one could imagine that data is collected in accordance with a preferred modeling technique? Could be nice.

Anyway, the paper is open-source and the link is here

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00477-020-01954-2

Geostats 2021 and more

So, another week’s gone. The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. On the 14th of June a little new member of the family arrived. Eskild is his name. Sweet and happy, but not sleepy at all. I guess he takes that on from his older brother.

Anyway, what this means is that I have been on parental leave since then. Thus, my working activity has been stagnant and will remain so until the start of August. This week however was (unfortunately since I couldn’t participate) the postponed week for geostats 2020. You know the pandemic 😔

I was scheduled for two presentations, which were prerecorded and shown at the conference. Thanks to some very much appreciated help from my co-authors Ingelise Møller and Thomas Mejer Hansen who were also part of the conference a discussion session for each presentation was also possible. I will put both presentations on my webpage shortly. If you also want to see the q and a session for each presentation I can firmly recommend registering for the conference and gaining access to all presentations and discussion sessions. I know at least what I will be up to when the two boys go to sleep in the next weeks.

I sincerely hope that it is possible to go ahead with Geostats 2024 in normal fashion. Such an interesting crowd of people and topics. Geostats 2016 was hands down the best conference I have ever attended.

Cheers

A year passed…

Wow. Time flies.

When I posted my last blog entry, I did not expect 1 year would pass before I would post again. Yet here we are. I just wanted to let you all now that I am fine, although the pandemic has (as for many others) had major impact on my life. I’m still working though, which is what I wanted to inform you about. With a lot of other talented people I just published an open-access article in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS).

We try to jointly simulate subsurface redox and geological architectures using 3D MPS simulation. I have been surprised of how well this turned out, given that this is not a trivial task of combining knowledge from geophysics, geology, geochemistry and geostatistics. I hope this applied work will inspire more use of MPS in mapping but also in considering how redox mapping can be performed without relying on the typical redox boundary modeling.

The article is available through the following link.

HESS – 3D multiple-point geostatistical simulation of joint subsurface redox and geological architectures (copernicus.org)

Kind Regards

Rasmus

P.s.

The picture was taken at a beach in the northern part of Jutland in April 2021. I was going for a walk with my family and spotted this perfect minor scale geological outcrop, that I had to take a picture of. It reminds me of how nature can be amazingly fractal-like sometimes, where this horizontal layering could easily also be seen at much larger scales. It also reminds me that there is actually a lot of interesting geology to see in Denmark if one opens his/her eyes 😊

Part of the statistics

What strange times. So many internet “experts” around, so little actual information. Therefore, I will spare you my two cents 🙂 Luckily, much covid data is available for free and I must admit that it is difficult not to play around with the data myself. Have been working from home as so many others to reduce contamination risk and it seems to be working alright here in Denmark. My son started daycare a few weeks ago. Almost simultaneously, I started an ongoing cough that still persists today. I of course went straight to the testing facility here in Aarhus, but they could not detect any virus. At least not covid19…Anyway, I am now officially part of the statistics. Look me up.

In other news. I just joined the editorial team of the GEUSbulletin.org as a subject editor of geophysics and geostatistics. The journal is a revamped version of the old GEUS bulletin now focusing on geoscience manuscripts with a focus on Denmark, Greenland and the Arctic region. The journal peer-reviewed and open access journal. Very excited to start this chapter of work. Probably time consuming, but also gratifying to read some nice manuscripts. The journal also do not charge publication fees and articles can be freely downloaded online, which I am a big fan of. I generally hope this is a way forward for science. Too much power still resides at the big publishers.

Two manuscripts are about to leave the birds nest (One in RESPROB and one in MAPFIELD). Should hopefully be able to fly. More news on that as soon as I know more. I will also be presenting a poster at the IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition. My first one actually. For some reason I always end up doing oral presentations at conferences. Looking forward to try out a poster. The conference has been rescheduled to May 2021. In similar fashion, geostats2020 has been postponed to July 2021. Here, I am scheduled for 2 oral presentations. Hope everything works out. Difficult to predict these days.

Stay safe out there.

New research added

Just wanted to let you know that I have added the presentation and abstract from the dwf2020 meeting on the webpage. Furthermore, I found an accepted abstract lying on my computer from last year. It was presented last year (2019) at the ‘sewer processes and networks’ in Aalborg. I mainly wrote the two page abstract as a conclusion on a small project I participated in with some good people at the consultancy company Niras. The project revolved around sewage pipe failures. We wanted to see whether we could establish a classification relationship between broken pipes and different pipe features such as age, material etc. Since I was only working as a subcontractor, my name could not put as the main author (company policy). Instead, Mads Paulsen ended up as the first author and also presented the findings at the conference. Made perfect sense since he handled the majority of the modelling. Had quite a bit of fun doing this project actually, and it presented a quite good case for applying machine learning. This is definitely not always the case even though it is being pushed heavily these days. It turned out that we indeed (maybe unsurprisingly) where able to predict some correlation between broken pipes and our proposes features. The abstract link is in the research archive as well.

DWF2020 abstract accepted

Long time no see. Just gotten the news that I have an abstract accepted at the danish water forum 2020. I’ll be talking about our (me and some GEUS colleagues ) new proposed framework for joint stochastic simulation of redox conditions and geological architectures. The overall goal of the research project (Mapfield) is a better description of the subsurface for targeted N-retention management. Hope to see some familiar faces there and looking forward to some criticism (hopefully constructive).

More on the project here: www.mapfield.dk

More on the conference here: http://www.danishwaterforum.dk/Research/Annual_Meeting_2020/Annual_announcement2020.html

New layout…

and I moved the website into a new web domain. From now on it can be accessed at rbmgeophysics.com. Guess I need someone to actually visit the site now. And who am I even writing this for? At this point in time I probably have to consider it an open access diary. My very own echo chamber. At least it creates a bit of content in the blog archive. I am also new to all this blogging. One can only learn by doing it. Same for coding!

Added some tags this time around. For fun!

Back to work and new paper out

3 months gone by of parental leave and now back to the office. There has been a lot of catching up the last week. Just the checking email took a few hours 😀 Good times. Been working on some nice new stuff in Python these last days. Nice to be working with some geostatistics again. Currently working on a tool that should bridge some of the gaps between 3D geological models and. Looking forward to have it ready for testing within the next weeks. Just installed pyvista and the plots look gorgeous. It’s build on VTK and has a very user friendly integration into python. A big shoutout to https://docs.pyvista.org/. In other news. Finally my newest paper is out in early access format. The title is “Estimation of a non‐stationary prior covariance from seismic data” and was the final piece in my PhD puzzle. I am really excited that it is out now and it is a great reminder of my co-author Henning Omre who has now retired. What a personality and character. You taught me so much in such a short amount of time. Please feel free to check it out. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2478.12848

P.S. What a message to return to… I’ll take care of your plants Hyojin 😀

Website up and running

Or at least partly. My own personal website is now online. Just spent the last couple of evenings playing around with wordpress and decided to go ahead and create a universe around all that is Rasmus Bødker Madsen. The site is still under construction (just as the house we just moved into) and will be further updated in coming weeks when time allows. For now the site will feature a static frontpage with featured research, a page with all research, relevant contact information and a blog.