Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fall GSA 2015

Fall GSA is in Baltimore this year — practically next door to Philadelphia — so naturally Temple will have a big presence. I will be presenting a paper on a 3D GPR survey I did last June while on sabbatical … Continue reading

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Pompeii

I recently returned from vacationing in Italy. Of course, as a geoscientist who teaches about natural disasters I felt obliged to make a day trip to Pompeii. The site is visited by thousands of tourists daily, but is still worth … Continue reading

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Using thermal imagery to look for GW seepage, Pennypack Creek, PA

My colleague, Marty Briggs, at the USGS Office of Groundwater, Branch of Geophysics, has done some fascinating research using thermal imaging.  The weekend I borrowed a FLIR camera to look for seepage points in the bank of the Pennypack Creek … Continue reading

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PYCON 2015

Most of my scientific career I’ve relied on Matlab for algorithm development.  But recently I’ve started exploring programming in Python.  The benefits for scientists  of converting to Python from Matlab are laid out in this Blog post. Being on sabbatical … Continue reading

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SAGEEP 2015

The Symposium for the Application of Geophysics to Environmental and Engineering Geophysics was held in Austin, TX this March. Good attendance and interesting talks! My presentation was on last summer’s experiment at the Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory: “Ground-based LiDAR … Continue reading

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GPR Research at the Susquehanna-Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory

This Friday (11/21) Graduate student Lacey Pitman successfully defended her masters thesis titled: “Ground-penetrating Radar Images of a Dye Tracer Test Within the Unsaturated Zone at the Susquehanna-Shale Hills CZO.” Here is the abstract: Dye tracer and time-lapse ground-penetrating radar … Continue reading

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Know-it-alls or clueless?

Do students who hand in quizzes early score better? Haven’t you ever wondered? Some students turn in their quizzes in half the time of the others. Do they know all the answers or are they the no-hopers who give up … Continue reading

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Interactive scientific plots posted on a paranoid webserver.

While Temple make it easy to create a WordPress hosted website, they turn off all user-authored javascript. I guess they have a point; security is a huge issue as hacker assault our servers all the time. But if you want … Continue reading

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The Trouble With Tremors

I recently helped a couple of TU Teach students put together a poster to join the Franklin Institute’s Science After Hours monster mash-up night held on Tuesday, October 14th, .  We focused on one of the scientific  “Oh, please!” moments in the movie … Continue reading

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Look, Ma. New toys!

Temple has recently purchased a Trimble TX-5 terrain-based LiDAR system that collects nearly million points a second as it scans the position of nearby structures.  The  system will be used for mapping microtopography as part of a new million dollar … Continue reading

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