Egu

This photo deserves to be at the center of the page. It is memorable. Why? I will explain immediately: anyone with a scientific eye will already have understood that I was presenting a poster. I was at EGU in Vienna. The guy next to me, wearing purple trousers, a black shirt, a black silk scarf with white doves, and a biker-style jacket, and I assure you that the hair is not a wig but real 1970s hair, may look like a hippie picked up at the last minute from the city streets. In reality, he is a great mind, and is seriously at risk of becoming my IT guru: his name is Keith J. Jeffery. He is a true heavyweight in European IT architectures, with many titles. An excerpt from one of his bios says: “Keith Jeffery is currently Director of IT and International Strategy of STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council), based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK.” He also holds various other titles, director here, president there, has worked on Grid, now works on Cloud, and many other interesting things that I will skip. ...

What does Rocco Siffredi have to do with Google and technology? The common point is clear: the display of enormous power, sexual in one case and computational in the other. I leave it to the reader to guess which one is Google and which one is Siffredi. The parallel appeared very clearly in my mind when I listened to a talk here at EGU (read this post to discover what EGU is) about Google’s new search and computation engine for Earth sciences, EarthEngine. IMAGE By Niccolo Caranti (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ...

I have various friends and acquaintances outside my work circle with whom I often end up talking about my activities. Every time, surprisingly, I discover how hard it is to explain what happens at these conferences or meetings I sometimes attend. Having already given up on answering the fatal question “what do you do for a living?” when asked by non-specialists over 70, I now try to explain how a congress such as EGU works. I once tried saying: “I work in EPOS, a European project dealing with the integration of research infrastructures for Earth sciences; now I work on metadata collection for the creation of a catalogue that will allow data discovery and integration.” The result was bewildered looks, mechanical “ah, interesting” replies, and other scenes I will spare you. ...