SpaceMika

Although I’ve found a surprising number of landslide-bloggers (my favourite is Dave’s), google searches on the DAN-W and DAN3D software packages seem to drop people here. I’m fairly regularly getting comments asking how to go about modeling particular landslides, or acquire the software, or related queries. To speed up response time, I’ve developed an F.A.Q.

1. How can I get DAN-W or DAN3D?
DAN-W is owned by Oldrich Hungr. Please see his software website and contact him directly with any inquires about acquiring the software. DAN3D was developed by Scott McDougall as part of his phD thesis. To the best of my knowledge, it is for research purposes only and not currently available commercially, but again, Oldrich Hungr knows for sure.

2. What information do I need about a landslide to model its runout?
For DAN-W, you need a profile of the travel path (including entrainment zones) and the source area, and the width of the path. This can be either a list of coordinates or a to-scale sketch which you can enter directly into the software. For DAN3D, you need digital terrain models (topography) of the area before and after the landslide. You will need to format this as ASCII grid files of the path, the source area, and any entrainment.

3. What rheology should I use?
If you’re doing a back-analysis, you use whatever rheology and parameters provide the appropriate runout distance, debris distribution, and velocity profile. If you’re doing a forward prediction, you can follow the suggestions in my thesis (currently TBA, sorry!), or back-analyze cases similar to your target and use that range of parameters in your prediction.

4. Tell me more about a particular landslide.
If I’ve personally modeled a landslide, it should be floating around this site somewhere. Most are linked off the Thesis page, although the latest versions haven’t been translated from thesis-formatting to website-formatting and hopped online yet.

5. What about modeling this specific landslide not on your website?
If you’re working on modeling a landslide I haven’t seen before, I’m curious. Tell me about it!

Laura writes: “I’m gonna be utterly shameless now and ask a favour: I’m trying to help out my old physics teacher with some outreach and mentoring of students and I’m rapidly running out of ideas; could I link your blog on my site so the guys can see into a real scientists life? (they get bored of my student life, I’m sure)”

At the moment I’m just another evolution of the academic, but I’m always happy doing science outreach. If you think they’d enjoy it, link away! As for a Q&A with them, how about the oh-so-fuzzy answer of, “As time permits”?  If they post questions in comments, I’ll answer a few here & there when I get time; if you compile a list I’ll probably do the same thing I did with Joe (horde it as my not-work-project for a long time, then release a giant splurge of writing).

chevron7 writes: “I would have been interested to see Samantha Carter’s progression if she wasn’t employed in the military. Did it help or hinder her?”

(Thanks for the alt.-to-.ppt tip before; I think my computer has developed stage fright. & where in Oz?)

I think Carter ended up with pretty much an ideal career. In the military you don’t need to waste time writing grant proposals all the time, so the downside is applications (feeling like all your research gets corrupted into new ways of killing people) and classification (never getting to publish). I never noticed Carter having huge moral quandaries with what she was doing, she got to have practical applications to some pretty astrophysically-far-out theories, and there’s enough occasional references to her publishing (even a book!) that she doesn’t suffer McKay’s problem of it’s-all-too-classified-to-write. To me that sounds way better than the alternative-future they gave her in “Continuum.

astrumporta writes: “I wanted to say I didn’t realize you’re a woman from your name (I know a male Mikka!) and I don’t think Joe used a pronoun, otherwise you might have gotten more “women in science” questions. [...] And I think most fans would say you have the dream job of all geek dream jobs!”

Yeah, being in physics/science means that unless a name is clearly feminine, it’s often assumed male until proven otherwise. It’s understandable, especially with my name looking like a typo for Mike (and I’ve also known a male Miikka, one of the grad students in the cosmology lab I worked in). I also get a lot of people guessing the gender right but thinking I’m Japanese in other blind Q&A sessions I’ve done for other outreach projects. It’s too early to have a solid hypothesis, but I’m wondering if it’s because we’re so accustomed to seeing “normal” gender balances in scifi that it’s easy to project that into real life and not consider women-in-science a strange enough occupation to ask about it.

Yup, totally my dream job. I really hope I get to come back for more!

Mika & Director Martin Wood: hanging out in McKay’s apartment in “The Last Man”.

I’m glad you had fun with the Q&A, and are investigating some of the links! It’s a rare sunny day in Vancouver so I’m heading out to enjoy it, but when it gets dark I’ll be back to see how many of the follow-up questions in the comments I can tackle.

My interview/Q&A is up on Joe’s blog. For some reason his version of wordpress doesn’t play nicely with mine, so all my pretty formatting disappeared. Ain’t it always the way? I’ll post the pretty version here after he’s gone on to other interviews.

Questions fell into a few broad categories which oddly mimic elementary school interview guidelines:
1. Who are you?
2. What do you do?
3. What is it like?
4. How did you start?
5. Why does the science happen like that in this episode?
Although we skipped When and Where and instead finish with Category Six, the unclassifiable queries.

The most surprising thing about the Q&A is that I did not get a single question about women & science. I need to remember to pass that tidbit on and see if anyone else has observations or thoughts on the relationship between scifi and women-in-science that we could build into a hypothesis. It also leaves me curious about counting up the number of female scientist/engineers listed in various episodes — Atlantis always seemed more balanced than any department I’ve been in (even with geo- being way more female-friendly than -physics).