[Skywise]

(07-03-2015, 12:16 PM)Island Chris Wrote: The following is only mildly interesting to me:

https://eos.org/project-updates/seismic-...the-models

What is a little more interesting is the comments about how they did their science discussions and reports.

Chris

Thank you for that. I really like that "Powell Blood Oath". Kinda ties in with some recent "passionate arguing" of my own on another board about the need for appropriate moderation of chat forums and the elimination of those who can't conform to commonly accepted societal norms for appropriate interaction. I even backed up my arguments with references. All for naught, I'm afraid.

Moving on, though, I still found something of interest in the subject of this article:

Quote:PSHA modeling typically seeks to strip out aftershocks, foreshocks, and swarms to isolate main shocks. This “declustering” is highly uncertain, leaving anywhere from 80% to 20% of the earthquakes as “main shocks.” The gathered participants agreed that there should be standardized declustering algorithms and tests of whether the declustered catalog exhibits Poissonian behavior...

I've thought about this myself in observing Roger's analyses of various quake predictors over the years. This topic always seems to be a point of contention. It is absolutely appropriate to remove certain events from a catalog for testing purposes, but those being tested always argue that Roger is being arbitrary, and thus flawed in his analysis. I agree only to the extent outlined in this article, that there is no standard method of declustering. But declustering must nevertheless be done to attain a fair review of predictive success.

And taking my thoughts a step further, I've often struggled with the absolutism of prediction analysis. Some have pointed out that even a .1 magnitude or a few kilometers makes the difference between a hit or a miss, potentially with radical changes in significance of results. If only there were some reasonable and logical method of making a 'fuzzy' analysis that would still impart meaningful results. But alas, I simply don't have the knowledge to even know if such is possible. Intuitively, it seems possible to me. But there could be very sound reasoning why it's not. (see, recognizing the weakness of my own argument )

Brian