The following appeared in the local Denver paper yesterday - enjoy

"Reliability of earthquake forecasting still shaky"
By Jim Erickson
News Science Writer

A University of Colorado physicist and his colleagues correctly
predicted tow earthquakes that shook Southern California this month.
Sort of.
John Rundle and his co-workers didn't predict the date and the
exact location of the two temblors.
But the quakes occurred in spots that the CU researchers said were
likely to be hit by magnitude 5 or greater earthquakes by 2010.
A magnitude 5.1 quake hit Big Bear, Calif., on Feb. 10 and a
magnitude 5.7 quake, centered 28 miles south of the border city of
Calexico, Calif., shook the San Diego area on Friday.
The CU quake forecast was presented at a colloquium last March
and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences on Feb. 19.
Waverly Person, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey's National
Earthquake Information Service in Golden, said the CU researchers
quake forecast is too vague to be useful.
"How are you going to save lives with that?" he asked Tuesday,
"If you tell people they've got to be watching for the next 10
years, they're not going to listen."
Scientists around the globe have tried to predict earthquakes
for decades, with little success. The most common approach is to
measure the historic rate of seismic activity in a region and use
it to assess the probability of future earthquakes.
The Colorado researchers took a slightly different tack. They
looked at clusters of small quakes that shifted from place to
place over time.
Rundle, a member of the Cooperative Institute for Research in
Environmental Sciences on CU's Boulder campus, said his team hopes
to refine its methods to make the forecasts more specific."