Roger, I think you should get the Lat-Long windows on each end from Lowell. If Lowell does not supply these I can look and see if he has this in his thesis. Then, for each earthquake over, say, M7 (your choice) on the New Guinea end, plot a graph with horizontal axis days before and after-maybe 100 days before and 100 after. On the vertical axis, have number of earthquakes over M3 (or M4, your choice) for each day for the Southern California window. You might plot symbols for each earthquake vertically, with size proportional to magnitude-that way we might recognize aftershocks, or aftershocks in the immediate area of a mainshock might be removed first. You might be able to put several earthquakes on a graph by using different colors-for the California end just keep writing the color symbols vertically above those for previous M7 New Guinea events for those that fall in the same day delay. This will give us a simple visual way of seeing if the effect is strong or weak/non-existent. It probably takes a statistical analysis like Lowell has done to show the difference between a weak effect and no effect-I may be wrong, but let's say that M7 EQs double the rate of M3+s in SOCAL about 29-30 days after. That would show up on these graphs. If the number of EQs goes up say, 10%, that might not be clear on these graphs but could have a high correlation if many M7+s in New Guinea area were used.....
Chris