John,

I do not know enough details regarding the mechanics of Shan’s forecasting procedure to answer your questions. I believe that he is trying to get some legal details organized before releasing all of the necessary information regarding exactly how it works.

Also, neither Shan nor I nor anyone else seems to know exactly what he is measuring. He is recording sun shadow deflections from an expected shadow path. Why those deflections occur is presently unknown by us. Their magnitude is also one of the details that he still needs to let people know about.

I can say that there appear to be some very high powered earthquake forecasting personnel in other parts of the world who are taking a strong interest in his procedure. And if it does actually work and it can be duplicated by other forecasters around the world then we should eventually learn about that. So far the consensus by the people involved appears to me to be that it does work.

We have been talking about GPS system data compared with his. But no conclusions were reached. At the moment efforts are underway to see if any astronomers can provide some help with information regarding Earth crust movements.

My philosophy is that if someone has gone through the trouble of getting a degree in science as Shan has (physics I believe) then if he or she claims to have made an important discovery, give them the benefit of the doubt until it is shown if their discovery is real or not. Don’t just dismiss the claims based on other types of data. I have found that extrapolations like can often be misleading. And when you are dealing with things like earthquakes which are literally a matter of life and death it is especially important to give researchers some latitude with their claims.