Roger, topic # 3 is largely for your consideration. The other topics are for any interested parties. These are personal opinions.

1. As a type of serious hobby I am running an earthquake forecasting program which is highly selective for earthquakes which will occur near populated areas and perhaps be destructive. At the present time there is no other program anywhere on Earth like this one. I circulate warnings for earthquakes and at times also circulate "no destructive earthquakes expected" notes when other forecasters believe that one might be approaching and none of my warning signals are indicating that one is going to occur. Those "no destructive earthquakes expected" notes have a high success rate. And they are a lot more important than one might think.

This forecasting program requires a certain amount of maintenance. And at least a month now I have been focusing on upgrading to a newer computer. The one I have been using has been getting ready to go off to that great computer land in the sky! This was a major effort as I have had to modify some complex specialty computer programs to run on the newer system which also has a more advanced operating system. All of the major parts of this effort got done yesterday. And I am now starting to get back to doing some earthquake research and discussing the general subject matter with other researchers around the world.

2. I presently have direct and indirect contacts with people involved with a good percentage of the major private and government earthquake forecasting programs around the world. And if some type of technology such as the RingMap program can be shown to produce a valuable type of data then some of these people would probably be interested in merging that technology with their own programs. An effort of that type is presently underway to get Shan's program tested and then used by people around the world if it can be shown to work.

The point is, if people have developed any technology such as the RingMap program and can show that it works, then if they explain it to me and make it available I can see if it can be used by some of my contacts. Details regarding ownership rights and publication recognition would have to be worked out by the parties involved themselves. I can offer suggestions but not much in the way of help with that.

3. RingMap usage - Roger, if you are writing specialty programs which look at the RingMap technology then you might consider the following:

It could be useful to have a program developed which would enable people to look back in time to see if an important earthquake might have been triggered by some other earthquake. Here is how it might work:

The program would ask for the latitude, longitude, and date of the important earthquake as well as a magnitude range and a time range. It would then check past earthquake during that time range and in that magnitude range to see if they were at those important distances from the original earthquake. Results would then be sorted and stored in a file for examination.

Each past earthquakes would be assigned a 1 to 9 weight value (9 highest) which depended upon how close it was to one of those narrow ring areas and how important each ring was. The sort would then be by weight value and then by ring distance value.

The first column in the results table would contain the weight value for each earthquake with the ones in the 9 range near the top of the table. The second column would show what the distance was between the original important earthquake and the one being reported. The third column would contain the usual time, latitude, longitude, magnitude, depth, and location information for the earthquake being reported.

This should be a relatively easy program to write. I might try it myself but am not presently using a good version of Basic etc. and do not know what the various ring probabilities are. The value of the program would be in the fact that it would enable researchers to develop some idea regarding which past earthquakes might have been responsible for triggering the one being studied.

4. If people believe that there might be some RingMap type of connection between two earthquakes then if they post a note here listing the two earthquakes or send me an e-mail with information on them then if I have time I can run them through my own programs to see if there is a match there. The earthquake information should have either the standard USGS or RedPuma formats. And they have to have occurred after January 1 of 1990. The data I am working with go only back to the beginning of 1990.

If a note is posted here with that information then the poster should include something like "Attn: EQF" in its heading so that I know it contains that information.

5. With this newer computer I decided to install a voice to text program. You can talk to it and it will convert your words to text in a word processing file. It will also execute commands such as opening and closing files etc. which could really be a great help. The problem is that it does not work very well. It gets easily confused regarding what it thinks you are saying. And I had to put developing it on hold for a while. I suspect that the signal being generated by the microphone is not strong enough and am going shopping for a better one.

Has anyone else had any success with those voice to text programs?