Chris,

RE: Continued Parkfield Creep: The monitoring in Parkfield is for creep, stress and deformation. The article clearly says they need to either recalibrate their equipment or get newer more sensitive instruments. As you know ULF measures sound not ground movement. People who hear earthquakes also detect sound.

The article is also pointing out that previously after a 6.0 quake in the area then things got quiet, where this time movement continues and it is serious enough for them to think a Fort Tejon type of event is building.

Your guessing game is an interesting way to look at Indonesia and of course it is not based on anything solid, such as any type of known seismic behavior so to your friend it would not be of much interest. However, let's think about what Keilis-Borok uses for his predictions.

K.B. looks at areas that are known to have large earthquakes and when he finds increased seismicity in the area then he uses that to pick a general area for his prediction. As to the window, I'm not sure if they are all the same, but they are for just about a year from when selected. And even doing this in one of his predictions his territory was still a little shy and he missed two quakes which would have qualified and his issued prediction was a false alarm.

When Jordan presented his program he clearly demonstrated that he was not asking people to submit prediction methods based on physics, but whatever they were using. IE: Tell me what you are doing and what to you is a successful prediction. Give us the predictions and if your own program says they are within your successful paramenters, then the quakes which fall into that program are hits. So if I propose to predict earthquakes based on a sound from a fault and I set my parameters and the quakes fall into those parameters then I have successful predictions. He doesn't judge you, you judge yourself.

As for group predictions, they have never been presented here and most likely unless there was something really large on the horizon, they would not be. Just like K.B. and his group, we are in the R & D department and not ready for prime time yet.

What one should keep in mind is that true short term prediction needs to be based upon something which is in the here and now, not a year from a now, to be truly useful. This is why ULF types of monitoring are far better than strong motion monitoring. And you probably noted in reading the news articles where Jordan was interviewed that he said he had an interest in ULF, so he's aware of this.

An interesting case in point might be imagining that somewhere in the US like San Francisco or LA were to have the earthquake swarm series like they did in Baja last week. It would be easy to say within a short period of time there would a liklihood of a moderate earthquake near the cluster. A prediction of 30 days would be an acceptable window. So if one were to deliver this to the public and advise them that a moderate earthquake does not create widespread damage, but can knock items off of a shelf for instance and urge them to do a little earthquake preparedness, this would be publically palatable. They should also include that no prediction is 100% accurate.

Petra