Petra writes:
"The scientific community who governs real life predictions has already set a standard and protocols."

Dennis replies:
No, this isn't entirely true. Up until the VAN team came into existence, there never were any standards that had been put into place for evaluating earthquake predictions. And even then, it was thru the efforts of only a couple of people that anything was ever done. But even what has been done so far hasn't been overwhelmingly approved by the scientific community. You can go out to different seismology journals and see papers on the subject. But that is all they are. Papers with somebody's viewpoint. Some I didn't agree with though its been awhile since I've read them and don't remember the particulars right now.

What Alan had done was acceptable on the newsgroup and he did at one time plan to publish his method but I don't know if he ever actually did do that. But then again, publishing is one thing. Gaining acceptance is another. I know from experience that if Alans method were put to the vote, it would have a lot of dissenters. Case in point, when I had reached the level of being statistically significant thru Alans' method, other people came out of the woodwork saying that Alans' method didn't test the process properly and the we should have been using double blind tests instead. That brought out a several hundred message thread.

For the most part, I agree with Alans' methodology . At least for an initial evaluation of a prediction methodology.