Earthquake Forecasting Efforts and Other Humanitarian Efforts – April 21, 2012

EPmap

Most of the work on the latest version of this program is now done. Roger needs to finish some display screen adjustments. And I will need to make some adjustments in the wave generation calculations. They are very basic adjustments such as telling the program that the sun is around 25 N during July rather than 25 S. Those adjustments are needed because of how the original equations were organized. My Etdprog.exe earthquake forecasting computer program has those types of adjustments already built into it.

Personally I think that the program in its latest form is a fairly impressive research tool. It can provide researchers with a variety of data and also serve as a type of software platform that they can build other features on. Any programming language can be used as long as it will generate an exe program that will run on a Windows PC.

Etdprog

This is my personal earthquake forecasting computer program. The times when various types of earthquake precursors such as EM Signals are observed or detected are entered into the program. And it then generates charts and data that propose where the EM Signals etc. might have had their origin. The program can also be used to do basic research on earthquake triggering processes.

The main problem with the program during the past year or two has been with converting voice information into data in a text file that the program can process. And because of that problem the forecasting program has been running only part of the time lately.

A computer that I recently obtained has now been equipped with a voice to text program. A person can say something and the program will convert it to text in a text file. The software works quite well, unlike other voice to text programs that I have tried in the past.

So, if a person were to observe an earthquake cloud at a certain time, that information could be stored on a voice recorder and played into the computer voice input. The information would then be available as text in a file that the Etdprog computer program could process.

That voice to text addition to the overall system means that all of the computer programs etc. needed for an update for the Etdprog program are now running. And the next step will be to link the various parts of the system together. When that work is done, hopefully in a week or two, the forecasting program should be fully operational again. And I will probably be generating forecasting charts on a regular basis and making them available at my Web site.

The next step after that will likely be to merge the Etdprog and EPmap programs so that the programs can collectively generate a wide variety of forecasting and earthquake research data. Amit Dave’s forecast data can already be easily displayed using the EPmap program and at the same time compared with past earthquakes.

Other Humanitarian Efforts.

Another important project involves trying to convince U.S. Policy Makers that science and medical research here in the U.S. and around the world is moving at perhaps only 10% of the speed it could be moving. One of the main problems is that the people in the U.S. and other governments who should be doing this work get stopped in their tracks whenever they run into any political roadblocks.

For example, energy companies such as the oil companies are using their political clout etc. to effectively keep the U.S. and other countries from investing the necessary amounts of money in energy research. And this is in spite of a recent poll that stated that something like 53% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats believe that we should be spending more on energy research. With gasoline at $4 to $5 per gallon depending on where you live, it is easy to see why people are interested in new sources of energy. However, oil company campaign money has a stronger impact on the policies of people running for office than the general public’s needs and wishes.

Those political roadblocks are actually not that difficult to get around. But the U.S. Science Policy Makers don’t know how to do that. And they apparently don’t even know that anything like that is possible.

So, attempts are scheduled to be made to explain to them how that can be done.

These are personal opinions.