Hi Chris,

If you were a teacher and you gave the class an assignment which must include certain information in making the assigment correct, you would know what is acceptable and what isn't. Thus you grade on the answer presented.

It reminds me of a cooking class I took once and we were given several ingredients to make something and were not told what it was, except that there was on extra ingredient in the list of ingredients. My partner and I made chocolate muffins, but the ingredients were to make biskits. No chocolate was needed. They didn't taste very good either.

With Don's work the extra ingredient or unsolved part of the prediction using the data was the magnitude and shortening the window to what he thought seemed more likely. It was his personal work that made the data more reliable and thus he didn't just take information and deliver it. He worked on it. As Lowell was the teacher providing the assignment, he knew how to grade the results. But there were posts made after his grading in which some others agreeded or disagreed, so it was not a solo grading event. These are in the archives and anyone can go look at them and see for themselves if they wish to.

Two weeks ago we had a series of C class flares and we had plenty of earthquake activity and since then there have been little or no C class flares and what do you see occurring now? Almost no quakes. This will occur again, so it is worthy of following.

Petra