Chris,

The instruments were of no use for the 6.0 Parkfield quake so they wouldn't do much good in Cholame either. Not to forget to mention they don't have the budget Parkfield had. Parkfield cost on average $500,000 a year to maintain. Cholame also seems to have a different dynamic than Parkfield. They have the chatter going on in one place and the earthquakes are occurring about 3 miles away from there to the east.

Jordan's program is really pretty basic. Each person/group submits their proposal which outlines their prediction program, be it something by use of an instrument, butterfly patterns, earthquake clustering or whatever people want to use. Then predictions are given and if the earthquakes materialize as predicted they score a hit and if not, it's a miss. It's pretty straightforward. For me personally, having spent some time here practicing, I can go back and see where my mistakes were made, perhaps open up the radius and work on the magnitude settings. But I won't be submitting the program as a person, but as a group. So part of my preparations now will be to do some practice sessions using group material to fine tune it. It will never ever be easy. We do this all in our spare time and we have no funding either; but I still think we will be successful.

The sort of down side to this experience is that unlike scientists who can write papers about the research and where it lead, I may not ever have that opportunity.

Petra