Well a quick bet would be that there are no longer experts on anything left in Italy who will willing say anything about anything from now on.

www.cbc.ca/news/world/...ml?cmp=rss

Lawyers suck.......

www.abc.net.au/news/20...etworknews

Jailed scientist for failure to predict earthquake?



So how are you suppose to predict earthquake before it happened?

Lucky they didn't condemn the pope...
or maybe he's a foreign leader and so they have to go to Den Haag in the Netherlands for this.


on the other hand: it seems to be a comitee of scientists who were highly paid to predict such earthquakes...
when they did accept the payments then they also have to accept the punishments for not doing their job properly. It would be nice if politicians were treated the same way.

Now where are they going to get any more scientist to do this job or to advance research. They just but a ten-year road block on their efforts to improve earthquake safety.

Now I'm waiting for them to retroactively re-try GALILEO!

Did you hear about the Italian that was an explorer that got lost and when he wasn't getting lost [exploring] was a slave shipper?

Yup...Jail-em...

dhc4ever, Please for the love of God, don't read the CBC. It's Canada's tax funded liberal propaganda mouth piece.

As for the scientists, Aloysius is right, if your going to accept the money for doing a job, a job that doing improperly can kill people, well it makes sense to get charged for manslaughter.

It was not because of the big quake that they got charged, its because the smaller quakes that should have alerted them to a pressure build up underground were dismissed. They should have said "We are getting small quakes and it can turn into a larger one as the Earth keeps shifting" and they wouldn't have been charged.

However they did not say nothing, they said that all those small quakes building up would lead to nothing, in effect telling people not to worry about a bigger quake down the road.

Dimitri

Since there is, as far as I know, no way to accurately predict an earthquake it is pretty damn silly to condemn someone who failed to do so. Are we going to start hanging the weathermen for failing to accurately predict tornados? The best anyone can do at this time is to say that conditions exist that make these events somewhat more likely.

"With over 7,000 earthquakes around the world each year of magnitude 4.0 or greater, trivial success in earthquake prediction is easily obtained using sufficiently broad parameters of time, location, or magnitude.[6] However, such trivial "successful predictions" are not useful. Major earthquakes are often followed by reports that they were predicted, or at least anticipated, but no claim of a successful prediction of a major earthquake has survived close inquiry." Geller, Robert J.; Jackson, David D.; Kagan, Yan Y.; Mulargia, Francesco (14 March 1997), "Earthquakes Cannot Be Predicted", Science 275: 1616, doi:10.1126/science.275.5306.1616.

Mike,

In effect, they are not getting charged for not predicting the larger quake that did come, but they are being charged for telling the public that there will be no larger quake.

The months of smaller tremors typically can indicate a pressure region forming that may lead to a larger quake down the road, and yet they decided there would be no larger quake in the area.

They were condemned because they told the local people not to worry about a big quake, even though the risk signs were there.

If they said "We are not sure if a big quake will happen due to all these smaller quakes" then they would have not been charged with anything.

Dimitri

Aah gimme a break...California has hundreds of earthquakes a month and none of them turn into big ones.

It don't wash. You can't predict the big ones. Period.

California is on a active constantly moving fault line Bushy. Hence constant small quakes.

In the Mediterranean, small quakes over a few month tends to always give way to a big one, after which the area stabilizes back down for a while without any small quakes.

Even so Bushy, they were put onto trial because they said a big one won't happen, and yet it did. If they are unpredictable they should have said nothing then said wrongly.

If you certify a bridge won't fail and it does, you can face manslaughter charges, so what is the difference?

Dimitri

Oh hell...I have ammunition to reload. Back to the loading bench.

Looks like Mussolini's back in town!

In Ca? Lil quakes can help keep big ones away. They release pressure on the fault. Period. Ask me how I know. You rather have a bunch of little ones or one big one? Trust me, you want the little ones. We get nervous when it stops moving here for more than 48 hours. Then it's likely something's snagged and it's building up to a whopper. You don't want whopper.

Volcanic Regions and stuff? Little ones mean GTFO, NOW.

Had a buddy come out here from Michigan once- had a lil one while in the front room, 10-15 seconds. I was almost igroring it...'til he picked his feet up like someone was coming by with a vacuum, eyes like this , then, ran over to the phone and called the airline and started making reservations for the next flight outa town smokin' two cigs at once darn near! Holy sheepdip I was rolling!

Dimitri wrote:

California is on a active constantly moving fault line Bushy. Hence constant small quakes. In the Mediterranean, small quakes over a few month tends to always give way to a big one, after which the area stabilizes back down for a while without any small quakes. Dimitri

We are riddled with big, small and sideways faults. Millions of them. There's two big ones and 3-4 small ones in my zip code. You drive through Canyon Country here and it's some of the most verticle strata anywhere....it's pretty gnarly. Pretty, but steep and gnarly, real head scratcher. I used to work by the San Andreaus fault too. I seen the earth move!

*

If they had so much warning from lil ones then Dr. Dumbass should have changed his story then bailed. But no, he clammed up and stayed. Serves him right for being an idiot.

Stovey, ever been told why?

When you put to much air into a balloon, at a certain moment it would go "bang".

Now let's talk about immigrants...