Technology

Earthquakes Cannot be Predicted / Official Japanese Quake Forecasting System is Flawed

If you’ve been watching the news the last few days, chances are you’ve heard about that researchers are now saying that Tokyo is facing a 70% chance of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in the next four years:

The preliminary calculations conducted by a team from the university’s Earthquake Research Institute were based on intensified seismic activity in the area after the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11.

The findings are more dire than a similar estimate by the central government’s Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion, which states there is a 70 percent chance a quake of the same scale will hit the southern Kanto region, including the metropolitan area, within 30 years.

Sounds pretty scary. Should we believe the forecast? Not necessarily.

In April of 2011, Nature published “Shake-up time for Japanese seismology” by Professor Robert J. Geller of Tokyo University (Japanese version available here). Geller argues that earthquakes cannot be reliably predicted.

When one compares the Japanese government’s national seismic hazard map to the actual areas where large earthquakes have occurred in the last 30 years, one notices the problem:

“Although such maps may seem authoritative, a model is just a model until the methods used to produce it have been verified. The regions assessed as most dangerous are the zones of three hypothetical ‘scenario earthquakes’ (Tokai, Tonankai and Nankai; see map). However, since 1979, earthquakes that caused 10 or more fatalities in Japan actually occurred in places assigned a relatively low probability. This discrepancy — the latest in a string of negative results for the characteristic earthquake model and its cousin, the seismic-gap model — strongly suggests that the hazard map and the methods used to produce it are flawed and should be discarded.”

Very general predictions are possible:

“If global seismicity and the historical record in Tohoku had been used as the basis for estimating seismic hazards, the 11 March Tohoku earthquake could easily have been ‘foreseen’ in a general way, although not of course its particular time, epicentre or magnitude.”

But the Japanese government continues to rely on methods that attempt – and apparently fail – to predict earthquakes of specific magnitudes taking place in specific regions.

“All of Japan is at risk from earthquakes, and the present state of seismological science does not allow us to reliably differentiate the risk level in particular geographic areas. We should instead tell the public and the government to ‘prepare for the unexpected’ and do our best to communicate both what we know and what we do not. “

Much of Geller’s article focuses on the Japanese government’s official Tokai earthquake prediction. However, the general message is clear: there is no reliable method for forecasting earthquakes.

The latest forecast for Tokyo does not appear to represent a sudden new breakthrough in the field of earthquake predictions. What’s new about it is that heavy emphasis is placed on the increase in seismic activity that occurred in the 6 months following the March 11th disaster. [For a detailed analysis of the forecast - see this post. ]

Some of the articles about the new Tokyo prediction have presented it alongside the highly questionable Tokai earthquake prediction. Both predictions are based on methods that have not been verified as accurate.

Don’t trust the hype. Big earthquakes do happen in Japan, but experts do not know where and when the next big one will occur. If you live in Japan, be prepared for earthquakes, even if you’re outside of what have been deemed high risk areas.

[gigantic hat tip to Steve]

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Paywall Blocks Access to Asahi Shimbun’s English Articles

Found this message popping up on my screen this morning when I tried to check some English language articles on the Asahi Shimbun’s website:

The Asahi recently scaled down the content on its regular English articles and started directing readers to its Asahi Japan Watch (AJW) section for the full versions. Unfortunately, they are limiting free access to AJW articles. After hitting the limit (which seems to be around 20 article views a month), readers will have to pay about $12 a month for a subscription.

The Yomiuri and Mainichi are still providing free access to their English language sites. The three newspapers tend to overlap a bit in their coverage of major stories, so I doubt many people will be willing to pay for the Asahi when free alternatives are available.

Important Note: Clearing or disabling cookies will allow you to bypass Asahi’s article viewing limit.

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2channel Fights Police Pressure, So-Called “Viral Marketers”

The future of the giant message board 2channel’s current influence on the Japanese Internet was thrown into question over the past two days as its founder Hiroyuki was interviewed by federal police and its current, anonymous operators took steps to eliminate the “stealth marketers” which propagate 2channel threads to the larger world.

In 2011, a campaign by 2channel posters against Fuji Television for its perceived pro-Korean bias intensified, culminating in a large protest outside Fuji TV headquarters on August 21. No mainstream Japanese news organization reported on the protest, but in a mysterious coincidence, on August 24 Fuji TV aired a special report on a scary underground website called 2channel used for selling illegal drugs. Their evidence for the drug trade was a single post from 2010 that used code words to refer to MDMA, marijuana, and cocaine.

Police, frightened by Fuji’s report, launched an investigation into 2channel, which seems to have become quite serious in recent days. Today, the newsweekly Shuukan Asahi reported that items have been seized from 2channel-related businesses and that founder Hiroyuki Nishimura, who no longer has any ties to 2channel, was called in for questioning. Police hoped to extract from Hiroyuki the real names and locations of the website’s anonymous moderators. According to the magazine, a publication of the Asahi Shinbun newspaper, investigators are calling 2ch a “hotbed of crime” because moderators did not delete the single post from 2010. (Over 1,800,000 posts are made on 2channel every day.) It is not yet clear whether the moderators will be arrested or if these police scare tactics will affect 2channel’s day-to-day operations, despite Shuukan Asahi calling the probe an “extermination mission”.

In related news, at midnight on January 9, 2channel’s anonymous moderators set up a new forum with special copyright restrictions. 2channel is used as a source by hundreds of blogs, which reprint news articles and the posts of 2channel users without any acknowledgement of copyright. Remarkably, in a country where copyright is taken very seriously, these outlaw blogs are not only quite popular but have acquired corporate sponsorship and ad dollars that 2channel itself has never been able to get, which makes the message board’s users quite mad.

Since 2004, when publishers ran into serious trouble securing copyright permissions from the anonymous posters on the Densha Otoko threads, copyright on posts has been owned by 2channel. Because 2channel’s legal operations were moved to Singapore in order to avoid libel suits from angry Japanese celebrities, it now lacks the means to easily file lawsuits itself. That doesn’t change the fact that copying people’s posts violates copyright. These blogs exist in a legal gray area, but that doesn’t stop them from getting corporate sponsors. The gaming blog Hachimaki, which is often the source of breaking news on Kotaku and other American blogs, is quietly funded by Sony and Kadokawa Shoten. The anime blog Yaraon is affiliated with the anime production house SHAFT, the producers of Hidamari Sketch among other popular shows. Paranoid 2channel users accuse these affiliate blogs of posting articles to 2channel itself in order to generate fake articles and make money for their corporate masters, a much speculated-on activity called “stealth marketing”, i.e. viral marketing.

In order to address the incessant arguments over viral marketing, moderators opened a new board, “Breaking News (Non-Commercial)“, which explicitly forbids reprinting, and therefore would not be profitable for Japan’s corporate overlords. Of course, it remains to be seen whether affiliate blogs will actually follow these rules. They currently seem to be limiting themselves to mocking non-commercial activists and boasting about the continued use of the old forum, which has in fact drastically fallen off.

Both of these stories are likely to drastically affect how news reaches the English-speaking Internet from Japan in the years to come.

Contributor Bio: Avery teaches English somewhere near Takeo. When he is not translating things, he is probably visiting haikyo or researching weird footnotes in Japanese history. He can be reached on Twitter at @ahm.

Quantum Levitation Racing

A very cool video put together by the “Japan Institute of Science and Technology” (never heard of them):

“Here is a short footage on our recent work on quantum levitation. We were inspired by the game Wipe’out to do our work. With this new technology, we hope to revolutionize the world of motor transport; Maybe in a near future we could assist to a real Wipe’out race.”

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