Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakes
reillymj writes "Researchers claim toads sensed a severe earthquake last year five days before it hit. Last spring's L'Aquila earthquake devastated the medieval city of the same name in Italy. Five days earlier, a group of biologists noticed some toads behaving strangely in a pond nearby that would later be the quake's epicenter."
They didn't predict it. They CAUSED it.
which is totally what she said
So all we need now is a way of measuring this reliably and we canALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD
The pinnacle of scientific achievement, obviously.
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
sorry to spoil it for y'all...
Everything sounds better in Latin, but it basically means hindsight bias. That's what we have here. It's sloppy science, since it's very likely that SOMETHING strange would have happened in the area around the time of the earthquake.
To be fair, TFA quotes Susan Hough saying basically this. Too bad the summary couldn't be bothered.
http://www.google.com.hk/search?num=30&hl=en&ei=xF60S9qqNMKB8gbkhtFC&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CAkQBSgA&q=chinese+earthquake+detector&spell=1
That's right. Don't read it. I'm going to summarize it for you:
Some scientists noticed frogs acting "strange". A couple days later, an earthquake followed. Scientists wondered if the frogs were somehow aware of the earthquake. They had no particular reason to believe they were. Other scientists interviewed on this matter say probably not. People retroactively attribute all kinds of things to big events that follow.
The article ends: "For now at least, the hunt for a way to predict earthquakes must continue."
That's it. You're welcome.
The quake was the 6th of april, and the toads already sensed it 5 days before that... What a marvelous coincidence that this news reaches us *exactly* one year later. We should declare this day a worldwide holiday to celebrate the glory of toads!
From TFA:
I consulted with Susan Hough, a seismologist at Caltech. After having a read of the paper, here's what she had to say: This is a good example of bad science. The earthquake prediction heyday of the 1970s was launched and sustained by similar studies: people who found snippets of data after the fact that showed an apparent correlation between some signal and an eventual earthquake. This is not good statistics. You can't select data after the fact. In this case, there's no way to know what kind of fluctuations are normally seen in toad activity, or what else might have been going on in the study area that could have influenced toad behavior.
Slashdot interpretation: Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakes!!!
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I would like to point out that Giampaolo Giuliani predicted that same earthquake measuring radon gas around there (link: http://www.nowpublic.com/environment/giampaolo-giuliani-laquila-earthquake-youtube-warning-ignored )
Nowadays, I can't tell the difference between your typical slashdot stories and April Fool's Day stories.
Everyday is April Fool's day here.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
In a seemingly unrelated incident, Philippe Gaston XI, nicknamed "The Toad", had inexplicably escaped from police holding cells when the earthquake cracked a wall.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Are you saying that the city was name after the earthquake?
I thought April 1st as well, when I saw this, even though it may be plausible that small creatures are more sensitive for certain things like tiny vibrations.
Anyways, the post on the website was posted on March 30th. Two days too soon for April's fool.
The same toads can also predict the release date of Duke Nukem Forever.
Did they?
When it comes to getting news or information on the net, this is one day that pisses me off more than any other. Say what you like about "spirit of the day" or whatever, but I do what I do because it keeps my brain working in ways that work and solitaire cannot. I frikken NEED my slashdot fix every couple of hours and if I don't get it, weird things start to happen to me. And since nothing today can be taken seriously at all, it's useless.
...utterly shaken by this news.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
"This is a good example of bad science."
This is a good example of horseshit. No science is bad unless it persists in promoting a point that it has already discredited. Examining prima facie unlikely hypotheses is as necessary and expected as examining hypotheses that are 'obviously true by common sense'. It is also perfectly good science to publish observations rather than experiments, particularly when it is impossible to catalog the entirety of the environment as well as impossible to enforce controls, both of these being the case when observing animal behaviors in the natural habitat. Being a seismologist you'd think she would be used to the facts of naturalistic observation and lack of control. Unless they've managed to produce a set of standardized earthquakes to use as a control group for doing seismology experiments. No? No wonder then the apparent lack of grasp on what's acceptable methodology.
"This is not good statistics."
'This' are singular. 'Statistics' are plural. Grammar are as necessary for good science as am methodology, controls and inferential statistics when it an be applied, or descriptive statistics when simply observing.
"In this case, there's no way to know what kind of fluctuations are normally seen in toad activity"
Only if you can show that observations stretching back probably centuries by locals, as well as relevant publications by herpitologists, are invalid. I suspect she has no idea whether any of either exist. TFA had no mention of any, but to assume this absence represents a lack is worse.
Being a scientist does not qualify one to be a critic of other fields, and sometimes even of one's own. Whose idea was it to ask a seismologist to critique a paper on animal behavior?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Whenever I read a piece of news like this, I remeber what happened at a scientific congress many years ago.
A well known seismologist (I will omit his name...) published a paper claiming that he found a way to predict earthquakes. Some time later at a conference a young and brilliant mathematician showed, using the very same equations and methods described by the seismologist, that not only it happened that every time the seismologist did a prediction an earthquake happened, but that the reverse was true, i.e. after an earthquake the seismologist would announce an earthquake prediction. A very inconvenient problem....the conference room was filled with laughs.
The mathematician then continued by demonstrating a well-posed method for earthquake prediction that was properly honouring the cause-effect relationship, but the predictor was pretty useless, since it could forecast only a small fraction of all earthquakes happening in the area under study (I think about 15% or so).
I believe that this anecdote suggests that whenever the newspaper (or Slashdot) talks about exotic methods for earthquake prediction, one can safely jump to the following piece of news. Making earthquakes forecasts is a very thought topic, and it is very unlikely toads will ever be of some help...
The article includes a video of a dog on a trampoline.
Happy April 1st, dumb-asses.
I toad you.
A toad toad me.
Isn't it somewhat common knowledge that a lot of wild animals start to behave abnormally shortly before a natural desaster?
But what about other seasons? And places that don't have Bufo bufo to rely upon? Will Bufo alvarius (Colorado River toad) work just as well? And can I claim it's an earthquake detector when I bet busted for toad-licking?
Scientists also say that Jews can predict when terrorists are about to fly plains into buildings. None turned up for work on 9/11
No Hypnotoad comments yet?
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
What I hate about april first is that this odd new will be on the site tomorrow also, and tomorrow it's not april fool day!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Thus a group of geologists was transformed into toads by an evil Italian sorcerer. Now they are trying to warn us all against earthquakes by not having toad sex when they should.
Or would that be Toadmometer? I can just imagine the news stories of the future...
"Citizens of San Diego evacuated today in response to a 9.2 reading on the city's recently installed toadmograph. The mayor had this to say, 'We thought it might be a false alarm but we almost hit 10 toadies when one of them didn't make it across the road. Hence the extra two-tenths of a toad. That's not something you take lightly!' The mayor continued saying that if no further toadmic activity is reported citizens can return in five days."
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomworger/509169005/
This makes it fairly obvious that it was actually toads, not mice, that rigged up the earth in the first place.
Nice bit of coverup, Douglas!
Next up, what species if not the dolphins? And what's the real qoute behind "So long and thanks for all the fish?"?
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
So Mrs. Frog did the earth move for you ....
RTFM is not a radio station.
Now that we have frogs to predict the earthquakes, we can more effectively employ sheep bladders to prevent them!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Japan's been researching this sort of thing for hundreds of years. This is actually in perfect timing with my senior project in Japanese; I translated a textbook article about the history of the relationship between catfish and earthquakes in Japan. Catfish are the popular ones there, and once upon a time they actually were assumed to cause the earthquakes.
It's basically non-scientific common knowledge over there that some animals can predict earthquakes in some form. According to the textbook, people from seaside countries all over the Pacific are well aware that before a large earthquake, odd animal behavior occurs. That often manifests itself as animals being suddenly and uncharacteristically unruly, swarms of deep-sea fish pooling near the surface of the ocean, rodents appearing out of nowhere, snakes suddenly coming out of hibernation, or all other sorts of things of that nature.
A scientist in the early 1900s, Dr. Shinkishi Hatai, hypothesized that the reason catfish went so berserk shortly before an earthquake is that they could detect minute changes in Earth's telluric current. Another famous Japanese geophysicist, Dr. Torahiko Terada, apparently dedicated his thesis to, and showed a very convincing correlation between the 1930 Horse Mackerel catches and the Ito Seismic Swarm at that time.