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A Cheap, Ubiquitous Earthquake Warning System
Tekla Perry writes: Earthquake alert systems that give a 10 or 20 second warning of an impending temblor, enabling automatic systems to shut down and people to take cover, are hugely expensive to build and operate. (One estimate is $38.3 milllion for equipment to span California, and another $16.1 million annually to operate.) But a Palo Alto entrepreneur thinks he's got a way to sense earthquakes and provide alerts far more cheaply and with much greater resolution. And he's got money from the National Science Foundation to begin the first test of his system — covering the Bay Area from Santa Cruz to Napa and the cities of Hollister, Coalinga, and Parkfield. He starts that test next month.
Hmm... let me think... $38.3M one time and $16.1M/year in maintenance does sound like pocket cash to me, given the population at risk here...
This one? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1367912015000917
That's what Google gave me. The abstract looks very interesting.
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
Once again, life imitates art.
https://xkcd.com/723/
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The gov't should convince insurance companies to band together and pony up the cash.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What are the chances that you could get people to sign up for some kind of app, SETI@Home-like, that frequency-analyses the accelerometer in a phone tied with the GPS-location without any extra fancy hardware?
Done en-masse, FFT'ing to a graph of an interesting frequency range, talking back to a cloud server, surely you could spot a pattern even through the noise of every single movement of every phone in order to detect a consistent, regional variation in a certain, shared, frequency range?
Surely, if you just have enough people signed up to the app, you can not only detect an earthquake (whether you can detect it early enough to do anything is still an open question, really - predicting earthquakes is little more than voodoo, and it's only physical movement of the earth itself that we can actually detect and report on!) but you could also use the app to alert those same people as it happens?
And they give more than 10 seconds warning. My Jack Russell cross (with Fox Terrier) had distinctive behavior that announced earthquakes. A minute - a minute and a half before quakes she'd act like it was a bad thunderstorm (try and hide under me). About 20 seconds before hand she'd start barking furiously with a mohawk-type ridge of hair standing up along her spine and try and drag me outside, once outside she'd go back to trying to hide under me. Others have reported the same reaction with Jack Russells
It took a while before we associated the behavior with earthquakes that were often too small or distant for us to notice.
Not all dogs will reliably detect earthquakes but Jack Russells seem to be very sensitive (they can't stand to be near wood fires or in the same room as an audio recording of one either) - possibly because either/or they are a "below ground dog" (love going down burrows); are "ratters" (have the hearing to listen to rodents).
The gov't should convince insurance companies to band together and pony up the cash.
Insurance companies won't be interested. This doesn't save expensive buildings. It gives people a chance to get out of buildings just in time. For an insurance, dead people are cheap.
This funding will complete the purchase of a Doppler Radar system for Southwest Washington and provide for the land and installation costs associated with the system.
The cost of the "expensive" earthquake early warning system is around the cost of 5 Doppler systems. As of 2013 the National Weather service has access to 159 Doppler installations.
Note that the national radar network is being upgraded to high end Doppler for tornado and severe storm detection. So why do those in the Midwest, Gulf Coast and East Coast deserve early warning on tornadoes and California gets peanuts ($5,000,000) for the inevitable large earthquake? Politics.
So they can afford this in Mongolia and it's too much for California? Really?
Why is Snark Required?
(Caution: I read the article.)
Sounds like a pretty good idea, all-told. An engineer does good with his PhD thesis, starting a non-profit company to create inexpensive MEMS-based earthquake sensors that use the cellular network for communication. Makes them cheap enough that he can deploy them all over the place. But who pays for upkeep? Who pays for electricity?
Here, we get to the problem: he depends on the kindness of strangers to bolt these small devices to their wall and plug them in -- permanently -- to an available outlet. Why would sufficiently many people do that? And since the dwelling turnover in California is so high (at least compared to the other cities I've lived in, CA residents seem to switch apartments at a furious pace), what's the plan for transferring ownership / upkeep agreements? WIth tens of thousands of sensors, that sounds like an ongoing, permanent customer service management nightmare.
Don't get me wrong, the idea's a good one. It might be easier to convince people to download an app that looks for tell tale acceleration signatures of a quake. Cell phones already have location information and the owners are already motivated for other reasons to keep them charged and maintained. The potential downside is that the data quality is likely much lower since cell phones aren't rigidly attached to terra firma.
But that, then, suggests perhaps a dual layer system that includes some company-maintained (he's running a business, after-all) sensors, say installed in a less dense mesh on telephone poles or street lights where they have ready access to (a) rigid fixation, and (b) electrical power, and, importantly, (c) won't be screwed with by the dog / kid / furniture mover. Moreover, upright structures with high aspect ratios, like streetlights, likely amplify ground movement, making detection that much easier. Use that streetlight network for coarse sampling, and the voluntarily downloaded apps as lower-grade, spatially denser sampling. And then, as Randall Munroe suggests in XKCD, monitor the twitterverse for earthquake terms. The apps have next to zero running costs, perhaps only sporadic development and a download server somewhere, the mesh network installation costs can be split between local municipalities, the state, and the NSF, with a maintenance contract to the company from the state. Heck, I'm starting to talk myself into a good business plan!
But depending on the kindness of strangers to install and maintain a thing in their house? Not such a good idea.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Yildirim says his Zizmos system will have virtually no installation or maintenance costs, because he plans to rely on the kindness of the crowd. Zizmos asks for volunteers to donate a tiny bit of interior wall space and a power outlet to host a sensor package, which is about the size of a deck of cards. Though these packages won’t go into the most remot areas along fault lines, and are far less sensitive than the types of sensors used by systems like ShakeAlert, the wider distribution, he says—10,000, or even 100,000 to cover California, compared with 1000 planned by the USGS—more than compensates for these deficits.
Oh my, I wonder what magical pixie dust he plans to use to bring the back end costs (setup and maintenance) to zero? A system that monitors 100,000 sensors and is capable of sending messages to almost 40 million people is not going to be done for free.
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The gov't should convince insurance companies to band together and pony up the cash.
This reminds me of an old Monty Python joke. When asked about tax policies, one bowler hat guy quips: "I think we should tax foreigners, living abroad!"
In any democracy, one thing is certain: A bunch of folks think that a bunch of other folks should pay for something all of them need.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I work at an insurance firm and yet I cannot afford to buy dead people for my necrophiliac lifestyle so you're sorely mistaken.
In any democracy, one thing is certain: A bunch of folks think that a bunch of other folks should pay for something all of them need.
I know why you think that, but in this case, no. Instead, it's risk mitigation, something for which insurance companies are quite familiar and already spend lots of money on.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I work at an insurance firm and yet I cannot afford to buy dead people for my necrophiliac lifestyle so you're sorely mistaken.
Visit the morgue and claim corpses that nobody else claims. Sounds like an easy source for your necrophiliac lifestyle.
The government would hire consultants, an advertising company, have the EPA do an environmental impact study, and probably outsource the work, spending $100B convincing them.
Just another day in Paradise
True, but then, they wouldn't need convincing, would they?
Just another day in Paradise
There might be some legal/bureaucratic impediment. Or they might not have thought of it.
Or the $38.3M early-warning system might not be as mature/effective as claimed...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Battery drain would be a huge issue depending on frequency and time the results collected and uploaded. Though starting with the iPhone5s, the M7 was introduced which is a dedicated co-processor specifically for monitoring and processing accelerometer based data. So, that should help. And being in California, one can assume the quick adoption of iPhone tech into the public upon release. It is silicon valley after all. Anyways, a phone laying flat on a table or desk should be helpful, though filtering out the SNR could be more troublesome with people causing the vibrations on said table in the first place.
BTW, those sensors are pretty sensitive. Check out an app called SensorKinetics and see for yourself what they're capable. I was rather amazed myself.
Life is not for the lazy.
no mention of 3d printing? nor some kind of phone + crowd sourcing + big data analysis?
what kind of pragmatic nonsense is this?
I should think that something like an earthquake - a regular, powerful, but maybe overall-small contribution, to movement that's visible in frequency data from a range of devices in a geographical area (i.e. averaging out the noise from all devices to leave behind that which is only common to them all) would show up.
I might be vastly wrong here, but even a few thousand devices reporting a set of FFT data of a certain frequency range (which range would take experimentation but I guess existing research would be able to point the way quite quickly), averaged out with nearby neighbours, and then compared geographically should be able to avoid any random noise and provide enough info to know something is up. In the same way that astrophotography often uses image-stacking - take 1000 blurry photographs, center them, overlay them, average them out (so they each only contribute 1000th of the signal for each pixel) and you can get some pin-sharp detail of what's actually there in the images.
A 1000 people running the app in Silicon Valley should be enough to average out "in your pocket bounces", "car vibration", etc. to provide just the background movement that's apparent in all of them.
If I was a multi billionaire, or even just a single billionaire, I would set up a non profit organization, call it "Angel O'Spheres earth quake waring network" and fund it for 100 years. That would be my memorial/monument.
Sorry, the money you are talking about is retarded low ... there are plenty of hosues or yachts much more expensive then either the $38M or $16M.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The article suggests that the price of the device is around two orders of magnitude lower than the price of the planned devices. But then it turns around and says that they'd need up to two orders of magnitude more devices.
This isn't cost savings. This is just the Internet of Things applied to an existing problem. If it works better, fine, but don't say that the solution is cheaper....
" covering the Bay Area from Santa Cruz to Napa and the cities of Hollister, Coalinga, and Parkfield." Considering Oklahoma is now the most seismically active state in the country, perhaps a better location for testing would be there.
Check out this project led by Caltech, which (largely) obviates the need for government-paid equipment:
"Your Phone as Quake Detector"
<ol><li><URL:https://vimeo.com/98781340> (I made this video!)</li>
<li><URL:cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/7/176219></li></ol>
Tom Geller
I was thinking this too. I signed up a while back, but still haven't got my sensor installed (still unpacking, running wiring and getting the network setup after a move).
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
This could really shake up the industry!
Table-ized A.I.
If here my seismology classmate Lucy Jones say that quake happend on a "hidden fault" I'll be very disappointed again. This explanation came from the USGS for about half of the large earthquakes in California in the past 30 years. Yet the oil industry routinely runs 3D sound-tomography surveys to routinely find oil-related faults. The problem is that each oil industry survey costs over $10M. The USGS or academia cannot this cost. So they cleverly try alternative experiments to find what they can. But they dont really find the hidden faults out there.
The first crowdsourcing seismology was called QuakeFinder. It used mems in laptops or special mems mini-boards for desktop computers. The second generation is called MyShake and is a cellphone App. QuakeFinder establish the proof-of-principle for crowdsourcing. They registered quake signals and could use public internet to accumulate results. Quantity of sensor compensated for lower quality of sensor.
The advantage of dedicated wall cellphones is they'd be attached to something solid like a wall instad of a persons pocket. And there would be continuous uptime without the phone used for something else or out of juice.
Before there were smartphones, but after laptops had motion sensors. I could not locate the date of this ECD comic.
Back in the late 1980s, the W6FXN 2 meter repeater on Buzzard Peak (145.460 MHz) above Cal Poly Pomona was setup to repeat the tone modulated seismic signal from one of the seismometers maintained by USGS (Running Springs on 162.8090 MHz?) when significant tone deviation was detected. Depending on geometry, this provided 5 to 10 seconds of warning to Orange County for earthquakes which were mostly located closer to Los Angeles. There were proposals at the time for extending this idea but as far as I know, none were implemented.