Students want multiple choice exams because having the answers in front of them enables visual recall of the correct answer. If a professor tries to institute tougher tests (in the U.S. at least), the students protest. There are consequences for this - student evaluations count in promotion and tenure. Getting slaughtered because your tests are too hard happens to all beginning professors. Then, they learn that they have to tailor their tests to the student culture if they want to keep their job. Bottom line: get real and stop complaining - college students are adults and they get what the ask for / deserve out of their education, for better or worse.
Earthquakes over M8.0 are called 'great,' as in catastrophic, for a good reason...
There are several kinds of earthquake 'magnitude' measures, all of which yield similar numbers. Moment magnitude may be converted directly to energy:
Magnitude = log (energy in ergs)/1.5 - 10.7
For moment magnitude 8.9, this works out to 2.5 x 10^29 ergs, which is about 6 Million Megatons of TNT. The impact of 2004MN4 works out to an earthquake magnitude 6.2 to 6.6.
Another geologist here (as if you couldn't guess from the name).
I'd like to add that KB is not a seismologist, but rather a mathmatician. A seismologist, should he or she be so bold, would 'predict' earthquakes based on the physical processes that generate earthquakes. KB's prediction is based on pattern recognition in the distribution of microseismicity. Sure, there is merit in short-cutting the physical processes and looking at emergent patterns, but if so, then the tests of these 'predictions' should be held to a rigourous standard, because there is nothing else to test! KB's prediction (a.k.a. test of his model) failed. Period. Parkfield was not in the prediction area. Its not even close!
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Students want multiple choice exams because having the answers in front of them enables visual recall of the correct answer. If a professor tries to institute tougher tests (in the U.S. at least), the students protest. There are consequences for this - student evaluations count in promotion and tenure. Getting slaughtered because your tests are too hard happens to all beginning professors. Then, they learn that they have to tailor their tests to the student culture if they want to keep their job. Bottom line: get real and stop complaining - college students are adults and they get what the ask for / deserve out of their education, for better or worse.
Randomly constructed, on demand buildings. Sounds like the makings of a termite mound....
Earthquakes over M8.0 are called 'great,' as in catastrophic, for a good reason...
There are several kinds of earthquake 'magnitude' measures, all of which yield similar numbers. Moment magnitude may be converted directly to energy:
Magnitude = log (energy in ergs)/1.5 - 10.7
For moment magnitude 8.9, this works out to 2.5 x 10^29 ergs, which is about 6 Million Megatons of TNT. The impact of 2004MN4 works out to an earthquake magnitude 6.2 to 6.6.
Another geologist here (as if you couldn't guess from the name).
I'd like to add that KB is not a seismologist, but rather a mathmatician. A seismologist, should he or she be so bold, would 'predict' earthquakes based on the physical processes that generate earthquakes. KB's prediction is based on pattern recognition in the distribution of microseismicity. Sure, there is merit in short-cutting the physical processes and looking at emergent patterns, but if so, then the tests of these 'predictions' should be held to a rigourous standard, because there is nothing else to test! KB's prediction (a.k.a. test of his model) failed. Period. Parkfield was not in the prediction area. Its not even close!