john's blog

Get ready for the California Shakeout drill on October 18.  Go to http://www.shakeout.org/california/  for details.  And when you're done shaking out, come back to the Open Hazards residential home damage estimator under the Tools tab to determine how much damage your home might sustain.  Or go to the earthquake viewer to see what the chance of an earthquake near your home might be.  Then visit our hazards viewer to see your flood risk, or read through our blogs and view our videos for more information on other hazards. 

Elliot Turner has written a great summary of the conference.  You can find it at:  http://compoundingmyinterests.com/compounding-the-blog/2012/10/12/learni...  As recalled by Elliot, one of the more interesting stories that Ed Thorp told was concerning a student at Duke University who got interested in Ed's ideas about risk.  He decided to apply them both in casinos and in the markets.

Today was the Santa Fe Institute symposium on Risk and the Financial Markets. This is a meeting that happens once a year about this time, usually at the Morgan Stanley building on Times Square in New York city.  This was particularly interesting meeting for me, since Ed Thorp, the original "quant", lectured.  Ed was the first who understood how to beat the game of Black Jack with a combination of card counting and the use of the Kelly Criterion to limit risk (see, for example, William Poundstone's book, "Fortunes Formula" for a popular discussion.  

As you can see, our web team of Paul, Alex, Charles, Erin and James have produced a terrific new configuration with a lot of new features.  One of these new features is the new social networking capability.  You can now upload photos and videos, send messages to friends, and create galleries of images.  These will automatically post to other social media such as Facebook if you select that option.  

Visitors to these pages will notice that a new earthquake forecast is now being displayed.  This is the Natural Time Weibull method for earthquake forecasting [1], which takes account not only of the rate of small earthquake activity near a location, but also the time since the last major earthquake in the region.

A magnitude 8.6 earthquake struck west of the coast of Sumatra today at 10:46:43 UTC.  This event is the fourth event to strike the region since the M9.1 event of December 26, 2004.  It is also among the largest 17 earthquakes ever recorded. 

Last saturday, November 5, 2011, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake occurred northeast of Shawnee Oklahoma. The question on some minds is whether the event was related to fluid pumping (for example, hydrofracking for hydrocarbon production) in the area.  While we cannot know for certain, there is a historical record of fluid pumping leading to moderate earthquake occurrence.