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Posts Tagged ‘prediction’

But how big does an asteroid need to be to cause major destruction? The new “Impact: Earth!” asteroid impact effects calculator will help you find out. The interactive web tool, developed by a Purdue University research team led by Jay Melosh, allows anyone to calculate the potential damage caused by a comet or asteroid striking the Earth. Users input information into several parameter fields, such as the diameter and density of the object, its angle of entry, and the location where it will hit. The calculator then estimates the impact consequences, providing information about debris distribution, ground shaking, size of the resulting crater, and whether a tsunami will be generated.

About 50,000 years ago, an asteroid about 164 feet in diameter scooped out the famous Barringer Crater (Meteor Crater) in northern Arizona. The new calculator estimates that if an asteroid twice as large as that one struck about 20 miles outside Chicago, it would generate impact energy equal to about 97 megatons of TNT—igniting a fireball with a 1-mile radius and triggering a magnitude-6 earthquake about six seconds after the impact.

The largest known impact threat in Earth’s near future is the asteroid Apophis, which scientists say has a small chance of striking the planet in 2036. The new calculator will tell you what will happen if Apophis falls in your backyard, Melosh says.

“Impact: Earth” is an update of an earlier impacts calculator that Melosh created with colleagues at the University of Arizona. The new user-friendly version includes more visual components, as well as calculations of tsunamis that would result from ocean impacts. Melosh is also a science team member on NASA’s EPOXI mission, which flew to within 435 miles of the comet Hartley 2 yesterday.

If the test works in real life, authorities will be able to pluck information from terrorist "chatter" and study the brain waves of terror suspects to confirm information about an attack in advance, such as date, location and weapon.

Even when the researchers had no advance details about mock terrorism plans, the technology still identified critical concealed information, according to J. Peter Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Northwestern. Given a few details, the system works flawlessly, the researchers say.

The team used a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects planned an attack in a major city. They were given information about weapons and bombs, and they had to write a letter about their plans to encode the information in memory.

Then, researchers attached electrodes to the "suspects" and measured their P300 brain waves, a type of cortical activity that occurs when meaningful information is presented to a person with guilty knowledge. It has been debated as a replacement for polygraphs.

In one test, the subjects sat in front of computer monitors that showed the names of various cities, including Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York and Phoenix. The city the participants chose for the attack presented the greatest P300 response, the study says.

Throughout the test, when the researchers knew some details about the planned attacks, they were able to correlate the terrorists' P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy.

Even more interesting, they were able to identify concealed information even when they had no advance knowledge, Rosenfeld says. Just by studying brain waves, they were able to identify 10 of 12 terrorists and 20 out of 30 crime-related details.

The protocol could be used to predict concealed knowledge and identify future activity, he says, providing an example of a suspicious person entering a building.

"You suspect that they're terrorists, and you have some leads from the chatter. You've heard they're going to attack one city or another in one fashion or another on one date or another," he says. Our hope is that our new complex protocol -- different from the first P300 technology developed in the 1980s -- will one day confirm such chatter in the real world."

[R&D Magazine]

"Damned if you don't" is the situation that seven of Italy's top seismologists now find themselves in -- the scientists face manslaughter charges for failing to predict the April 2009 earthquake that struck the town of L'Aquila in central Italy.

In late March 2009, tremors were recorded in the surrounding region, resulting in a magnitude-4.0 earthquake on March 30. The following day, the seven seismologists were in L'Aquila attending a meeting of the Major Risks Committee, a group that advises Italy's Civil Protection Agency on natural hazards risks. At a press conference following the quake, committee member Bernardo di Bernardinis told reporters, "the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable." But on April 6, a magnitude-6.3 quake struck, killing more than 300 people and leaving about 65,000 homeless.

Local citizens claimed they had been planning to leave their homes after the smaller quake, but had changed their minds after the committee's comments. In August 2009, the citizens filed a formal request for investigation, and earlier this month the chief prosecutor stated that his office had enough information to indict the individuals named in the case.

Nearly 4,000 researchers around the world have come to the seismologists' defense, signing a letter to Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, urging him to compel decision makers to focus on hazards mitigation and earthquake preparedness rather than holding scientists responsible for doing something that is not yet possible. Despite extensive research efforts by seismologists in recent decades, earthquakes cannot yet be accurately predicted to occur on a specific day, or even in a specific month.

The new system, developed by Y. Tony Song and his colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, uses GPS data from NASA's Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) and information about continental slope (where the ocean floor descends from the edge of the continent to the ocean bottom) to estimate the energy transferred to the ocean by an undersea earthquake. After the magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile on February 27, 2010, Song's team successfully predicted the size of the resulting tsunami. Just minutes after the earthquake struck, the GDGPS network captured the ground motion data and relayed it to Song, enabling him to calculate the seafloor motions and accurately rank the tsunami's source energy as moderate (4.8 on the system's 10-point scale).

Tsunami waves are most often generated by large undersea earthquakes (greater than magnitude 7 on the Richter scale) that result from the movement of oceanic and continental plates. When dense oceanic plates slide under lighter continental plates, the seafloor moves vertically, which allows a quick transfer of energy from the earth to the ocean. Because every earthquake is unique, each tsunami exhibits different wavelengths, wave heights, and directionality -- making tsunami forecasting a daunting task.

Traditional tsunami warning systems have relied on estimates of an earthquake's location, depth, and magnitude to determine whether a large tsunami would occur. But history has shown that magnitude is not always a reliable indicator of tsunami size. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake generated a huge tsunami, while the 2005 Indonesia quake did not, even though both had similar magnitudes.

Song says the new system shows that coastal GPS systems can effectively predict the size of tsunamis, which can reduce false alarms that disrupt the lives of coastal residents. Repeated false alarms can also lead to complacency among coastal residents, which may decrease community response to future warnings.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, since 1850 tsunamis have caused the loss of over 420,000 lives and billions of dollars in property damage worldwide.

Recorded Future appears to be a data analytics company that tries to calculate what the future might hold by applying search-engine like capabilities to highly specific data sets in order to deduce what's probable to happen down the road. By scanning the Web for the frequency and nature of references to a certain person or occurrence, Recorded Future computes what it calls a "momentum value" for each entity in its database. From there, it tries to project future happenings, be they stock market swings or terrorist attacks.

A blog post on Recorded Future's Web site explains:

The momentum value indicates how interesting a certain event or entity is at a particular time, and is continuously updated. In computing the momentum value, we take into account the volume of news around an entity or event, as well as what sources it is mentioned in, what other events and entities it is mentioned together with, and several other factors.

The post continues:

The momentum measure is used to present the most relevant query results in our web user interface, but it can also be analyzed using statistical methods to predict possible future changes in momentum, which in turn can be valuable e.g. for trading decisions.

It sounds more reliable than a crystal ball, and honestly it sounds like a good fit for Google. Recorded Future's analytics tools could prove valuable to the search giant, especially if they prove useful at crunching large volumes of data into useful, actionable information -- a task that is Google's bread and butter. We'll try to guard our optimism and not dwell on the fact that such prediction models sounds vaguely similar to some of the risk management models employed by once-mighty investment firms.

Google plans to invest $100 million in startups through Google Ventures this year alone, so regardless of whether Recorded Ventures pans out, we predict Google will be just fine.

[ComputerWorld]