Alan Kafka's Blog

Natural Hazards, Environmental Degradation, and the Urbanization of Planet Earth:

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Kafka) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:20:00 +0000

Perspectives on the Ethical Challenges Geoscientists Face in an Uncertain World

Alan L. Kafka, Amy E. Frappier*, and Noah P. Snyder, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Boston College. (Paper submitted to Proceedings of the International Conference on Ethics and Sustainability of the Earth, Boston College, February 26–28, 2009.)

Environmental degradation is no longer an issue that concerns only environmental activists. The concern has become a part of mainstream culture, across the political spectrum. But as if the environment itself isn’t enough for us to worry about, there is another aspect of how human activities are affecting our lives on planet Earth that receives less attention: the interaction among natural hazards, environmental degradation, and urbanization (Figure 1). This is an insidious problem because comprehending it requires thinking about processes occurring on geological time scales interacting with processes occurring on the human time scale, and humans are not typically wired to think in geological time.

Natural disasters are inevitable consequences of life on a dynamic planet. We cannot hold back nature from occasionally unleashing its powerful forces on a vulnerable human population. But human actions that cause environmental degradation, as well as the ever-increasing population and built environment in hazard-prone regions, are worsening the devastation wrought by nature.

Geoscientists can help the public and decision makers to address these issues because they are trained to think differently than the general population: “[Geoscientists] take a long view of time, and they expect low-frequency, high-impact events [and] have internalized the vastness of the age of the Earth and relative brevity of human history” (Kastens, et al., 2009). But they can only help if they transmit that perspective in a manner that gives the public an accurate picture of what we do and don’t know about these hazards.

Click on Figures for larger view.

Click here for PDF file of entire paper.

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*Now at Department of Geosciences, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York

Obfuscation and Unnecessary Mathematical Ado in Science Research

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Kafka) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:11:00 +0000

I am often frustrated reading research papers in geophysics that seem to involve total obfuscation and much mathematical ado about what in the end turns out to be some pretty basic, straightforward research. At times I seriously doubt whether the amount of energy I invest in reading these papers is worth what I learn from reading them.

Recently my colleague, John Ebel, shared with me a Boston Globe article about an economist who confessed that he intentionally made a paper he wrote pointlessly complicated so that it would get accepted for publication. This article provides data to support my suspicion that this insidious phenomenon is widespread across disciplines.

“An Economist's Confession: I Have Sinned Against Clarity”,
by Christopher Shea, http://tinyurl.com/y9kvqpx

Shea writes: “At least David R. Hakes, an economist at Northern Iowa University, has the courage to admit what he did: He purposefully made an article pointlessly complicated, hoping that peacock-tail math and dense prose would impress other academics (or, at least, that other economists would pretend to be impressed, so they wouldn't be tagged as unsophisticated).”

Hakes also admits that in the end, he could no longer understand his own paper, and would not have been able to give a talk on it without assistance. He concludes that “the time and effort necessary to read [his own] paper may exceed the benefits received from reading it.”

How is it that the emperor has been able to go on wearing his new clothes for so long?

How Well Can the "Experts" Predict Earthquakes?

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Kafka) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:08:00 +0000

It has been a curious experience for me to be immersed in research on earthquake prediction while the country is going through a financial crisis. I was intrigued by the following quote from USA TODAY (January 2, 2009), as well as similar quotes that I see nearly every day in the blogosphere:

"Market gurus predict stock rebound but won’t rule out extreme move up – or down."

Now, that's a pretty safe prediction! It's like taking a multiple choice test with the options increase, decrease, or remains the same, and choosing “all of the above.” I think that pretty much captures the state of the art regarding earthquake prediction. Seismologists can predict earthquakes about as well as those market “gurus” can predict the stock market. That is, not well at all.

The perennial promise of successful earthquake prediction captures the imagination of a public hungry for certainty in an uncertain world. Yet, the sober reality is that there is no reliable, scientifically proven method of predicting where and when an earthquake of a given magnitude will occur.

It is understandable that people are forever hopeful that there would be “experts” somewhere who can provide us with some methods for predicting earthquakes and thus avoid human tragedy. Unfortunately, as in the case of financial markets, it's not clear that "experts" are able to predict earthquakes any better than intelligent “lay” people who are given access to seismological data.

While procrastinating on my research/writing about earthquake prediction, I was browsing in my local library and found a fascinating book written by Nassim Taleb, entitled The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb analyzes uncertainty and problems with prediction from the perspective of his career in various aspects of financial markets.

The notion of a “black swan” is described in Wikipedia as:

“a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations ... The term black swan comes from the assumption that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a symbol for something that could not exist. The 18th Century discovery of black swans in Western Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.”

Here is Taleb’s working definition:

“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes: First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it appear to be explainable and predictable.”

Taleb argues that, because of the possibility of black swans, many (most?) types of phenomena are essentially impossible to predict. He further argues that many so-called experts in a wide variety of fields have developed very sophisticated mathematical models of all sorts of phenomena—but because black swans are hard to incorporate into the models, the models typically don’t account for these high-impact events that actually do occur. Thus, he concludes that experts don't predict any better than “non-experts” are able to predict. In fact, if you compare what actually occurs to what the experts predicted to occur, they typically do at least a little bit worse than non-experts!

According to Taleb:

“... [C]ertain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating – or, worse, at smoking with complicated mathematical models.”

Some would say that Taleb takes too extreme a position on these matters. Read the book and decide for yourself; but when it comes to earthquake prediction, I do think that there is more than a grain of truth to his argument.

In 2004, a feature article posted on NASA’s website heralded an earthquake prediction project they funded as an “amazing success” - Earthquake Forecast Program Has Amazing Success Rate.

Being inherently skeptical about these matters, a colleague and I decided to test just how amazing this particular success was (Kafka and Ebel, 2007). We tested the NASA-funded prediction model, known as Pattern Informatics (PI, Rundle et al., 2002*), by comparing it to a much simpler method that I developed, called Cellular Seismology (CS, Kafka, 2002, 2007). At its core, CS assumes nothing more than that future earthquakes will occur near past earthquakes. Thus, testing PI against the CS model is a good way to compare how well an “expert” model performs when compared to what I would argue is essentially a "non-expert" model. I see CS as a non-expert model because I imagine that many non-experts would likely come up with some variation on CS as a “common sense” component of what they think should be included in an earthquake prediction scheme.

Our results: PI doesn't perform any better than CS, and we have yet to find anything in the record of past seismicity that is any more predictive of where future earthquakes are likely to occur than the trivial, intuitive notion that future earthquakes tend to occur near past earthquakes.

We continue to compare other methods to CS, and it will take many more years of observing earthquakes before we will have enough evidence to discern the extent to which other methods might actually outperform CS. But to date, we have yet to find any method that does any better than CS (see for example Kafka and Ebel, 2009). Although we have certainly not conducted an exhaustive analysis of the questions addressed here, the results of our studies do suggest the possibility that Cellular Seismology, simple as it is, may actually be a measure of “all we can know” about the future occurrence of earthquakes. Hard as it may be for the public (and for seismologists themselves) to accept this conclusion, the results of my research suggest that such a possibility needs to be considered.

As Yogi Berra said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

* Rundle, J.B., K.F. Tiampo, W. Klein, and J.S.S. Martins (2002). Self-organization in leaky threshold systems: The influence of near-mean field dynamics and its implications for earthquakes, neurobiology, and forecasting, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 99, 2514-2521, Suppl. 1.

Calling it Bad Karma is Bad Karma

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Kafka) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:11:00 +0000

(Note: This is a revised version of a post that originally appeared on the BC-ESP Discussion Forum blog.)

Shortly after the tragic earthquake in Sichuan, China, actress Sharon Stone commented that the tragic effects of the earthquake were the result of “bad karma” (because of how the Chinese are treating the Tibetans). If this kind of response to a natural disaster was just an isolated incident, there would be no reason for me to be writing about it. Unfortunately, however, I am quite often told some variation of this bad karma story after a tragic earthquake has occurred. My “favorite” response came after I gave a lecture on the great Sumatra earthquake and tsunami of 2004. According to one woman in the audience, since the mainshock occurred the day after Christmas and the largest aftershock occurred the day after Easter, it’s obvious that the reason for this tragedy is that God is punishing us for our sins!

I find this kind of thinking to be very disturbing for three reasons: It is bad theology, it diverts attention from what science actually can do to help mitigate the tragic effects of earthquakes, and it is, in itself, the essence of bad karma.

I would hardly claim to be an authority on matters of the theological realm (for discussion of those types of matters, see Rabbi Kafka's blog), but this one seems theologically simple enough that even I can see the logical flaw: What would be the point of any deity (or natural/spiritual force of the universe) killing thousands of innocent people to punish “us” for our sins? It is hard for me to imagine a worse view of life than to think that innocent children in a school in China were killed to teach the Chinese government the right and moral way to treat the Tibetans. I sure hope that is not the way our world works!

There is plenty of thoughtful and fascinating philosophy and theology written on the question of why innocent people suffer from tragedies that have no apparent meaning. As seismologists involved in the study of events that are sometimes very tragic, I think it is valuable for us to ponder such imponderable questions, if only to sensitize us to the tragedy a world away from the fascinating and scientifically interesting seismograms we record. But, simplistic answers to such deep questions don't help anybody.

I guess I should be pleased that Sharon Stone publicly apologized for her outrageous comment, but unfortunately I don’t find her apology to be very comforting. I find that this disturbing kind of naïve understanding of the relationship between science and spirit is all too alive and well in our culture.

And, why do I say that calling it bad karma is, in itself, bad karma? While I do not believe in a deity who keeps score of our actions and punishes us when our score is too low, I do think that what some people call “the law of karma” is a reasonable way to think about the effects of our actions. Call it what you want, but actions do have consequences. I think it is better for us to respond to natural disasters by devoting some energy to increasing our understanding of the causes of earthquakes, improving seismic hazard mapping, building more seismically resistant buildings, and developing better emergency management plans, than to blame the tragedy on some bizarre theological cause.

Using science to investigate the causes of earthquakes and to help mitigate their effects is “good karma” - it is positive action that leads to making people safer from the devastating effects of earthquakes.

Faults and Earthquakes in the Greater NY City Area

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Kafka) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:49:00 +0000

My thoughts on faults and earthquakes in the New York City area, and how all of that relates to the intersection of Science, the Media, and the Public can be found here.

"The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders" - Foster's Law

Earthquake Prediction: You Want Answers, We’ve Got Questions

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Kafka) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:44:00 +0000

While driving to give a lecture on earthquake prediction to a large class of non-science majors, I remembered the Radio Shack sales pitch, “You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.” It seems to me that this quote captures the cultural divide between seismologists and the public regarding earthquake prediction.

Based on my interaction with the public regarding earthquakes (particularly after significant earthquakes occur), and on my experience with courses that I teach at Boston College, I have come to the conclusion that there is a great divide between seismologists and the general public on the topic of earthquake prediction. The public wants answers but what characterizes seismologists (and scientists in general) more than anything else is their intrigue with the process of finding answers to questions, rather than the answers themselves. In the words of Richard Feynman, we are driven by “the joy of finding things out.” Sure seismologists sometimes get egotistical about their latest earthquake prediction-related “discovery”, acting as if they are close to finding some ultimate “answer” about earthquake predictability (and I am certainly at times guilty of that egotism myself). And sure we get cynical as we get older and start to feel that we have lost the “naive” enthusiasm about a life of “exploring the unknown” that we had in graduate school or earlier. But, my experience with seismologists (and other scientists) of all ages is that, if you “scratch the surface just a little bit”, you will find that we are still in our hearts living the ideal that drew us into the world of science in the first place: We love to think about the big unanswered questions, and we love the challenge of trying to figure out the answer.

When non-scientists meet me, they are often thrilled to find a real seismologist who will be able to finally give them answers to earthquake-related questions they have been thinking about all of their lives. After a short while, I can see their disappointment when they find out that they want answers, and I’ve got questions. So much so that I don’t think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that they would rather hear me say, “Yes, there will be a magnitude 8 in your backyard tomorrow morning…” than to hear me say, “Well, that’s actually a big and fascinating question that seismologists don’t know the answer to and are actively investigating…”

Another aspect of this cultural divide: Most scientists I know are convinced, with good reason, that this curiosity driven science is precisely what leads ultimately to real and useful answers in the long run. However, that argument is usually not very compelling to a public that is hungry for immediate results and for certainty in an uncertain world. I think it is precisely the interplay between what is certain and what is uncertain that makes science fun, and that ultimately does yield answers to important questions (although sometimes to different questions than the ones we were originally seeking to answer).

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us with a big mismatch between what the public wants, and what we love to provide. At times I despair that this divide will never be bridged because the public has very little interest in this unending “quest for truth” that draws us into careers as scientists.

I am curious to hear what other seismologists and non-seismologists think about this divide. Do you as a seismologist have this same experience? Do you as a non-seismologist find it frustrating that seismologists are not providing the answers you are seeking?

If you do think that this is an accurate description of the situation, what do you think we can do to make the situation better? Is this a matter of scientists learning how to tell our story in such a way that we more effectively market whatever answers we have (incomplete as they may be)? Is it our obligation as public servants to focus on what we do know and minimize our excitement about the mystery of what we don’t know?

Thoughts, comments (or maybe even some “answers”) on this topic are welcome.

Why Does the Earth Quake in New England?

noreply@blogger.com (Alan Kafka) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Yes, it's true. Earthquakes do occur in New England...

In the evening of October 2, 2006 residents of coastal Maine felt the ground shake from a magnitude 4.2 earthquake located near Bar Harbor. In nearby Acadia National Park, falling rocks forced the closure of the Park Loop Road.
On December 20, 1940, residents of Springfield, MA felt vibrations from an earthquake centered near Ossipee, NH. The Springfield Republican newspaper reported that "dishes toppled from the shelves in many kitchens and wall pictures swung pendulum fashion on their fastenings."
On November 20, 1755, the Boston Weekly News-Letter reported "a most terrible Shock of an Earthquake: The conditions were so extreme as to wreck the Houses in this Town to such a degree that the Tops of many Chimnies, and some of them quite down to the Roofs, were thrown down. . . ." This earthquake was centered off the coast of Cape Ann, MA.