Gadget predicts quakes before they hit

"This system makes mistakes. Its not a hundred percent accurate," said Yoshinori Sugihara, head of JEITA's Emergency Earthquake Alert and Trial Project. "The appliance has warned of an earthquake when there was no earthquake."

I would have thought the occasional false 20 or so second interruption would be a small price to pay for the benefits of being able to shut of things like gas and electricity prior to an earthquake.

Even a 10 second warning could enable people to greatly reduce the risk of fires and other such secondary events that can be so devastating after and earthquake.

I certainly agree with this thought. The slight amount of discomfort or disruption of normal activity would be extremely worth the value of being able to preclude the disastrous results of not forseeing the outcome of the earthquakes.

Can Cats and Dogs sense impending 'quakes or is this just another myth?

"Can Cats and Dogs sense impending 'quakes or is this just another myth?"

There certainly seems to be a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that indicates they do have some sort of a warning that something is going to happen.

There is however, a big problem with trying to document things like this and that is the way people remember things selectively.

Basically you will always remember your pets or animals behaving strangely but rarely will you remember them behaving normally. The end result is a whole stack of reports of animals behaving strangely prior to an event and no reports of them behaving normally.

The problem if there is no out of the ordinary event nobody ever remembers their pets or the animals around them behaving in either a peculiar or normal way. The other part of the equation is that when there is an extraordinary event the never notice the pets or animals that are behaving normally but clearly remember the ones that are behaving in a peculiar manner. In reality your memory is selectively stacking the results so that it appears there is a correlation.

If you were to look at the ratio of strange to normal animal behavior over a relatively long period you will more than likely find that it is the same before an earthquake as the normal background level of strange behavior.

Something else that may be happening is that animals are sensing exactly the same things that the unit is using to predict the earthquake so they have a few seconds prior warning.

Yes...very true...

Like the 'my cat always stares out the window before my wife come home' phenomenon?

...Yeh but the cat spends 75% of it's time staring out the widow (at that cat from next door)... ...when it's not asleep anyhow.

Must go sleep...zzzzzzzzzz

"Like the 'my cat always stares out the window before my wife come home' phenomenon?"

You also need to remember that cats and dogs have senses that respond differently than ours. Humans live in a visual world and devote about 80% of their sensory input to visual stimuli, while in a dog the dominant sense is smell followed by hearing then visual so they live in a world of smells and sounds and can detect odors and sounds that we have about as much chance of detecting as Georg W Bush and Osama bin Laden have of having a love child.

It has always amazed me at how the dogs I have had can detect and identify the sound of one of the cars we have considerably earlier than humans can. You easily tell that somebody is about to arrive because they all take off and head for the front door.

We have a fairly large family house that we share with my parents and my brother and his family so it is extremely rare that nobody is at home. Even so my parents have this paranoid idea that a burglar will sneak in and steal everything without anybody noticing. You can't even get past the front gate without the dogs tearing through the house and going ballistic at the front door and try and broadcast it to the entire neighborhood, so a burglar has no chance.

We also have a poodle that has really bad cataracts and can see about as well as lawyer or politician can tell the truth. Apart from occasionally walking into things and walking off the edge of one of the tiers in the garden he gets along pretty well. We have two other dogs and if they start playing in a way he cant join in on he chucks a major dummy spit till the come over and modify their game so he can play as well. They work pretty well together as a team and most people have no idea that he couldn't visually tell the difference between a dog and a cat.

Even amongst dogs the their visual ability varies considerably. Apparently dogs with a long snout have wider fields of view but reduced acuity while dogs with short snouts have narrow fields of view with increased acuity.