A year and a half ago, we wrote about some Italian seismologists who were being tried for manslaughter after a risk assessment they wrote up, in which they concluded that a series of small earthquakes along a faultline wasn't that serious, and the risk of a big earthquake was not that high. About a week later, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck, destroying a bunch of buildings and killing over 300 people. Admittedly, one government official exaggerated what the report said, claiming that there was no danger -- but government officials have a way of taking a nuanced claim and turning it into a crazy absolute. Either way, because of all of this, the seismologists and the government official were charged with manslaughter -- especially after it was claimed that some people stayed inside during the quake, believing the recent reporting about there being no risk.

Because of that, they've now been convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail. This is despite the fact that the report quite clearly said that "earthquakes were unpredictable, and that building codes in the area needed to be adjusted to provide better seismic safety."

The conviction is tremendously troubling -- and the scientific community is quite rightly up in arms about it. Even more bizarre is that the judge didn't seem to care too much about the concerns everyone was raising. From John Timer's report:

The prosecution had attracted widespread condemnation from the scientific community, with one petition on behalf of the seismologists attracting over 5,000 signatures. But, shockingly, the judge in the case took only a few hours to deliver the verdict, and handed down sentences that were two years longer than those requested by the prosecutor.

It seems like a fairly extreme theory of negligence that would lead one to decide that a "too tame" seismology report was negligent and resulted in manslaughter. And, of course, the chilling effects of such a ruling will be tremendous. Who will be willing to provide such a report in the future? And, if anyone does, won't they now err on the side of "we're all going to die!!" even if the evidence doesn't support that? It's not surprising that people want to spread blame around when there are tragic deaths, but sometimes it goes way, way too far.

There have been a few interesting crowdfunding and crowdsourcing projects in recent years -- solving some really difficult problems or just creating cool stuff (out of stuff that didn't seem so cool). Here are just a few more examples of crowd projects that are out there (and are possibly a bit "out there" too).

• Collecting a lot of data on earthquakes requires a lot of sensors -- which can now be crowd-purchased to help create a Quake Catcher Network that will deploy seismic sensors and develop an educational game to go along with the sensor network. This project has a $4000 goal, and there's just over a month left to help fund it. [url]
• An Android phone placed inside the satellite will be shot into orbit next year, and the Space App competition has picked four apps that will run on this phone as it circles the Earth. One of the apps sounds pretty lame, though. [url]
• The Apps for Science challenge has picked a few apps that might help scientists do their work more efficiently. Unfortunately, these apps only work on Elsevier's SciVerse online portal and require a SciVerse account. [url]
• To discover more interesting business-related content, check out what the deal is on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

This past weekend, as you know, Japan held a signing ceremony for ACTA. While that's already been covered, the folks at StopACTANow pointed out something really bizarre in the Japanese announcement concerning the signing ceremony. It lists out five points. The first four are all more or less understandable via paraphasing: (1) there's a signing ceremony in Japan (2) ACTA was kicked off by suggestions from Japan, and driven by the US (3) a bunch of other countries participated and (4) all of the participants will be at the signing, and those who are ready to sign, will. But the bizarre thing is the fifth point, which reads as follows:

On the preceding day, Friday, September 30, an international symposium entitled, “Global Intellectual Property Strategy and the Reconstruction from the Great East Japan Earthquake: Eliminating Counterfeit and Pirated Products through ACTA”, will be held in Sendai as a side event of the signing ceremony.

By now this has already happened, and we haven't seen any info about it, but, seriously? What does the Great East Japan Earthquake have to do with intellectual property at all? And is Japan really suggesting that ACTA plays some sort of role in rebuilding Japan? Perhaps ACTA supporters and their efforts to keep any outside influence away from the negotiators has gone to their head, such that they think they can say any insane thing and people won't notice.

There are plenty of discoveries that are impossible (or just a lot harder) to do without properly-equipped satellites orbiting over our heads. Good thing satellites are getting cheaper and more reliable to send up. (But too bad there's so much space junk above us.) Here are just a few cool satellite articles for your amusement.

• Satellite measurements of the upper atmosphere could lead to forecasting models for earthquakes. Days before a massive earthquake, detectable ionization and heat buildup in the atmosphere can be seen -- but it's still uncertain exactly what the mechanism for this is. [url]
• The Kepler telescope has taken stellar photo­metry to the next level -- and needs help to analyze all the data it's gathering. It sounds like amateur astronomers could have a decent chance at making some interesting discoveries... [url]
• Telescopes need to be calibrated, so there's a proposal to put a light bulb in orbit as a standard reference for light sources. Hubble and other space-based satellites already have internal references, but an orbiting light bulb could serve the same purpose for other telescopes and ground-based telescopes. [url]
• To discover more stuff on research & research tools, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Sensors are everywhere, recording all sorts of activities and creating an enormous amount of data. The ability to store and analyze immense amounts of information is making these sensors even more useful. Before this computational capacity was so readily available, researchers were forced to hone their hypotheses before conducting experiments. But now, it's possible to just collect a lot of data and then try to see if any hypotheses are supported by already-gathered evidence. Here are some quick links on sensors and sensor data.

• Collecting data from a wide variety of sensor feeds could become a useful service -- if only there were a standard format for sensor data and all that data turned out not to be junk. Massive amounts of garbage in, garbage out.... [url]
• Ground-based lasers could be used to map the Earth's magnetic field by exciting sodium atoms in the atmosphere and watching them fluoresce with telescopes. And this technique could be used to find underground oil deposits without using satellites to map fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field. [url]
• British and Russian scientists should probably take a look at the previous link before they launch two satellites that measure the Earth's magnetic field fluctuations from space in order to anticipate earthquakes. Predicting earthquakes would be an awesome ability, but it's not certain there's even a correlation between earthquakes and changes the Earth's magnetic field. [url]
• You could contribute towards the deployment of 600 Geiger Counter devices in Japan -- if you donate to a Kickstarter project that aims to collect and publish the radiation data. The raw data will be published under Creative Commons 0 license. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.