Manslaughter For Failing To Warn Of Earthquake

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/22/14611225-scientists-found-guilty-of-manslaughter-for-failing-to-predict-italy-quake

This will be my last article for the day, but I just figured I would see what you guys think about this one. Pretty sure it's impossible to accurately predict with certainty when an earthquake will strike. If I were a seismologist, I sure as ***would not be going to Italy for work after this crap.

That's some ***.

What the actual *** is this ***?

Yeah cause you can TOTALLY Predict the exact day an earthquake is going to strike...*** idiots I swear.

Well.. they weren't being prosecuted for failing to predict the exact time the earthquake was to strike.. they were being prosecuted for saying an earthquake won't hit, and then one did.

Whether that scenario merits prosecution, I dunno. But there's a big difference between saying an earthquake is coming and being off by a day, and telling everyone to stay at home because there is no earthquake coming, instead of evacuating them.

I read it more as:
*small trembles*
"Large quake is improbable, no cause for immediate concern"
*they were wrong, big quake*

Only way I can see you holding them accountable is if there was large amounts of evidence that a big quake was coming and they lied on purpose.

Italian seismologists in the future:

Everyday is a quake day. Please don't jail me bro.

I'm not making a judgement on whether they deserved prosecution or not. I'm just saying it wasn't as clear cut as them making a mistake of when it would hit.

They could have advised people to evacuate and they instead told them not to. If the analysis and evidence was in their favor then I think there was no reason to prosecute them.

The article says that their report said it was improbably, implying there was some margin of error associated with their conclusion. The fact that they're being punished for what may be a statistical outlier is pretty ridiculous. If this was turned around and the scientists warned of an impending threat but were incorrect, would the *** city sue them for wasted resources spent on evacuation and damages inflicted from stalling normal activities?

All this does is discourage good scientists from cooperating with the government and encourages shitty scientists to cooperate by telling these governments what they want to hear.

See that's the problem with making assumptions about reports in court cases though, we know a fraction of the amount of information.

If there was 33% chance of a follow-up quake that could devastate the city, then they probably should have said something, even if it was more likely to not happen.

I don't know what quantitative measure they came up with but you can't assume it was statistically insignificant from this article either.

Holding seismologists accountable edit: to predict earthquakes is on par to jailing Miss Cleo edit: b/c she failed to predict the winning lotto numbers.

I never thought I'd come to see the day, but today I reference FoxNews.

Italian court convicts 7 scientists for failing to predict earthquake

Yeah this is one of those stories that you hope there is some missing detail in the article that would make the situation its describing seem sensible. That said, I can't see them garnering the amount of support from the scientific community reported in the article if their results were wholly inconsistent with their public statements.

Sorry typing on phone :) wasn't done lol

I agree that bad cases are bad. But sometimes people forget that the media is in the business to sensationalize ***, and sometimes they do it by leaving out important information. The scientists could very well have had plenty of evidence to say an earthquake was unlikely, in which case this trial would have been an exercise in finding someone to blame, which is bad for everyone.

it really does seem to be the case...

News reports here from CalTech and in socal have California seismologists raging. Been on the news today and they are saying its really getting attention because the city wasn't built to handle any earthquake. Look at the pictures in the article.

Bricks and masonry... They should be holding city officials accountable for not predicting the earthquake likelihood of the city and not retrofitting the buildings.

But see you can't make that claim from this one shitty news article either. That's how you convince people to believe in things like frivolous lawsuits. Do frivolous lawsuits exist? Sure, but not nearly on the level people think they do. It's easy to convince someone a lawsuit is frivolous when you leave out all the important factors as to why the lawsuit took place in the first place.

Not really, as they never said that it wouldn't happen.

Also: frivolous lawsuits happen all the damn time >.>

Flawed anecdotal evidence. There are also sorts of measures put in place to make sure the law system isn't cluttered with garbage. Some of it gets through, the vast majority does not.

I don't know what legal system you're talking about, but it apparently isn't the US or apparently the Italian one.

The scientists had no fault in this whole deal. The regulatory system in Italy is just as bad as our politicians.

Aside from earthquakes being nearly unpredictable, had emergency levels been declared higher the scientists would've been laughed at for lack of actual proof and accused of overestimating the risks posed to civilians.

The sad part is the eyes have all been turned against them instead of the ridiculous state of the cities that were hit and destroyed by that quake. It's been 3 years since the event and no restoration or rebuild programs have actually reached those places.

All of the people left homeless by the quake are still living in "container" like homes and their plea to return to their homes is stuck somewhere in some lawsuit that gets addressed and postponed something like once a year.

Anecdotal evidence is also the most salient.

I'm sorry that you can't comprehend what was said in the article and how it's *** that they were even charged.

I'm also sorry that you can't comprehend that it's two entirely different legal systems of which neither are anywhere near perfect.



Context or not, there's a lot of lawsuits that should never happen, should have been thrown out before going to trial.

For example: Coffee burning people, who knew?

There was nothing said in the article. It was a vacuous gloss of some scientists getting charged. I can comprehend the difference between facts presented to me, and some generalized rehash of an account.

You're probably right, they probably were charged and found guilty based on crap evidence. But, the only point I'm making is that people should educate themselves before making emotional gut reactionary decisions based on little evidence. And it doesn't apply just to lawsuits, it applies to all decision making, including this election.

In the case with McDonald's the woman spilled coffee on herself. If the coffee had been 10 degrees cooler she would have had time to sop it up before she suffered third degree burns, and it still would have been extremely hot coffee. We are all now safer that there are standards for coffee temperature. If you someday god-forbid spill coffee on your crotch, you won't have to worry about getting skin grafts on your genitalia because the coffee was excessively hot. That's progress.

With how much money she knew she was getting, she probably spilled it on purpose, which leads to no time to sop it up anyways cause there wouldn't be any attempt to.

People died, emotions run high, anger dictates someone needs to be blamed, scientists take the bullet, case closed.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks maybe they said "take the hit for this, we'll set you up for life"

...or maybe, as suggested, they crazy.

Almost all Italy is considered a highly seismic zone, yet nowhere we have structures that are even nearly capable of holding the damage from a big quake. Our country is supposed to have buildings like those in Japan, but we don't to preserve culture or something. We keep people living in buildings from 800 or more years ago only for their value, but those buildings flop down like paper castles at the first swing of the earth.
Don't even make me start about the Vesuvius. Most dangerous super volcano in the world after Yellowstone and we have houses up to the mouth with about 700k people. And don't even think we have roads like in the US, here where a town ends another begins with houses one on top of each other, people would never escape alive in case of alarm(especially when the alarm comes late as it always happens cause doing it earlier would 'just scare people'), we'd probably die in the traffic.
This country has its dangers yet we have no plans or the ones we have are completely not realistic.

About the article itself, there was some guy a couple of years ago who kept swearing he knew a big quake was coming but that authorities didn't listen to him cause after some investigation they considered it a needless allarmism. So yeah, the data apparently was there, but they just decided it wasn't worth worrying. Problem is they always say that, then what's the point of having seismologists at all? Of course the alarm must be given in advance when you can still escape, otherwise any imbecill can tell that something is happening when it's already going on...