For Japan. Even fairly advanced countries that are aware of the danger of earthquakes and tsunamis (and, in Japan's case with dozens of potentially dangerous volcanoes) the ability to use sirens, e-mails, cell phones or traditional mass media such as radio or television is still limited. Accordingly, we advocate social networking channels such as Twitter and Facebook as supplementary means of communicating both a looming emergency as well as a way to get help after a disaster. Even though the hundreds of earthquakes (three large clusters) east of Honshu but well west of the Pacific Plate boundary in only a few days were unprecedented and still lack adequate explanation, our models are doing fairly well at prediction. See the Chronology topics for more details. |