Watching an informative interview with Brendan Meade and Susan Murphy, several questions came to mind. First, I would be interested in asking Professor Meade to talk more about the Sendai "semi-prediction." Given that preparing for earthquake recovery is often more feasible than preparing for an earthquake itself, and given that the timeline for his predictions is so uncertain, how are those kinds of predictions handled? Who is the audience for his research?- Does his work reach policy-makers? I am also curious about the response to the paper predicting the Sendai area as a risky one, both before and after the earthquake happened. Second, I would want to hear him expand on what he thinks the future of earthquake prediction will look like, as I found it interesting about how much unknown there is in the world of earthquake prediction. A couple of times he mentioned that we may not be smart enough to fully understand the physics yet, or that we do not know how much data is truly needed to make earthquake predictions. Do he and his peers think this will be ever known? And if or once these unknowns are fully known, would we even know what to do with that new information? Finally, just because I had never heard this characterization before, I would ask him to explain what it means for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment to be "intellectually broken"- how does a field recover from that?
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