MedicUp

Dr. Jones, thanks for doing this AMA.

When California's Earthquake Early Warning System finally gets rolled out for public release- as a seismologist - what magnitude/intensity of earthquake would you want for it to alert you to? I would imagine a seismologist would want to be alerted to everything compared the average citizen that is averse to non-significant shaking.

(Maybe another way of phrasing the question: what magnitude/intensity of earthquake in the State gets you particularly excited/interested)?

My understanding is that the current EEW system is currently "closed" because of the limited infrastructure/capacity the system has to notify end-users. There are some private partners like the BART train system and Google to explore the potential use in Industry. An injection of funding into the EEW program only occured after the recent Napa earthquake and there is still a lot of infrastructure/funding that needs to be developed. There are a few private companies that are getting ready for public release such as this one but that is probably still a whiles away.

It's exciting to see what the system might look like in the future though. There are a whole group of folks in Japan who live-stream their computers to monitor for alerts from their country's Earthquake Early Warning System as a hobby. Example video - caution loud

Hi Jos, thanks for doing this AMA!

For the last 10 years, we've certainly had our frustrations with our ability to vaccinate against measles and polio for a variety of reasons - political, religious and poor science - but I'm excited to think that just maybe we will be able to eradicate those diseases in the (relatively) near future.

What do you find exciting in your line of work with UNICEF? Is there any particular diseases that you have great hope for in terms of elimination?