Seismic retrofitting of important structures is essential in seismological active zones. The importance is doubled when it comes to some buildings like schools, hospitals, bridges etc. because they are required to continue their serviceability even after a major earthquake. Generally, seismic retrofitting codes have paid little attention to retrofitting of foundations due to its construction co...

We introduce here the Earthquake Network project which implements a world-wide smartphone-based sensor network for the detection of earthquakes. Thanks to the accelerometric sensor, smartphones possibly detect the waves of a quake and report the event to a cloud computing infrastructure. In this work, we propose a solution to the detection problem based on statistical modelling the arrival time...

An innovative study of Wikipedia biographical pages is presented. It is shown that the dates of some historical cataclysms may be reproduced from peculiarities of lifespan changes over time. Time dependence of number of biographical pages related to a year has a broken linear trend in logarithmic scale. It shows a sudden change of the slope from 0.0006 to 0.008 per year near 1700 AC. Presumably...

Several years ago, my buddy Steve died in an avalanche. It was a stormy day and the avalanche danger was high, but Steve and his partners felt that by choosing a familiar route and carefully managing their exposure, they could stay out of trouble. After all, they were experienced backcountry skiers with avalanche training. Steve, the most skilled of the group, had just visited the area less tha...