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About This Map

This is a No-FAQ Zone, still heavily under construction.

AskTog: Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line

cell.01

AskTog: Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line

"With all the hype at the coming of web commerce, web sales still pale in comparison to bricks-and-mortar, and for good reason. Commercial websites are still, in the main, scary, difficult, and undependable.... I’m confident these companies' sales outcomes reflect the poor quality of their sites. I’m amazed that their sales divisions continue to put up with it, but perhaps, with so many bad examples out there, they think their companies are doing the best they can. They aren't. You will find some specific examples below. These sites are not unusually bad. They are, rather, all too average. I came upon them not because I was looking for deficiencies, but because they had products or services I was personally interested in. They are, in fact, good companies with good products. They just have badly designed or implemented websites..." read more on cite

Small Tech Water Solutions

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The Big Promise of the Small by Carolyn McConnell - small-scale technology for solving water shortage problems,

"In the 20th century, humanity achieved huge feats of water engineering, taming wild rivers, redesigning entire watersheds, and creating farmland from desert. But evidence has begun to mount that massive manipulations of water are not worth their costs. Huge dams have destroyed ecosystems and human communities, often waste as much water as they gather, put countries in unsustainable debt, and inevitably silt up, becoming useless, often before they have even been paid for. ...

Is human ingenuity useless in solving water shortages? Those who study the issue think there is still hope. The problem may be in scale; it was the mega-projects that failed. The most exciting solutions are small. All over the world, engineers, potters, and even children are coming up with inventions that are cheap, simple, locally attuned, and sustainable..." Carolyn McConnell; read more on cite

Online Social Network Benefits

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Rheingold Associates: How Online Social Networks Benefit Organizations

"...The explosive multiplication of an individual's ability to find answers to questions is one of the most powerful benefits of an online social network. Search engines find facts. People provide solutions to problems. Networks of people can solve problems for each other. Online networks accelerate and globalize the process.

Each person in a network knows more than anybody else in the network about at least one special interest and can provide useful knowledge when questions arise concerning their area of expertise. No person is an expert on everything, so we must rely on the expertise of others. But getting the right answer in time isn't easy. First, you need to know "who knows who knows what" in order to ask the question. Second, you need a reason for the people who know the answer to share it with you. When your network includes hundreds of people who have a productive relationship with the online social network you share and feel favorably inclined to answer questions within the network, your ability to get questions answered quickly multiplies exponentially..." -- Lisa Kimball & Howard Rheingold; read more on cite

Ecoliteracy - The Challenge for Education in the Next Century

cell.01

challenge.pdf (application/pdf Object)

"...Since its introduction in the early 1980s, the concept of sustainability has often been distorted, co-opted, and even trivialized by being used without the ecological context that gives it its proper meaning.... What is sustained in a sustainable community is not economic growth, development, market share, or competitive advantage, but the entire web of life on which our long-term survival depends. In other words, a sustainable community is designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.

The first step in this endeavor, naturally, is to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. This understanding is what I call ecological literacy..." Fritjof Capra; read more on cite

PressThink: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

cell.01

PressThink: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

"...5.) Whereas an item of news in a newspaper or broadcast seeks to add itself to the public record, an entry posted in a weblog engages the public record, because it pulls bits and pieces from it through the device of linking. In journalism the regular way, we imagine the public record accumulating with each day's news-- becoming longer. In journalism the weblog way, we imagine the public record "tightening," its web becoming stronger, as links promotes linking, which produces more links...." --Jay Rosen, Pressthink; read more on cite

A New Framework for Environmental Scanning"

A new framework for environmental scanning, essay by Richard Slaughter

Environmental scanning (ES) is a methodology that stands at the juncture of foresight and strategy. It establishes organizationally relevant criteria that allow prepared human minds to discern information, knowledge and insight from the multitude of ‘signals’ that occur daily. In most cases the starting point for ES is the design of a scanning frame which helps practitioners decide what to look at and how to judge the usefulness of information. But, at the same time, there also needs to be an openness to new data, ‘lone signals’ and unconventional sources. ..." --Richard Slaughter,

Buddhism, Modernization, and Science

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Buddhism, Modernization, and Science

"The capacity of mature men and women for responding to the world as a whole, or at least taking more of it into account, is being radically upgraded. The day is apparently past when any of the great value systems of mankind could be appropriated by a particular community and applied with merely local significance. What McLuhan calls "the electric age" has "established a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system." [4] Our central nervous system has been extended "in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned." [5] With its explosive proliferation of knowledge, stored in computerized technology, modernization more and more "becomes an almost automatic process driving development forward. The reality of the situation is blurred by saying that we are living through a new industrial revolution.... Indeed, we have good reason to expect that the great technological breakthroughs are yet to come." [6]

I am concerned in this essay with a different breakthrough. I am concerned with the emergence of a new style of life, a self-corrective process of inquiry which has become habitual and embodied in a global community already living under its direction..." --Nolan Pliny Jacobsion, "Buddhism, Modernization, and Science"; read more on cite

The Diaper Dilemma: The Opportunity Costs

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The Diaper Dilemma: The Opportunity Costs

"A term you may recall from your college economics class, opportunity costs, refers to those immeasurable, non-monetary costs – time, convenience, human energy, etc.- one should also consider in any kind of purchase. For instance, you may say it costs you $1.50/gallon to fill your gas tank, but it also costs you 5 minutes of time to stand in the cold (or heat), 5 minutes of extra driving to get to the gas station, the energy it takes to wash the gasoline smell off your hands, and the patience to endure Baby’s fussing during the whole event.

Therefore, when factoring the 'costs' involved, financial, environmental and health, one must also consider time, energy and convenience. Let's look at the opportunity costs involved in disposable diapering and cloth diapering.

Disposables
When it comes to diapering your baby, many would argue that disposables have the lowest opportunity costs – indeed, it’s in weighing these that the majority of today’s parents choose disposables. Certainly, it is easy to throw away a diaper and forget about it. But there are some opportunity costs of using disposables that should also be considered. ..." --Susan Crawford Beil, Punkin-Butt; read more on cite

The Living Network of Schools Owned by Teachers and Students

--by Stanislaw Glazek

"This paper describes a network of teachers and students who form a living system of education at all levels. Organization of schools is based on new principles. One person can be a teacher in one area or activity and a student in another. Schools are owned and governed by the teachers and students. The system is powered at all levels equally by the will of students to learn and the will of teachers to learn and to share their expertise with students.

"We describe main processes and structural principles of the network. The key processes are the process of learning by inquiry and the processes of design and learning by redesign. We also describe steps required to initiate the network growth process from small scale seeds. This avoids wasting human resources and money on a large scale. The first step we suggest for the teams of teachers and researchers who are interested in building the network is studying a bit of basic physics by inquiry using specially designed and well tested materials.

"The network is economically sound. We distinguish the economy of the network because we claim that the freedom and safety of learning and teaching processes can be based only on the financial independence of teachers who gained their independence as a result of developing and using these processes. The system is designed to ensure highest quality in all respects. The design described here is provided as illustration for the underlying principles and their implications rather than as the ultimate structure. In fact, the living
network is expected to evolve and adapt efficiently...." --Stanislaw D. Glazek; Institute of Theoretical Physics, Warsaw University; read more on cite (pdf)

The Once and Future Money

--by Bob Landis

"Good afternoon. I’m delighted to be here today. It’s an honor to speak to a gathering of smart and successful people. And it’s a privilege to share a podium with some of the best living minds in economics. ...

"...Allow me to present what might be called the three articles of the gold bug creed:

"First, gold is money. It always has been. It’s the clear choice of free markets throughout recorded history.

"Second, what we call money today is not money at all. It’s just a rash experiment in credit expansion that has spun totally out of control. Like all such experiments before it, this one will end in tears.

"Third, following the failure of the current monetary system, gold will once again play its historic role as the anchor of a successor system. The market will demand it, and the authorities will have no choice but to let the market have its way.

"The presence of gold in your portfolios signifies that you will emerge from the collapse of this experiment with your capital intact. Indeed, you may clean up in a radically altered landscape. Kind of the ultimate good news/ bad news scenario.

"Now with your indulgence, I’ll take you on a little historical excursion as I provide some support for these wild assertions. ..." --Bob Landis, "The Once and Future Money"; read more on cite

Water For All

--Public Citizen

"As the world's water becomes scarcer and corporations seek to exploit this scarcity for profit, people around the world are losing ownership and control of water resources on which they depend. Water is a human right; to the extent one has the right to live, one has the right to water. Public Citizen's Water for All Campaign is dedicated to protecting water as a common resource, stopping water privatization and bulk water sales, and defending access to clean and affordable water around the world. ..." --Public Citizen; read more on cite

No Patents on Ideas

--Thomas Jefferson

".. It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.

"It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. ..." --Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson 1813; read more on cite

The Stages of Realevolution

A Summary excerpted from "Changing My Mind, Among Others"
--Timothy Leary, PhD.

"...A knowledge of human stages would allow us to smile at the hunter gatherers in our society who expect welfare checks; to tolerate the passionate, dramatic rhetoric of Mideastern midbrainers; to comfort domesticated parents worrying about their kids; to support advanced brain computer–electronic wizards who have activated brain circuits ahead of ours. The answer to all human problems is to recognize your genetic stage, go to the place where your genetic peers hang out, and in that secure place prepare yourself for the future stages inevitably awaiting you.

"But first we need a scientific and psychologically convincing list of human stages...." --Timothy Leary, PhD; read more on cite

Manual for Futants

Conscious Evolution in Designer Genes; Generic Self-Directed Conscious Evolution
by Neil Freer

" Are there humans who are genetically determined to be indicators of the next dimension of evolving human consciousness? Yes. We call them futants. This paper is intended to provide a name, sense of identity, concept, vocabulary, context, and suggestion of societal role-contribution..."

"...The technique for generic, constant, self-directed expansion evolution of consciousness is simple: Begin with one’s consciousness as it is. Turn that consciousness back self-reflexively on itself in self examination and analysis. Determine the statements it enables which cannot be proven by it, the questions it can engender but cannot answer, thereby determining the limiting parameters of this modality. Recognize, contemplate and explore the new kind of consciousness (perception / comprehension / experience / dimensionality) suggested and required by these statements and questions. Employ whatever techniques are appropriate to afford direct experience of this new expanded consciousness. Develop a vocabulary adequate to describe and explain its nature. Formalize its structure and rules, refine and expand its potential: use it as an exploratory tool and a criterion of truth. Use it to gain information about the universe which cannot be gained by lesser types of awareness. Determine how the elements of the previous levels of consciousness are subsumed into the new consciousness.

Repeat the cycle as above. ..." --Neil Freer, A Manual for Futants; read more on cite

In the Beginning was the Command Line

--by Neal Stephenson

"About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized." ..." _--Neal Stephenson; read more on cite

Machinima FAQ

--Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences
By Frank "ILL Bixby" Dellario and Paul Marino.

"So, what is Machinima?

"Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment.

"In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence.

"By combining the techniques of filmmaking, animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game engines, Machinima makes for a very cost- and time-efficient way to produce films, with a large amount of creative control. ..." --Machinama; read more on cite

Perilous Optimism

by Ernest Partridge

"Human beings thrive on hope. Without some sense that our individual deliberate effort brings us closer to a fulfillment of our personal goals, we simply cannot function from one day to the next.

And yet, hope often betrays us, as it blinds us to clear and evident danger and leads us to courses of action and inaction that will eventually result in the loss of our property, our livelihood, our liberty, and even our very lives.

Pangloss is admired, and Cassandra is despised and ignored. But as the Trojans were to learn to their sorrow, Cassandra was right, and had she been heeded, the toil of appropriate preparation for the coming adversity would have been insignificant measured against the devastation that followed a brief season of blissful and ignorant optimism.

Throughout history, and most recently in the mid-Twentieth century, millions have perished due to stubborn and ill-advised optimism. For example, Hitler made his intentions brutally clear in Mein Kampf, yet neither the British nor American governments took heed until the Wehrmacht crossed the Polish border.

Today, Cassandra holds advanced degrees in biology, ecology, climatology, and other theoretical and applied environmental sciences. In a vast library of published book and papers, these scientists warn us that if civilization continues on its present course, unspeakable devastation awaits us or our near descendants. Turning away from that "present course" toward "sustainability," will be difficult, costly and uncertain, but far preferable to a continuation of "business (and policy) as usual."

As a discomforted public, and their chosen political leaders, cry out "say it isn't so!," there is no shortage of reassuring optimists to tell us, "don't worry be happy."

We sincerely wish that we could believe them. But brute scientific facts, and the weakness of the Panglosian arguments, forbid. And so, in this paper we will confront some of the arguments of the optimists, and sadly conclude that their reassurances can not stand up against scientific evidence, fundamental natural laws, logical scrutiny, or even plain common sense. While the optimists are numerous and their reassurances familiar, we will focus our attention primarily on two individuals: the late economist, Julian Simon, and the philosopher, Mark Sagoff..." --by Ernest Partridge; read more on cite

The 60 Minute Network Security Guide

-- First Steps Toward a Secure Networking Environment
Systems and Network Attack Center
National Security Agency

UNCLASSIFIED

[recommended through: Blane Warene's "Sitepoint" blog...]

"...During the last four years the National Security Agency’s Systems and Network Attack Center (C4) has released Security Guides for operating systems, applications and systems that operate in the larger IT network. These security guides can be found at our web site
www.nsa.gov / Security Recommendation Guides. Many organizations across the Department of Defense have used these documents to develop new networks and to secure existing IT infrastructures. This latest Security Guide addresses security a bit differently. Our goal is to make system owners and operators aware of fixes that become “force multipliers” in the effort to secure their IT network.

"Security of the IT infrastructure is a complicated subject, usually addressed by experienced security professionals. However, as more and more commands become ``wired'', an increasing number of people need to understand the fundamentals of security in a networked world. This Security Guide was written with the less experienced System Administrator and information systems manager in mind, to help them understand and deal with the risks the face. ..." --Central Security Service 'Security Configuration Guides'; >read more on cite

Utne Independent Press Awards

-- 2004 Nominees(Promo) Staff

"Over the course of each year, the Utne editorial staff spends countless hours reading not just glossy magazines, but inky tabloids, esoteric newsletters, trade journals, urban newsweeklies, literary zines, radical tracts, and passionate printed matter of all kinds. Of the thousands of publications perused, skimmed, and read cover-to-cover, here are the ones that excite us the most (and are most apt to go missing from the Utne library)...." --Utne Independent Press Awards; read more on cite

Performing Citizenship and "Temporal Hybridity"

PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP AND "TEMPORAL HYBRIDITY"
IN A QUEER DIASPORA
by Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa

"...In this article, I explore the Filipino queer diaspora and the performance of transnational citizenship. I appropriate traditional definitions of diaspora as a concept that describes global communities that have been dispersed from their country of origin to other parts of the world due to migration... Queer racialized subjects perform multiple forms of citizenship that are falsely perceived to simultaneously contradict each other...In the emergence of queer diasporas world wide, the reproduction of hierarchies causes internal displacement of its own subjects. One such displacement occurs for lesbian subjects who disrupt the notion of a queer diaspora due to gender differences in relation to their queer male counterparts...In my exploration...I intend to reveal the way in which identities informed by race, sex, deviance, and resistance to colonial rule, remain in motion as bodies spread across time, though at different moments of self-reflexivity..." --Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, devilbunny; read more on cite

Dreaming in Gujurati

KSW : APAture 2004 : Shailja Patel

download mp3 - Dreaming in Gujurati

"A Kenyan Indian explosion on the national spoken word scene, Shailja Patel performs to standing ovations across the US and internationally. In 2004, she was invited to perform at the Lincoln Center, New York; to collaborate with jazz legend Jon Jang in the Asian American Jazz Series; and to participate in the Nautilus Institute's prestigious Scenarios Workshop, along with luminaries of the Left such as Daniel Ellsberg. ..." --The South Asian Literature + Arts Archive; read more on cite

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Published in 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto is an icon to far-seeking intelligence. An oft-quoted section from the manifesto will probably ring true far into the future:

"...we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it..."

read more on cite.

What's Your i-Name? | Linux Journal

--by Doc Searls
Linux Journal

In my closing keynotes at the first two Digital Identity World conferences, I cried like a wolf in the wilderness for somebody--anybody--to come sow some grass-roots identity seeds. By the middle of last year I pretty much had given up hope. Then, during last summer's LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, I found myself in the top row of the nosebleed section behind first base at a Giants baseball game. Next to me was a woman with a laptop doing stuff on the Web, thanks to the free Wi-Fi provided by the ballpark.

She said her name was Kaliya Hamlin, and she worked for IdentityCommons.org. In name alone, IdentityCommons sounded like it might be the Johnny Identityseed I'd been looking for. Naturally, we got to talking. Several months later, my by now traditional closing keynote at Digital ID World was about Identity Commons and the grass-roots effort it's leading around a set of customer-native identity standards, including one called i-names.

Link: read more on cite| Linux Journal.

An explanation of i-names

From the XDI Wiki

The success of the Internet has led to an explosion of different electronic addresses: email, SMS/MMS, instant messaging, etc. As powerful and convenient as these addresses are, they all have one serious flaw: they are extremely hard to protect from spam, viruses, worms, and other security and privacy violations.

A new type of address has been developed to solve this problem. Called an i-name, it is the first universal private address—a single address you can use for all types of electronic communications while always maintaining control of your privacy.

Link: read more on cite.

Welcome to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library

Link: Welcome to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) contains 7 million documents related to advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research of tobacco products. Visitors can search, view, and download these documents from this web site. If you are new to the site or would like to learn about advanced search features, visit the tutorial or the brief guide to searching.

The LTDL includes documents posted on tobacco industry web sites as of July 1999 in accordance with the Master Settlement Agreement, additional documents added to those sites since that date, and the Mangini and Brown & Williamson document collections from the Tobacco Control Archives maintained by the University of California, San Francisco. New documents are added monthly as they are collected from industry sites.

Con[structed] lang[uage]s At A Glance

Link: Conlangs At A Glance
Jeffrey Henning
Richard Kennaway
On constructed languages...

"The structure of this page of links was inspired by Richard Kennaway's classic Constructed Languages List, which unfortunately he has "mothballed". This particular page is updated every few weeks and was last updated July 28, 2005, from our database of 1,429 languages.

If your language isn't listed in the main Conlangs A-Z directory, you can submit it here. If the language is listed, you can click the "Update This Information..." button on its page and complete the four new fields this listing uses: Conculture Noun Phrase, Quotation (a quote written in your language, preferably something that gives the unique flavor of your language rather than an extract from a common text), Explanation (a phonetic or morphological rendering of the quotation) and the Translation (of the quotation into English" -- Jeffrey Henning

Link: read moreon cite.

Institute for Planetary Synthesis

Link: Overview of IPS Website.

A different sort of hopping off space, with some intriguing and sincere players...

Chemtrail Central :: View topic - What is your take on this?

[This is a great reading list posted on Chemtrail central warning folks bout alleged CIA psyops disinfo sites. I thought it was a very useful list...click on the forum link below and the upshot of the forum writers here is that this list is itself a disinfo list, casting doubt on folk trying to put out real Word. I wanted an easy place to get to all these links and thought I'd store them here in Smart Light...cab...FLEMING FUNCH? THEY'VE GOT FLEMING FUNCH LISTED!!!  that's a laugh and a haugh!]

Link: Visit link.

airamericaradio.com
albasrah.net
aljazeera.net
aljazeera.com
almartinraw.com
americanfreepress.net
angieon911.com
antiwar.com
apfn.org
arcticbeacon.com

Endgame by Goro Adachi

Link: Endgame.

Endgame
Odyssey and the Martian Trojan Horse
By Goro Adachi
September 17, 2002

'H-Bomb' or Misfire?

On September 5, Richard C. Hoagland of the Enterprise Mission - author of The Monuments of Mars - disclosed what he had described as an 'H-bomb' that would finally settle the Cydonia controversy. The existence of artificial structures on Mars, Hoagland had predicted, was to be no longer mere speculation, but an undeniable fact. After a number of frustrating delays, he finally posted his analysis of the Cydonia IR (infrared) images from the Odyssey spacecraft (released by NASA on July 24/25) on his website, then went on the Art Bell radio show to announce his discovery to the world .

cosmicastronomy.com

Link: Mainlist - visitastronomy picklist page links.

List 1 - Cosmic interstate highway
List 2 - Topics with captions
List 3 - Recent astronomy
List 4 - All the astronomy
List 5 - Sci fi short stories
List 6 - Charge polarities
List 7 - Cross references
List 8 - The pullmotors
List 9 - The overview
List 10 - All physics
List 11 - Spokes

List 12 - Illustrated dictionary of tympani properties
List 13 - Illustrated dictionary of galaxy properties
List 14 - World's fastest astronomy crash course
List 15 - Complete pick listing of every page
List 16 - Supersize galaxy bigmass pages
List 17 - Special interest galaxies

Moscow Neutron Monitor - 1-minute data

Link: Moscow Neutron Monitor - 1-minute data.

One- and five-minute Moscow neutron monitor variation for last 11 hours. Updated every hour.

Data2

Link: http://www.elfrad.com/">Data2

The graph on the next page --Link: http://www.elfrad.com/data2.htm">Data2.-- indicates the detection monitor of an experimental device used to record changes in the ionosphere. This particular design does not record electromagnetic impulses or changes in the magnetic field, however it does detect disturbances within the ionosphere itself. For instance, GRBs, Solar Flares, CMEs, Earthquakes, and other natural and unnatural phenomena are reflected and amplified, which enable us at ELFRAD to convert to a ULF frequency for a detailed analysis.

Using this technique it is possible to record major earthquakes at great distances, the moment a precursor occurs or a seismic event happens.

There is much on going work presently involved in this project such as perfecting directional equipment and networking many sites together for advance warning purposes. When our research proves to be very viable and 100 per cent accurate we will announce the project worldwide.