After finishing my degree at Purdue University in November 1963, I joined IBM at the Glendale Development Laboratory in Endicott New York. During my 26 years with IBM I worked on:
When I took an early retirement in 1990 from IBM I joined the staff at the State University of New York at Binghamton working with Francis Wu and Jeff Barker.
The program, which runs under Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP, has an extensive database of events. A number of pre-defined maps are included which illustrate the seismicity in various parts of the earth.
Click on the image at the right to see a screen-capture of the program. The buttons do not work for you but will work when the program is run on a PC.
An earlier DOS program was used by CBS News when reporting on large earthquakes. It was used at the time of the Parkfield alert in November 1993, the Northridge (Los Angeles) event of January 17, 1994, the Kobe event of January 17, 1995, and several others. You will know it if you see the caption across the top of the screen: "CBS News Seismic Monitor."
Union Pacific Railroad uses the program in their dispatch center in Omaha to inform them when they may have to stop trains and inspect the right-of-way.
This program and the Seismic Waves program (see below) are part of the new Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC which opened September 20, 1997.
The photo is of me and my wife, Barbara, and our daughters Adele and Kendra in front of the 40-inch monitor running Seismic/Eruption on the opening day. Photograph by Paul Doyle.
The Global Volcanism Program (GVP) of the Smithsonian Institution released in 2000 a CD-ROM with the Seismic/Eruption and Seismic Waves programs on them plus lots more such as a photo gallery of eruptions and earthquake damage. The programs are configured as they are at the National Museum of Natural History exhibit. Go to the GVP web page for an order form.
If you would like to use the Windows program, Seismic/Eruption, (Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP) you can fetch it here: seisvole.readme and SeismicEruptionSetup.exe.
You can update the earthquakes to within an hour or so of real time. If your computer is connected to the Internet, run Seismic/Eruption and click on "Options/Update hypocenters via Internet."
Some people report a problem that causes Seismic/Eruption to end after updating. I cannot reproduce this problem so, if it is happening, you will have to live with it. It seems the update completes before the crash so no data is lost.
You can have the program give you notification of earthquakes within minutes of the event by installing the program in conjunction with QDDS: Quake Data Distribution System. Details are in QDDS.seismic.html. Since earthquakes come in from several nodes in the earthquake distribution network, there are usually many duplicates. The program QDM removes duplicates in near-real time. It, too, can be run in conjunction with Seismic/Eruption. Details are in QDDS_QDM.seismic.html.
The program displays both earthquakes and volcanoes. The database of volcanism is from the Global Volcanism Program of the Smithsonian Institution.
When the program is running, the user sees lights, which represent earthquakes, flashing on the screen in speeded-up time. The user can control the speed of the action. In addition, the program can show seismicity under the earth in three-dimensional and cross-sectional views.
NOTE: The programs Seismic/Eruption and Seismic Waves can be used by anyone free of charge.
Seismic/Eruption has shaded terrain images which are saved-screen images. If you want to create your own images, you can do this by fetching the 5-minute world topographic file etopo5.zip. WARNING: It is very large: about 18 megabytes when unpacked and 11.4 meagbytes as a zip file. For higher resolution images of the continental United States, you can fetch topo30.zip. It is even larger: 43 megabytes when unpacked and 15.3 megabytes as a zip file.
2005.03.31: Seismic/Eruption now supports the 2-minute world topographic file ETOPO2 which is larger still: about 110 MB. You can download from: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/relief/ETOPO2/ . This yields better shaded terrain images for regional maps. It includes bathymetry, as does ETOPO5.
For Professor Wu's Geol. 214 you can download WORLD45.ZIP
Seismic Waves is a Windows program which illustrates how wave propagate from an earthquake hypocenter to seismic stations throughout the earth. One sees waves propagating out from the epicenter on a three-dimensional view of the earth at the same time one sees waves propagating through a cross-sectional view of the earth. These two wave propagation views are synchronized with actual event waveforms so that as a particular phase arrives at a station, one sees the effect on the seismiogram
To use the program, fetch: seiswave.readme and SeismicWavesSetup.exe .
It is possible to add new events by using the Wilbur II facility at the IRIS Electronic Bulletin Board
The AS-1 seismometer is modeled, somewhat, after the design featured in the April 1979 Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American. That design used analog components to amplify the signal whereas the present design is digital with the output going to the RS-232 (communications port) of a personal computer. For more information, click on: AmaSeis
The EqLocate program allows you to select P-wave arrivals of a number of seismograms for an earthquake and find its location. For more information, click on: EqLocate.
Running
To measure the Vestal XX race in 1971, I invented the Jones Counter which is used throughout the world to measure running races. It was used to measure the Olympic Marathons in Montreal (1976), Los Angeles (1984), Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), Sydney (2000), and Athens (2004). The counter was manufactured by my son, Clain, for 9 years who sold the business to the New York Running Club when he went off to college. It is now manufactured by Paul Oerth and his sons in San Francisco.
Running (until 2003 when arthritis of lower spine reduced me to walking)
Cross-Country Skiing
Camping
Canoeing
Wife: Barbara Grest Jones, Children:
- Kendra: IBM computer support, California
- Clain: Assistant research professor, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT
- Adele: Clinical psychologist, Rochester, NY
Thanks to Randall Svihla, a former patent examiner who tracked down the correct title of some of the above patents and the U.S. Patent Number of the last two. Before he contacted me, I thought the last two were one patent. (They issued after I left IBM.)
Last modified November 18, 2008 (alj)