Two short notes about science policy activities in Japan.
The plans to develop something like a Japanese National Institutes of Health is moving along. According to the 2014 budget request released by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, most of the increase in this year’s request is slated for new policy priorities. Near the top of that list is the new medical agency. The budget request will need to be reviewed by the Ministry of Finance and approved by the Diet (the Japanese legislature).
Since I’ve written extensively about the earthquake trial in Italy, which was prompted in part by concerns over so-called earthquake predictions, I’ve kept up with mentions of how earthquakes can or cannot be predicted. But I have been lax in tracking how well earthquakes are monitored. Many regions have systems in place to detect the early signs of an earthquake, but only Japan has a nationwide system. Established in 2007 by the country’s Meteorological Agency, the system has issued 135 early warnings, but there have been errors in 31 of those warnings. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the warnings were false (though The Japan Times disagrees). The warnings could be off in terms of magnitude or location, as appears to have been the case in an early August.
The warnings in this case act based on tremors felt, not some educated guess based on prior activity such as clusters of quakes. Since the alerts lead to shutdowns of parts of the country’s high-speed trains, having errors with nearly one-quarter of the alerts issues is a problem. With prediction of earthquakes highly problematic, I would not expect Japan or any other earthquake-prone region to adopt such measures in the near or medium-term future.
Pasco Phronesis 