occurred randomly, without regard to syzygy. E.g., in a 28-day lunar cycle he has two windows of eight days each, plus six partial credit days, thus covering 22 days out of the 28. (This is reminiscent of Charles Richter's pronouncement that "every earthquake takes place within 3 months of an equinox.") The arbitrary inclusion of other undocumented factors makes the results nearly impossible to evaluate. One analysis that tried to evaluate his results in a consistent manner found no statistical significance, and concluded that "Berkland is not actually predicting earthquakes." Berkland's claimed "accuracy rate" is also incomplete. The societal value of any prediction method depends not only on its success rate (the proportion of total predictions that are successful), but also on the false alarm ratio (the proportion of predictions that are false), and on the hit rate (proportion of all events successfully predicted), or its inversion, the number of earthquakes missed. These cannot be determined without knowing about all of the predictions made, which Berkland does not document. See also Earthquake sensitive Lists of earthquakes Further reading . . . . Notes Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . External links Berkland's web site was inactive since about June 2010. American geologists Appalachian State University faculty San Jose State University faculty Fellows of the Geological Society of America 1930 births 2016 deaths