July - September 1998

Deputy Director David McGregor retired in August after 34 years with the ISC. David joined the ISC as its first employee when it was located at its original site in Oswald Road, Edinburgh, and continued with the Centre at its subsequent homes in Edinburgh, Newbury, and Thatcham. Together with former Director Anthony Hughes he was one of the four people who moved with the ISC when it relocated to southern England.

Educated as a geologist, David began his service with the ISC developing computer programs, back when programmers carefully guarded cabinets filled with precious punched cards. As time went on, he transferred a growing library of programs from cards to tapes to disks and modified them, first to run on IBM computers at Rutherford-Appleton Lab and later to run on the ISC?s own VAX computers.

David and his wife, Pat, opened their home over the years to graciously host many ISC employees arriving from abroad. Pat also often translated macroseismic reports for the Bulletin and abstracts for the Bibliography.

In 1977 David became Deputy Director of the ISC and was responsible amongst other duties for selecting the technologies that the ISC embraced to collect, process and edit an ever-growing volume of data. Over time, David became an important part of the Centre?s institutional memory and his contribution to its development has been uniquely valuable. He has generously offered to help recover data from the ISC?s archive tapes as the Centre establishes a modern database.

As recommended by the Executive Committee at its meeting in July, the Centre has been seeking an additional seismologist to help reduce the accumulated backlog in Bulletin production. We received applications from many well-qualified candidates, and we were able to choose among seismologists with outstanding credentials and years of directly relevant experience.

Mr. Mamy Andrianirina of the Malagasy Republic has accepted a two-year appointment at the Centre, and we expect him to join us in November. Mamy holds university degrees in physics and chemistry and a post-graduate diploma in seismology. He has located regional and teleseismic earthquakes for the Institute and Observatory of Geophysics, Antananarivo, since 1989. Mamy participated recently in the seismology course of the International Institute of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering in Japan, and Daisuke Suetsugu rates him as one of the best participants in 35 years.

Stephen Cox, Executive Secretary of the Royal Society, paid an informal visit to the ISC in August. Among other topics, Mr. Cox offered suggestions on sources of supplementary funding, including the Royal Society International Exchange Programme. With some other funding agencies, such as the UK National Environment Research Council and the European Science Foundation, the Royal Society may be able to provide references to support applications from the ISC.

David Rendel, the local Member of Parliament, visited the ISC in September. Mr. Rendel promised to support the ISC, and featured the Centre in his weekly newspaper column the following week. He offered suggestions on grants to support educational outreach programmes in the ISC?s neighbourhood.

The complete Bulletin, January 1964 ? April 1996, is now available from the ISC web site, at www.gxjydl.com/search/bulletin. Data from before 1994 were put on-line in late September following configuration of further disk space.

The program for selecting events has been modified to include magnitude and amplitude criteria. Users may now select events within rectangular regions or based on distance from arbitrary locations. There is a new option that begins to take advantage of the hypertext capabilities of the web within the Bulletin data itself. If the "include links" option is selected, each primary origin is presented as a link to the associated phase readings and each Harvard M_W is linked to the complete solution for that event at the Harvard University CMT Project web site.

Three further Sun workstations were installed at the ISC in September, bringing the total to 5. With retirement of the VAX growing ever closer, this is an important step in the Centre?s computer modernisation programme, which is partially funded by the US NSF. Putting computing capability on the desktop of each ISC staff member will enable Centre operations to evolve away from batch processing towards an interactive model.

One immediate benefit is a many-fold reduction in processing time; runs that took several hours on the VAX take only a few minutes on the Suns. Another benefit is that seismologists editing the Bulletin can more easily link processes together, for example by leaving several utilities running in separate windows and pasting results from one into another.

The ISC has purchased the Oracle 8 relational database management system. Migration of the ISC data to a coherent management system is an important element in the Centre?s draft long-range plan (available in Postscript format from www.gxjydl.com/doc). Ultimately, a relational database is intended to replace the current system of managing data in a variety of different formats as it is collected, processed, edited and finally distributed to users. The management system will provide quicker and more flexible data retrieval, which is important as access to ISC data from its web site grows. The database management system also helps to insure integrity of the data while multiple users are updating it simultaneously. This is an essential service for the ISC as it moves towards an interactive system for editing the Bulletin.

The selection of Oracle 8 was based on Oracle?s strong position in the data management software field, success of other seismic data centres implementing Oracle data management systems, and favourable pricing compared with other vendors. By sharing a common data management system with other seismic data centres, the ISC may have more opportunities to exchange lessons and perhaps even to share software.

Robin Adams, ISC?s senior seismologist from 1978 to 1995, lost his wife, Thelma, to cancer in August. Robin is writing a book on historical seismicity of Central America, and continues to spend a few days at the Centre each week to consult its collection, use its computing facilities, check for post, phone messages and e-mail, and share his good spirits and wisdom with us.