This is an extremely important case, in that it underlies a central concern in scientific reporting, and it threatens to change the risks associated with scientific innovation and communication. For instance, if scientists at a pharmaceutical company issue unfounded assurances that a drug is safer than it is in truth, consumers might have a reasonable case. On the other hand, predicting earthquakes is so difficult, even if the scientists had mistakenly suggested that there was no reason to suspect an imminent quake, I find it hard to find justification for a 6 year prison sentence, in addition to damages.
But beyond that, it seems the scientists offered no such assurances at the meeting in question. To quote the Nature article (perhaps biased in favor of the scientists):
The minutes of the 31 March meeting, though, reveal that at no point did any of the scientists say that there was "no danger" of a big quake. "A major earthquake in the area is unlikely but cannot be ruled out," Boschi said. Selvaggi is quoted as saying that "in recent times some recent earthquakes have been preceded by minor shocks days or weeks beforehand, but on the other hand many seismic swarms did not result in a major event". Eva added that "because L'Aquila is in a high-risk zone it is impossible to say with certainty that there will be no large earthquake". Summing up the meeting, Barberi said, "there is no reason to believe that a swarm of minor events is a sure predictor of a major shock". All the participants agreed that buildings in the area should be monitored urgently, to assess their capacity to sustain a major shock.
To continue the analogy with medicine, it seems similar to a group of scientists suggesting that a particular course of treatment is likely safe, then receiving blame when the treatment goes awry. But blaming medical researchers, or earthquake scientists, could discourage innovative new treatments.
As one final point, I'd point out that the occurrence of an earthquake does not disprove the scientists: the likelihood of an earthquake given the data could still have been small, just non-zero. If medical researchers were held accountable for every death resulting from heart transplants gone wrong, we'd never have the overall benefit they provide.
Before that meeting, some of the scientists have been "used" by various politicians and high-level civil servant in their public speeches and interviews with the media. There are records of the director of the nation-wide emergency task-force being being interviewed and saying things like "After these afternoon quakes there is nothing to be feared, I can assure you. My fellow colleague and quake researcher can tell you the same", and one of the convicted scientists cues in "Sure, there is nothing to be feared. Indeed, these small earthquakes have released a lot of energy, making a big earthquake impossible". _Impossible_. That is not correct scientific communication, that is being the wingman of a politician being interviewed by national TV.
The same board of scientists have been found legally responsible for other similar statements, for example for not green-lighting the evacuation of the student's campus. The engineering students noticed strange cracks on the walls and notified the emergency task-force who replied: "First, the building is safe, we have had it tested few month ago; second, they said on TV that there are not going to be big earthquakes". The main building of campus collapsed.
The government imposed a "everything is safe, do not worry" view. This was a political decision and the board members let the politicians use their scientific credibility for their political agenda. This is what is being punished here. It is their behaviour and the words they said on TV that is being addressed, not the content of the technical minutes.
Anyway, there is a point of the sentence that is a bit scary. The whole board is being punished, not just the head of the board and the others who spoke before the meeting. The court considers the board a single body, and this is a bit strange and worrisome.
With medicine/drugs, there's a financial incentive to call it safe, so there actually does need to be some amount of scrutiny there with risks of enforcement.
With earthquakes, I'd hope that anyone who passed 9th grade science would have laughed this out of court.
I can wholeheartedly recommend a documentary called Draquila – L'Italia che trema [1] about the L'Aquila earthquake.
As many of my Italian friends tell me, Italy is an absolutely corrupt shit hole. I remember a scene where they showed recordings of civil protection officials gloating about the disaster on the phone, right after it happened. They talked about the opportunity to make money [2].
The head of the national civil protection service is / was notorious in his blatant abuse of emergency powers to give government contracts (construction) without oversight to his crooked friends.
As an italian I can confirm this, there are many people speculating on this sad events.
You can find many articles on the net about how many initiatives to send money often make those money "disappear".
When the money actually arrives, the people how need to rebuild often rebuild using cheap material and take the money for them.
Some of the cities hitted by quackes many years ago never really recovered and maybe after 20 years a lot of people might be living still in containers.
Whether or not the seismologists gave some kind of reassurance or not, it seems ridiculous to try them for manslaughter.
Perhaps professional incompetence or the like, but it's not as though the town would have done anything different had they said without any provable foundation "a major earthquake is imminent". Seismology is in such infancy that holding people responsible for acts of nature, which state of the art are highly unpredictable, is on the surface, ludicrous. What's next, the meteorologist on trial for getting the forecast wrong about heavy rains which cause floods and damage, etc?
I agree. When I had first read the title I thought maybe they somehow CAUSED the quake. Definitely got me interested until I actually read the full article. Seems a little overboard the amount of "justice" taken upon them.
Not all of Italy, only the South. That's why the biggest party in the north is a secessionist party. A lot of cool stuff comes out of the North, like Arduino.
I lived in the Veneto for 4 years, and I would say the north is definitely corrupt. I've seen business people turning up at the commune to hand over bags full of cash without uttering a single word. Places of business burnt down because they the owners didn't have "approval" from the right people. Council officials just blatantly asking for money to make something happen. Try buying a house in the Veneto, you have to do it illegally.
Also, I bumped into a lot of Lega Nord people (the secessionist party) while I lived there and generally found them to be little more than racists and fascists. When I had to obtain my Permesso di Soggiorno, a group of us, all english turned up on the same day. We were all given 2 year stamps, except my black friend. They would only give him 6 months. I found the north of Italy to be jaw dropingly racist across the board.
At least, that was my experience. Don't get me wrong, I love Italy, but it's only because I let myself be blissfully ignorant of it's fundamental flaws when I'm there.
I was born and still live in Veneto and the amount of racism against immigrants (lately it's common to blame the Chinese, North Africans and Romanian for everything wrong in society or economics) is depressing.
This is bullshit, let me tell you. Corruption is everywhere in Italy: North AND South. Public sector AND Private sector. I am Italian, from the North, I lived in Milan for years and I am married with a woman from Rome: I know what I'm saying...
Not agreeing or disagreeing with you, as I have no idea about this, but I'm not sure being Italian is evidence that you are an expert on Italian corruption...
"Expert" is a relative term. He may not know all the intricate details. But having to live in the system he has first-hand knowledge, and not being part of the system (apparently) he has no personal reason to hide its dirty secrets. Also, his experience is likely to be typical for other people like him. This, I would say, makes him a great source. Then if an "expert" wants to perform a scientific study or in-depth journalistic investigation or some other thing "experts" are supposed to do, the said expert would need to contact him and other like him, for knowledge. Which he, thankfully, has freely shared with us here.
Corruption in Italy is hardwired in the behavior of people and their approach to life. It's enough to live in Italy for a long enough time to understand how people reason and why corruption is so widespread.
Obviously, being Italian doesn't make me an expert in corruption from a legal point of view, but I am pretty positive to know a bit about Italian mentality and facts confirm that corruption is as common in the North as it is in the South (I can cite my sources, if necessary.)
for the record: the last major of milan was, for lack of better word, "impeached" after it was found out her son had built an abusive "batcave".
The current governor of lombardia and the whole council is in a corruption and vote marketing scandal.
The head of the secessionist party for the last twenty years left his role after it was found out he and his son had been using the party as a revolver bank account.
And, noticeably, the Dear Leader Silvio Berlusconi is from milan.
There is a lot to say on the north vs south in italy, but saying "northern italy is not corrupted" is as silly as it gets.
Holy cow, the plot of Sin City (Politician's son builds a rape/torture chamber, and the son is protected from punishment because the politician wants him to produce an heir) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401792/) actually really happened in Milan?
Italy is an absolutely corrupt shit hole. I remember a scene where they showed recordings of civil protection officials gloating about the disaster on the phone, right after it happened. They talked about the opportunity to make money
Just as another data point, lots of countries have corrupt and self-centred politicians. A spin doctor the UK government, on September 11th 2001, between when the towers were hit and when the fell, wrote an email to their staff saying "It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Moore ). You'll always get slimey politicians who will see oppertunity in tragedy.
That's a little different. What you're talking about is burying bad news, which is indeed standard political practice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
What it's not is corruption, which is what the OP is talking about.
For what it's worth, I would say Italy does have a perception of being more corrupt than its fellow European counterparts. This may or may not be true - it's obviously a little difficult to objectively measure corruption, but the Corruption Perceptions Index[1] has ranked Italy as one the most corrupt countries of Western Europe.
i don't know. i do believe it is true (chileans i know that have lived in argentina are mortified by the corruption there), and the country is very isolated culturally (by the andes in the east and desert - and poor relations politically - to the north). so it's reasonable for it to be different, but i don't have a good explanation for why it is.
whatever the reason, it seems to be quite deep, culturally. anecdotally, i was shocked just a couple of weeks ago when i went to get a picture framed and the people doing the work lied to my face (they said between themselves that they didn't have the material i wanted; when i questioned that they promised they did; the results were not what they promised). that was very odd for chile (sorry, i didn't make it clear above - i live there), but the shop owners were argentinian immigrants... it is normal, culturally, here (speaking in broad terms) to speak "optimistically" of the future (so if you ask whether a shop will have something in stock next month, they will - usually, in my experience - say yes), but not to directly contradict what was said a moment earlier without batting an eyelid (i should perhaps add that i suspect i missed something myself in the exchange in the picture shop - perhaps the expected way i should have behaved was to offer an acceptable compromise instead of directly questioning what was happening - i am aware that cultural distinctions are not absolute judgements).
I gather from the website that this app is trying to discourage tax evasion by exposing evaders. Your sentence "it aims to crowd source tax evasion in Italy" gives the wrong impression.
> I remember a scene where they showed recordings of civil protection officials gloating about the disaster on the phone, right after it happened. They talked about the opportunity to make money
This is crazy, but I'll note that it isn't a peculiarly Italian form of crazy. People rush to find scapegoats after every disaster. In the future, consider being as skeptical of those accusations as you were when people accused folks you identify with, like scientists.
People will everywhere rush to find scapegoats. What is much more worrisome is when the court supports them. The first thing happens everywhere, the second shouldn't happen in a civilized country
The tragic fact about scapegoating is that once a community has chosen a scapegoat it is very hard for it to "regain its composure."
Who will be the first to defend the scapegoat? There are big disincentives. You risk being grouped with the scapegoat and suffering the same fate. You risk becoming the new scapegoat. You risk reprisals from the folks who are hiding in shadows while the spotlight follows the scapegoat.
And it probably won't even help. Once a person has chosen an opinion, they tend to defend it, and this applies tenfold to a group. (This plays out in social media every day.) Changing a mob's opinion is hard. Time doesn't necessarily help. There are scapegoats that are centuries old.
The social dynamics favor letting the scapegoat take the fall. That's why scapegoating is so common that we have an ancient name for the practice, even though almost everyone would agree that it's immoral.
Everything you say is politically true, but the reason we have judges and juries (in the US anyway, I don't know how Italy works) is that they are in a position to stop the BS.
the reason we have judges and juries (in the US anyway, I don't know how Italy works)
I assure you that Italy has judges and juries and a modern judicial system. This isn't some teeny tribe of Amazonian warriers here, this is a large country.
A blog post [0] about a month ago explains better why they are on trial:
The prosecution’s closing arguments [...] made it clear that
the scientists are not accused of failing to predict the
earthquake. “Even six-year old kids know that earthquakes can not be
predicted,” he said. “The goal of the meeting was very different:
the scientists were supposed to evaluate whether the seismic
sequence could be considered a precursor event, to assess what
damages had already happened at that point, to discuss how to
mitigate risks.” Picuti said the panel members did not fulfill these
commitments, and that their risk analysis was “flawed, inadequate,
negligent and deceptive”, resulting in wrong information being given
to citizens.
Interesting. As I would expect, seismologists unrelated to the case disagree with the ruling:
>"It's too easy to predict an earthquake after the fact and say everyone should have cleared out, but beforehand people, for good reason, thought the risk was low," said John Vidale, a University of Washington seismologist. In fact, Vidale said, the scientists' statements that the quake was unlikely were true. "There was a very small chance of that earthquake," Vidale told LiveScience. "It didn't make sense for people to evacuate."
At first I assumed that the scientists must have been out drinking, or must have made up the data ... but, no, they simply gave the best prediction they could, as they should.
I guess that forecasters of quakes and weather in Italy now have two alternatives: always claim a disaster is upon them, or move to a country where judges understand statistics.
Don't be so naive! Scientists are not bound by some force of Nature to tell the truth. The accusation is exactly that they didn't tell all they knew about the earthquake, but they hold back the information in order to "quiet down" the population.
Obviously, I don't know if the accusations are true or false, but, knowing Italy, where "famous" scientists are usually very close to politicians, it would not surprise me at all.
Where I live now, the local sports talk radio hosts always blast the weather guys when they forecast doom and gloom with an incoming snow storm, regardless of how much snow we get. Maybe it's just the "we're tough" Scandinavian culture, but they really make a mockery of the forecasts as always being overblown and sensationalist before anything happens.
Is there anywhere to find all of the facts? This article doesn't give background info.
It took some digging to find that indeed the scientists had given a reassuring statement, though it had an expected but-we-cant-be-sure admonition, beforehand.
In particular, at least one member of the civil defense bureaucracy went out of his way to say there was a consensus that there was no danger (even though there was not such a strong consensus):
"Immediately after that meeting, De Bernardinis and Barberi, acting president of the committee, held a press conference in L'Aquila, where De Bernardinis told reporters that "the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable". No other members of the committee were at the press conference."
There should be consequences for such grave misrepresentations. I was surprised to see that the whole committee is being punished, though, and not just the official who misrepresented the state of knowledge.
Maybe, as some other commenters have noted, this is part of a ritual of condemnation at the first judicial level and absolution upon appeal to the second or third level.
Not really, because any witness goes on the stand, whether they are a party to the case or not. Saying someone is "on the stand" does not mean they are a criminal defendant.
Not really. I worded it that way because I was not sure if other civil defense bureaucrats might have made pronouncements. The article mentions only the one, but it does not claim to be comprehensive.
This is way more complex than it might appear. Italian speakers can watch this movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rROgB5QMgHs&feature=playe...
It shows a telephone conversation between the chief of "Protezione Civile" (responsible to react and intervene in case of catastrophes) Guido Bertolaso and a politician in the region where the earthquake happened, Daniela Stati.
Bertolaso first tells Stati that they did badly by saying the media that they didn't expect more earthquakes (as they did the day before, after a small shake that did no damage). Bertolaso added that he would fix this error with the media and send the most important scientists he knows to "quiet down" the population, upset by the previous message and by the continuous shakes. The accusation is that scientists didn't actually report what they knew, but they went in front of the media to "quiet" down the population.
Unfortunately, the day after the big earthquake happened and 309 people died.
Predicting an earthquake is predicting when a bent wooden ruler will snap. Sometimes it creaks before it snaps. Sometimes it creaks, and doesn't snap. Sometimes it just snaps.
The way to prevent deaths from earthquakes is to ensure buildings can survive them. Modern buildings collapsed in the quake. I wonder if they were built to standard, or if a few corners were cut?
If the bender neglected to tell the observers to wear eye protection and the unthinkable happened, they should be held accountable. A ruler in the eye is no way to start a Monday.
That is ridiculous. Any reasonably intelligent person knows that the science of predicting earthquakes is terrible. If you are smart you would take reasonable precautions to something like that. You live in an non-reinforced brick house from the 1500's and you feel a tremor; maybe it's time to get out of town for a while. The scientists didn't do the bending.
I can't find words strong enough to say how stupid this is. As wisty said, the good way is to build quake-proof buildings. Of course, that means fighting the Mafia which controls construction work in this part of the country, which takes more guts than judging 6 scientists.
Sweet. Now I can sue the weatherman the next time I get caught in the rain.
Personally, I'm not surprised at this stupidity. I also won't be surprised if from now on every single report offered suggests that an earthquake will occur tomorrow, making the entire exercise meaningless and probably costing lives in the future.
It happened two times against "Météo France" (French national meteorological service) by an insurance company in 1996 and winegrowers / farmers in 1999 but it has been dismissed in each cases.
While I have to believe that this will die through appeals, the long-term implications are enormous.
As nxswolf points out, it not only will scare off future scientists interested in working in Italy, but any official/expert tasked with preventing tragedies.
The fallout is that, with each possibility, worst-case scenarios will be the norm to avoid culpability over reasoned approach. Not to say that worst-case should not be considered, but dialling up to 11 is never an appropriate public response.
Finally, today it is seismologists, tomorrow it could easily be network security folks, application engineers, CTO/CSO's etc. Basically, any situation where the sum-total parts are so large and multi-faceted that no one person/agency could be seen as the expert.
Terrible tragedy, terrible fallout. The optimist in me hopes that this is dropped at the next appeal.
While it's up to scientist to use the best science available. No where to they say scientists are responsible for outcomes. If the failure is based on the best science then what is needed is better science.
Ultimately, the failure is on the journalists and news organizations who choose to broadcast the words of the scientists. They have their rapport with the public and have responsibility to uphold their journalistic integrity. What is really at fault here is editorial review of the news organizations. Period. Anyone can say anything, but it is the news corporations that broadcast the message.
Scapegoating at its best. Really, what a disgrace this is.
Scientists are already loathe to communicate directly with the general public for fear of misunderstanding of carefully chosen words. This kind of farce will cause a rift that will take a long time to heal. If ever.
What's next? Putting the Earth on trial for manslaughter?
Risk prediction is about minimizing expected risk, which does not exactly correspond to the eventual damage done. This means that there will be times when they are wrong. If we punish risk predictors this harshly for being wrong, no one will want to take this job up since it basically guarantees eventually being convicted of manslaughter. But without such people we have no hope of ever mitigating such disasters.
Well, sure thing, noone can predict earthquakes. But the same is true for claiming that there won't be one.
Prior to the earthquake on April 6th, 2009, there have been several smaller ones. On March 30th, there was a quake with a magnitude of 4.1. People were really concerned that something was about to happen shortly. So the day after these scientists claimed, that there won't be an earthquake in the near future. This was surely to calm the public. However, they were wrong. And according to the court, they didn't make their point clear enough, that they are basically unable to make such predictions.
Although I don't follow the sentence, I somehow get the judge's point.
We live in a land where silence is king
Whispers have all disappeared
Cry for an echo, you won't hear a thing
Silence is king around here
Silence is king around here
Desperate measures come from desperate times
I don't regret what I have done
If my actions made you speak your mind
Angry words are better than none
I am Italian. Sense does not understand how things work around here, Poetry does.
Galileo could have been jailed 2 years ago.
As a fledgling phd entrepreneur, at 28, I am leaving Italy.
Well, the sentence is not really about "earthquake prediction", but about the fact that some hours before the big earthquake alarms from the INGV (the italian institute for earthquake monitoring, one of the best in the world) were ignored.
Of course nobody can predict earthquakes, but in L'Aquila's quake there were strong evidence of "something happening", and they were ignored: that's why they were found guilty.
P.s. I'm from Italy
Any sources for the "INGV" alarms and the "strong evidence" and that they "were ignored"?
Because the other sources say that there were small shocks before and the scientists consciously decided based on what they know that this does not make an earthquake more likely.
> If the scientific community is to be penalised for making predictions that turn out to be incorrect, or for not accurately predicting an event that subsequently occurs, then scientific endeavour will be restricted to certainties only and the benefits that are associated with findings from medicine to physics will be stalled."
presumably the result of the quake would have been the same if the scientists didn't give a reassuring message?
And now they are in jail, if another quake strikes, the same will happen again.
Surely it is better that scientists are at least trying to predict the quakes, even if they get it wrong sometimes?
The result wouldn't have been same according to testimony from the article: some people that would've fled due to the tremors stayed due to the reassurances.
They are not in jail, and I bet they will never go to jail. I say this because, as Italian, I've seen way too many processes ended in first degree with a condemnation, and later on, in the second and third grade, ended with an absolution.
If the data (plots, spectograms, etc) was made public on realtime the opinions/warnings would be issued by independent scientists or ordinary people or algorithms that would issue the chance of something happening and nobody would get punished.
The sentence is in "first grade" (in Italy there are 3 grades of sentence and the third is definitive), so things can change in the other grades, and probably will, because this sentence caused an uproar here in Italy.
As much as i'd like to keep the scientists accountable for their work, seriously, letting people live in medieval apartments in a city with such history of earthquake disasters was the real crime.
I, for one, applaud this ruling. There's no reason why scientists should be above the law. It's funny how often they complain of not being taken seriously enough, but then when they are, and something bad happens as a result, they're quick to deny responsibility. Are seismologists serious scientists? If they are, they must accept the consequences. If not, we don't need them. It's as simple as that.
But beyond that, it seems the scientists offered no such assurances at the meeting in question. To quote the Nature article (perhaps biased in favor of the scientists):
The minutes of the 31 March meeting, though, reveal that at no point did any of the scientists say that there was "no danger" of a big quake. "A major earthquake in the area is unlikely but cannot be ruled out," Boschi said. Selvaggi is quoted as saying that "in recent times some recent earthquakes have been preceded by minor shocks days or weeks beforehand, but on the other hand many seismic swarms did not result in a major event". Eva added that "because L'Aquila is in a high-risk zone it is impossible to say with certainty that there will be no large earthquake". Summing up the meeting, Barberi said, "there is no reason to believe that a swarm of minor events is a sure predictor of a major shock". All the participants agreed that buildings in the area should be monitored urgently, to assess their capacity to sustain a major shock.
To continue the analogy with medicine, it seems similar to a group of scientists suggesting that a particular course of treatment is likely safe, then receiving blame when the treatment goes awry. But blaming medical researchers, or earthquake scientists, could discourage innovative new treatments.
As one final point, I'd point out that the occurrence of an earthquake does not disprove the scientists: the likelihood of an earthquake given the data could still have been small, just non-zero. If medical researchers were held accountable for every death resulting from heart transplants gone wrong, we'd never have the overall benefit they provide.