Quakefinder Blog

Stellar Solutions, Inc Named Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Winner


Congratulations to QuakeFinder’s Parent Company – Stellar Solutions!

Palo Alto, CA (November 16, 2017)

Today, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce named Stellar Solutions a recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest honor for performance excellence and sustainability. Stellar Solutions is a woman-owned small business in the aerospace engineering services field with a vision of satisfying customer critical needs while realizing dream jobs. Founded in 1995 by Celeste Ford, Stellar Solutions has been providing innovative solutions and high impact for its customers (government and commercial, national and international) for over 20 years. Receiving the Baldrige Award is an incredible honor that recognizes Stellar’s sustainability through visionary leadership, organizational alignment, and systemic improvement and innovation.

“We at Stellar Solutions are honored and humbled by the National Baldrige Award recognition. It is especially important for me as the Founder to have created an exciting business that is “built to last”, and to have the efforts of our Stellar team recognized,” said CEO and Founder of Stellar, Celeste Ford. “We work hard each and every day to have high impact and to live our vision of ‘satisfying our customers’ critical needs while realizing our dream jobs’, and the Baldrige framework has been an important element in making our business successful and sustainable.”

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program is managed by the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). An independent board of examiners evaluated 24 applications this year on their processes around leadership, strategy, customers, measurement & analysis, workforce, and operations, as well as their results related to each of these categories. Stellar is one among five award recipients who will be presented the award in April 2018 during the Quest for Excellence Conference (the Baldrige community’s national meeting) in Baltimore, MD. Only 110 organizations have received the award (out of over 1,600 applicants) since 1987 when the Baldrige program began.

About Stellar Solutions, Inc.
Stellar Solutions, Inc. is an aerospace engineering services company that provides top tier engineering and technical management talent in support of significant national and international aerospace programs. Stellar is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in Colorado and Virginia, as well as international sister companies in the UK and France. The Company has distinguished itself by satisfying customers’ critical needs and crossing the boundaries on diverse projects including defense-related intelligence projects, international telecommunications satellites, commercial imagery satellites, and NASA’s earth science and planetary missions. Stellar is also committed to helping every employee find their dream job, and has been recognized as one of Fortune magazine’s Best Places to Work for four years running.

Stellar Solutions areas of expertise include systems engineering, systems integration, mission operations and engineering, continuity of operations and resiliency, program management and strategic planning. Stellar also operates a Humanitarian R&D sector, QuakeFinder, whose goal is to save lives by forecasting earthquakes by developing the technology and methods for detection and analysis of electromagnetic earthquake precursors. Stellar and QuakeFinder launched the first commercial triple-cubesat in 2003, and currently operate an extensive network of sensors monitoring electromagnetic activity in earthquake-prone regions, including California, Peru, Taiwan, Greece, Chile, and Indonesia.

For more information, contact Craig Fairlee, VP Business Operations (650) 838-0946 | cfairlee@stellarsolutions.com



QuakeFinder Publishes Journal Paper


Congratulations to Karl, Dan, Laura and Tom for their recent publication of QF research in Earthquake Science!

“Identification and classification of transient pulses observed in magnetometer array data by time-domain principal component analysis filtering” is the first of three journal papers to be published describing our evolving techniques to understand and characterize electromagnetic signals from our magnetometer array. This particular research was performed in early 2016 and was our first attempt to identify classes of EM ‘pulses’ in our time series data. The 6.0 Napa quake on Aug 24th, 2014 around which QF had four stations, is used as the basis for these analyses. The technique described successfully identified solar activity and also a class of pulses we hypothesize to be earth-emitted. The results of this research helped guide our data science plan in 2016/17 during which we’ve developed additional techniques and tools. The 2nd paper, now in review for publication, describes this technique and the corresponding results. Stay tuned for great things from QF!





Remembering The Loma Prieta Earthquake


Remembering The Loma Prieta Earthquake

Twenty-eight years ago at 5:04 pm, a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck northern California. ‘The ‘Loma Prieta’ Earthquake, centered in the Nisene Marks State Park, caused significant damage to Santa Cruz County and as far north as Oakland. Game 3 of the 1989 World Series was just getting started when the temblor sent its P and S waves through the hosting city of San Francisco. This was the first earthquake to ever be broadcast live on television. Lasting approximately 15 seconds, the quake killed 63 and injured nearly 4000 people. Most of the deaths resulted from the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland.

Days later, Antony Fraser-Smith, a researcher at Stanford University performing Ultra Low Frequency work for the U.S. Navy, traveled to Santa Cruz county to collect his monitoring equipment which happened to be just miles from the epicenter. Upon review of his recorded data, he noticed anomalous behavior in the days and hours leading up to the quake. Following months of electromagnetically calm data, his instrument had suddenly picked up signals that ‘saturated’ the measurement system.

Past research in Greece, China and Russia had focused on electromagnetic phenomenon as earthquake precursors but the results had been inconclusive. In the decade after Loma Prieta, Fraser-Smith encountered tremendous head-wind from the established earthquake community in his attempts to further study and publish EM-related research. This respected Stanford electrical engineering professor and researcher was an outsider and unprepared for the earthquake-prediction antibodies entrenched in the halls of the U.S. government. Having been swindled by alleged collaborators and publicly accused of falsifying his data, he eventually gave up the campaign in disgust. Scientific change is difficult.

Since 2005, QuakeFinder has taken the helm having deployed 170 remote instruments (similar to Fraser-Smith’s) and collecting/storing data from earthquake-prone countries. With over 1000 earthquakes captured in our database, QuakeFinder is now focused on data science attempting to uncover the precursory behavior ahead of earthquakes as seen by Fraser-Smith. Our results to date indicate a strong statistical correlation between anomalous EM signals and earthquakes. Antony remains a QuakeFinder friend and inspiration. Our mission is to save lives by forecasting earthquakes..and validate his earlier findings!





QuakeFinder 3rd Quarter Newsletter


History of Hurricane Forecasting, Part 1.

This newsletter is a continuation of our series of studies into the history of weather and natural disaster forecasting. The intent of these studies is to understand the pioneering efforts of those who brought us these capabilities, the often-messy process of discovery, the societal reaction and impacts of forecasting, the resistance of establishment naysayers, and all the setbacks and triumphs along the way. QuakeFinder seeks to enable an earthquake forecasting system and gathering these lessons-learned from history will help guide us on our quest. The following article is a look into the early history of hurricane forecasting.



Do you know the first recorded hurricane forecast was made by Christopher Columbus? Within 10 years after the discovery of the New World, he had made four cross-Atlantic exploration journeys and as a result had gained unique experience in tropical Atlantic weather. While 15th century sailors knew of gale force storms in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean, those 100 mph winds were nothing compared to the 150+ mph wind storms of the Caribbean. Columbus knew first hand the power of the ‘tempest’ storms having lost 2 of his 3 ships near Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti &Dominican Republic) during his second voyage. And he knew some of the early warning signs – a brick-red horizon, shifting winds and a rising swell. On his fourth trip in 1502 before a planned return to Spain, he warned the ruling Governor (and rival for the Queen’s attention) of an approaching large storm from the southeast. The fleet of 30 ships ignored the warning and set sail while Columbus and his four ships sheltered on the west side of the island. Two days later the hurricane hit and sunk 21 of the traversing vessels killing over 500 sailors. Columbus’ ships were unharmed.


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