Selling Earthquakes 5th Edition 2006 Centennial Update "The 1906 Big One" by Bruce Bolt

ISBN# = **********485

Price = $40

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Earthquakes, for being a GE course, was ridiculous difficult. The midterm wasn't so bad, but the final was brutal; it really was fairly math-intensive. The main problem, though, is that Davis seems to assume a little TOO much that you really are reading the texts (the textbook he co-authored, which isn't even the mandatory text, as it's out of print and on reserve in the library; the textbook we were required to get was next to useless); he doesn't really cover some of the "basics" that crop up often in what would otherwise appear to be really easy problems. To this day, I don't really understand what a rake is, but apparently it was important enough to show up on both the midterm and final, and he never covered it in class except to explain very briefly and in an unclear way when somebody asked about it after the midterm. If it was in the reading, I don't remember it; at any rate, it seemed like a good chunk of the class didn't seem to get what it was, and still he didn't think it was important enough to go over in detail during the post-midterm review.

Towards the end of the quarter he began to focus more heavily on historic earthquakes, but it felt more like rote memorization. The labs were easy enough, and mildly helpful in prepping for the exams, but they could definitely have been more difficult to be on par with the level of the problems that appeared on the tests.

The man's approachable enough, and he has an adorable Australian accent. He could lecture with a lot of gusto on a number of things, particularly major global earthquakes of the past decade or so, but for the most part... Really dry, boring, droning... especially when it came to explaining the math, which was arguably the most important part. Read the textbooks on reserve, they help a lot in re-explaining (or explaining for the first time) what he talks about in lecture, as it's what he lectures off of. Overall, though, would definitely not recommend this class with this particular professor to anyone.

First off, the material is TOTALLY awesome. Earthquakes in CA?? Where else can you learn that better? His class, ESS8 though, is not what you would expect. The final exam has a ton of math on it which if you aren't a south campus major will leave you scratching your heads. I understand if the math problems were "plug and go" problems but they AREN'T. You literally have to sit there and THINK about this shit. THAT is pretty bad, especially since there were like 30 problems of 100 on his final like that. That's my only complaint, otherwise the course was enjoyable.