A measure of dedication

For the past 36 years, Chu Zijia's daily routine has included fetching water from a well early every morning, putting it in a special instrument and making a measurement. He has mixed feelings toward the answer - it rarely changes, which bores him. But if it fluctuates, it could bode bad news. A teacher at Tanggu No 2 Middle School, Chu has been conducting seismic surveillance as a grassroots observer for the government since 1975. Even his retirement in 1988 didn't keep him from working with the monitors and students. The 88-year-old still attends meetings at the local seismological bureau every month and hands in his data. And he still lives at school. Here in his living room/office, his desk fights for space with personal possessions, prizes for the students, and, of course, the graph paper he uses to note daily statistics. Also scattered are the awards and prizes he has earned for his inventions and science education. "To be frank, it's a job that easily wearies you. You just repeat what you did the day before and 99 percent of the time, you get the same answer after hours of work," said Chu. "But the valuable statistics must be consistent so there is a record of every single day since the working station was founded." After the 7.3-magnitude Haicheng earthquake in Liaoning struck in 1975 - the only major earthquake successfully forecast through the study of data - thousands of observation points were set up all over China.