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Over the past few days US media have reported on yet another
major mining accident,
this time in Chile, where a cave-in trapped some 33
miners. On August 23, our egg host in Chile, Fernando
Erbetta Doyharcabal
sent an email with the subject line "(Another) miracle in
Chile," describing the discovery that all of the miners are
alive, and the celebration this inspired in Chile.
Perhaps you have already heard that a miracle ocurred
yesterday here in Chile.
18 days ago, 33 miners got trapped into a copper mine after
a landslide literally buried them alive. This happened in
Copiapó, in the north of our country.
Yesterday Sunday 22nd, after 17 days of non-stop work, a probe of
only 6 inches in diameter reached the tunnel where the miners
supposedly had escaped to (688 meters deep!). And when the technical
staff took the probe back to the surface, it had two little pieces of
paper attached with messages: "All of us are OK in the shelter". They
were alive!
The news ran in minutes through all our country (and the
world) and people celebrated here as if we had won the Soccer World
Cup, children waving Chilean flags, cars honking on the streets,
and so on.
All of that happened yesterday mainly since our early
morning when we
knew that the probe had reached the tunnel (11:00 UTC) until our
evening when we had certainty that the miners were alive and OK
(23:00 UTC), with one good news following the other. We lived a whole
day of real hapiness and spiritual communion indeed.
The rescue operation will take at least two months but the
miners know that and are prepared to resist. Today they will begin
to receive the first liquid foods through the probe and they
also have had phone communication.
Our Chilean egg has been working normally since last days of
July, so maybe it detected the beautiful emotional atmosphere that we
experienced yesterday here in Chile. It would be wonderful
to know that. Unfortunately I am still not able to get the data and
process them adequately. So if you or someone in your team could
help us, it would be nice.
The GCP event was set for 11:00 to 23:00 UTC as specified by
Fernando. The result is Chisquare 43830.482 on 43200 df, for
p = 0.016 and Z = 2.137.
In response to Fernando's particular interest in the
behavior of the Santiago Egg, I extracted the data for this
individual device and plotted it together with the whole
network data. The result is notable -- the two traces are
almost a mirror image of each other, with Egg 2080 showing
as strong a trend as the full network, but in the opposite
direction. This means that during the
event the variance measure for the single device was
consistently small, less than expectation, whereas for the
whole network, the measure was consistently larger than
chance expectation. Please note, as explained in the paragraph following
the figure, single event analyses or those for single Eggs can't be reliably
interpreted.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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