One of the predictions made for the New Year transition 1998 to 1999 was that a "ripple" of celebration passing around the world as midnight reached each timezone would correlate with an increase of the variability of the means. That is, we predicted a positive deviation of the GCP data during a period of 10 minutes centered on midnight. These analyses required development of relatively powerful tools, and were not done until August 1999, but they turn out to be very interesting. The original specification was not explicit about the blocksize for analysis, but two precedents were set explicitly by Bierman and Broughton, who both specified the raw, second-by-second data. This precedent was followed for the formal analysis of the 24 zone data (there are actually 25 zones in the data due to unique local interpretations near the dateline), but several more explorations were also made, using different block sizes, and also looking at a data split comparable to Broughton's, albeit sequential rather than signal-averaged.

First, we examine the data as raw, second-by-second trials, corresponding to the formal prediction specification made by Bierman and Broughton. For this dataset Chisquare = 136430, df = 135000, probability = 0.00312.