| Current Results |
| GCP DATA AS "EVOKED RESPONSES" Richard Broughton considered the GCP data as if it were electrical data from a brain, based on the fundamental notion of the EGG project as a means to capture some glimmering of global consciousness. He set up an analysis to compare the analog of an "evoked response" for New Years for the times (which are places, timezones, of course) where there is much attention to the celebration ("Maxi-Celebration"), with other places where there is little celebration ("Mini-Celebration"). The composite deviation of the former has probability = 0.0285 and of the latter, p = 0.2332. The two categories diverge, and at the stroke of midnight the difference is just significant (p = 0.0458). For details, see his note describing the analysis. For a visualization of the striking difference, look up the graphs (pdf format) of the "Evoked Response" showing a combined global response as well as individual egg trends for the New Year transition over the 10 minutes surrounding midnight. For a check of the procedure, a set of data from a randomly selected day near Jan 1 was treated the same way. The result is graphed as "Control ER" and does not exhibit significant differences. Roger
Nelson made a prediction that there would be a little "peak" of activity for
each of the 24 midnights
around the world. A new moment of midnight happens every hour for
24 hours beginning 12 hours prior to midnight UTC, and a graph of the
10 minutes surrounding the moment, concatenated in sequence
as each new midnight is reached, shows a persistent positive deviation relative to expectation.
A prediction of a special quality
for New Year celebrations in NYC, affecting all the EGG network, was tested by looking at
all data taken at midnight ±5 minutes EST. See
Richard Broughton's "Evoked Response" work, above, for a more incisive
examination of this general hypothesis. All the tables and graphs for January 1, 1999 are worth a look, for an example
of relatively extreme deviations. Again for a comparative view, Broughton examined the
data generated by the PentaREG, an independent set of five REGs, and plotted the January 1st output in a manner similar to that used
for the EGG data.
More examples
Moving away from the predictions and
specific analyses such as those for the New Year transition, an interesting question that
arises is whether we can learn something from looking at the data and noting an unusual
aspect, then searching for something that might explain it. Of course this is not a
robust, statistically sound procedure, but it can be used to generate hypotheses. Scanning
the daily summary graphs, Eckhard Etzold noted that one particular RNG showed virtually
identical cumulative deviation traces visible in a comparison
of the two days. This may be a chance event, but it promoted an assessment of various
physical variables in the area where the REG is located, without, thus far, finding any
viable explanatory correlates. |
