Current Results |
PRAYING FOR PEACEOn the 3rd of April, 1999, a plan to pray for peace in Kosovo
for two minutes every day for a month was announced. A ceremonial
introduction was given on the internet, and some public service
announcements augmented the word-of-moutn invitation to join with others
praying at the same time. The time set was 19:00, universal time, which
corresponds to 12:00 noon in California, where (I believe) the
organizational source was centered.
It was brought to my attention by Suzanne Taylor (of MightyCompanions),
via an email note:
"This is to bring to your attention a 2-minute a day prayer for the Kosovo situation. It is taking place at noon PST, simultaneously all over the world. Marianne Williamson was the spokesperson who announced this, in an hour long broadcast from the Internet on Saturday. It is to go on for one month, which makes the end date May 3". This constitutes a nicely defined, albeit implicit prediction for the GCP, from an independent source. It was not added to the formal prediction registry, but it nevertheless provides a very useful and informative example of a particular sort of prediction that has been made previously on a smaller scale. George deBeaumont processed the data according to the following pre-defined recipe:
1) Retrieved (web based extract form) data 4/3/99 thru 5/3/99 at
19:00:00 to 19:01:59 for each day.
The following figure, By George deBeaumont, shows the result.
The trend is non-significant, with a
terminal probability of 0.193 at 360 df.
This looks like a good example of a
random walk, though there may be a small postive bias, and the dataset
contributes a modest accumulation of excess deviation to the grand,
overall picture. The assessment allows us to say that if there is any
effect from this sort of organized prayer vigil, it is not strong enough
to overwhelm the noise.
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