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Sunday, May 28, 2006
Global Consciousness Project: Preliminary Results from the Indonesian Earthquake
Roger Nelson has just posted preliminary results for the behaviour of the Global Consciousness Project network during the May 27th earthquake in Indonesia. The plot at the bottom of the page shows the variance of the global network of random event generators for the eight hour period beginning one hour before the earthquake (red line). The blue line shows the deviation corresponding to a chance probability of 0.05. The observed cumulative deviation had a chi-square value of 29439 on 28800 degrees of freedom, yielding a chance probability of 0.0041 and z score of 2.645, which should be, based on empirical measures of the actual variance of the generators, reduced by about 5% to z=2.513. For details on the raw data from the network and how it is normalised and processed into these reports, please see the GCP Data document. Note the suggestion of a “precursor effect” in the hour prior to the earthquake—this has been seen before in GCP results for other earthquakes: interesting, isn't it? Please see the complete summary of results for other events dating back to 1998. Make of these results what you will; I have no interest in discussing or debating these matters in E-mail. (Full disclosure: I contributed to the development of the data collection and analysis software for this project and host two of the random event generator sites at Fourmilab.)Posted at May 28, 2006 13:08