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Thursday, August 30, 2007

RetroPsychoKinesis experiments overhaul complete

The RetroPsychoKinesis Experiments were launched on the Web more than ten years ago: public access was opened in January of 1997. Since then a total of more than half a million experiments (practice and on-the-record; about half on-the-record) have been run by volunteer participants; you can view the results and those of control runs, updated daily.

The Web documents describing the experiments, including background such as the Introduction to Probability and Statistics, z score and Chi-square calculators, and the Probability Pipe Organ (think of it as “central limit theorem live”), while typical for those developed in the 1996–1997 period, were beginning to look somewhat quaint to contemporary eyes, so I have just posted a complete make-over of the entire document tree. All documents are now XHTML 1.0 (Transitional) and CSS 2.1 compliant, and use Unicode text entities for special characters. Images, including those of mathematical formulæ, have been re-made with higher resolution, and GIF images have been replaced with PNG throughout. The Fourmilab standard style sheet has been applied, providing consistent appearance and the ability to easily change it in the future. Form navigation has been improved, with <label> containers allowing the user to click upon field labels as well the actual controls. A number of broken off-site links have been fixed, and additional links to Web resources added.

These changes apply only to the RetroPsychoKinesis Experiments Web tree. The main RetroPsychoKinesis Project site, which is largely a collection of historical documents and related publications and abstracts, was not included in this project and remains somewhat of a period piece. I'm not sure when, if ever, I will have the time for the massive revisions it would take to bring it up to modern-day standards; all of the documents remain, however, perfectly readable for those who wish to consult them.

Posted at August 30, 2007 21:48