Correlation of global events with reg data: An internet-based, nonlocal anomalies experiment - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Sept, 2001 by Roger Nelson

There were other preplanned analyses of these data, including one by Dick Bierman predicting differences between the European and U.S. eggs, which yielded a positive but nonsignificant p-value of .199. Richard Broughton took seriously the analogy with EEG technology and considered the GCP data as if it were electrical data from a brain. He setup an analysis to compare the analog of an "evoked response" for New Years during the times (actually time zones) when there is a great deal of attention to the celebration ("Maxi-Celebration"), with other places where there is little celebration ("Mini-Celebration"). The composite deviation for the former yielded a p-value of .028 and for the latter, p = .233. The difference between these was taken as the formal outcome and yielded a p-value of .122. For more detail, see Broughton (1999) and the presentation on the GCP Web site at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results_p3.html.> As is the case in all statistics-based anomalies research, some predictions are confirmed and others, apparently equally justified, are not. For example, an analysis of the 1-s data for the Y2K New Year transition, which we predicted to replicate that of the preceding year, showed only a modest deviation, with a p-value of .237. Yet the same data, analyzed according to a prediction by Dean Radin that the variance of trial-score means across the individual eggs would decrease as midnight approached, strongly confirmed his expectation. Though it was a proper prediction made prior to examining the data, Radin did several analyses to home in on an "optimal" expression of the outcome, necessitating a Bonferroni adjustment. Even with a factor of 10 to compensate for the selection from multiple analyses, the chance probability for the focused reduction of variance is on the order of 1 in 1,000. I did a number of independent analyses to explore the generality of Radin's work from different perspectives. One of these explorations is shown in Figure 3, which displays changes in the squared deviation of the mean trial value across eggs over the time surrounding the Y2K transition. This is a cumulative sum of the squared median deviation of the mean from empirical expectation, and it reveals, as did Radin's analysis, a striking spike at midnight. A permutation analysis of 4,000 random arrangements of the same data found that although many cases had a higher spike somewhere in the range, few were so exactly focused on midnight. The combined probability, based on the permutation distribution, was .020.