Earth Day 2006

Earth Day in 2006 is on April 22. This year it was on a Saturday, and prompted by a note from Vera, I decided to make it a formal hypothesis test again (last time was in 2001). Since 1970, Earth Day has been an annual event for people around the world to celebrate the earth and our responsibility toward it. The Earthday network says, "Volunteer. Go to a festival. Install solar panels on your roof. Organize an event where you live. Change a habit. Help launch a community garden. Communicate your priorities to your elected representatives. The possibilities are endless! Do something nice for the earth, have fun, meet new people, and make a difference."

Earth Day 2000 -- the 30th anniversary -- was expected to stir 500 million people on all continents and in more than 160 nations. Probably the expectations in 2006 should be similar. It seems that even the US government is beginning to see some light, though there continues to be an obtuse administration response. More broadly there is a growing recognition that we must pay attention to the earth's needs.

Given the basic character of the Global Consciousness Project, with purposes that include helping more people recognize that we can have a better future by becoming more conscious of our interdependence, Earth Day seems a natural event to examine. Since the Earth Day observances are very diffuse, with no central, focal moment, we decided that the most sensible prediction would be to simply expect the whole day to show the effects of large numbers of separate celebrations, rituals, meetings, and consciousness raising events. The full 24 hours of data for 22 April, 2006, based on UTC time, were extracted, and processed as raw second-by-second composites across all eggs. At the time of processing (on the 23rd), 62 eggs had reported. The figure below shows the cumulative deviation for the 24 hour period. The total Chisquare was 87061 on 86400 degrees of freedom, for a p-value of 0.056. Earth Day 2006 -->


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