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I received a note from my friend Rick Leskowitz on Nov 12 wondering if
the GCP might have reacted to the climactic game of the 2013 season.
As you can well imagine, I quite enjoyed the last few weeks of the
baseball season! The Red Sox win was very inspiring, and seemed to
generate more than the usual amount of fan passion, probably because of
their unusual combination of team chemistry and the sense of redemption
and recovery from the Marathon bombings the helped engender.
So I wondered what the GCP EGGs might have detected, but must admit that
I'm not able to interpret the daily reports to see if any patterns
emerged. Could you point me in the direction of something that might
have been significant the night they won (Oct. 30, around 10:30-11pm
Eastern time)?
This analysis is exploratory, and not included in the formal series. It
assesses the usual 6 hour period, beginning well before the time
specified by Rick at 8:00 pm. The period he suggested is marked. If we
look only at that half hour, there are no strong deviations, but
a bit earlier there is an impressive, hour-long departure. We know this
is normal behavior for random sequences, but it looks nice (and if it
happened at 10:30 we might be tempted to think it is causally
meaningful).
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish
signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be
largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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