The material in theis page is mostly fairly old, and some projects actually have been done. If you are looking for something that appeals, it may be worthwhile to scan through the whole page, but here are a few suggestions made in response to inquiry about what someone might do do contribute.

1) a menu of graphical displays that website visitors could select to see what the summarized data look like last week or on a particular day a year ago, etc.

2) a musical rendition of the data that could be turned on (most people would not want to listen) based on statistical parameters of the current data. I envision a "chord" that would be chaotic noise most of the time, but would become more harmonious if strong interegg correlations or temporal autocorrelations occurred.

3) obtaining data from long-term physical variables like cosmic ray flux or something else that is either random or has a seperable random component to see if correlations might exist with GCP data or with events that correlate with departures from expectation in our data.

4) any creative scientific or aesthetic use of the data that appeals to you.

Types of Analysis

As time and programming skills permit, we will present multiple versions of most analyses, calculated and displayed either automatically or by selection from a small set of options. Priority is indicated with a number in parentheses.

(1) "Event" calculation should be provided to correspond to predictions made following specified rules for defining the beginning and end times for events, including pre-specified time periods to be associated with "point" events. This is now done on an ad hoc basis, manually.

(2) "Update" calculations using all available data within a specified period. This would include data from all eggs except those which send data only once or a few times per day. At present, this function exists in the daily eggsummary report, which gives Z-scores for 15-minute blocks, extreme scores, and three graphical summaries. All of the raw, second-by-second data are directly available via the web-based extract form.

(2) "Defined Period" calculations and displays might cover a given date and time, say, the past month, week, day (already available), or hour.

(2) "On-line" calculations with all data from permanently connected Eggs. One example exists now in the "Real-Time Display".

(2) "Viewer" specified calculation time periods, using input forms to get necessary information. It may be necessary to restrict these to a small subset of calculations. It will be necessary to clarify the interpretation in light of post hoc selection and multiple analysis concerns.

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Statistical Tests

The focus for most analyses will be anomalous shifts of the segment distribution mean, and a composite across eggs is defined as the formal test of the primary hypothesis. We are interested in exploratory assessments of other parameters as possible indicators. We also expect to explore correlations with environmental variables including automatically registered global-scale measures such as sidereal time, geomagnetic field fluctuations, and seismographic activity.

A second major focus will be on the transitional probabilities within the sequences of interest. Atmanspacher and Scheingraber's Scaling Index Analysis is one procedure for exploring this area, and Jiri Wackerman's measure of Omega-Complexity, when implemented, will provide a comprehensive perspective on internal structure in the data.

The following list of likely measures, with short names and brief annotation, suggests some useful projects for analyst-programmers.

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Graphical Displays

We want the website to be attractive and elegant, and well-designed displays of the data can greatly contribute to the art of the matter. Some displays are aesthetically pleasing by their nature. Where the best form is a graph, we will prefer a straight display, following Edward Tufte's "waste no ink" dictum, of simplicity, readability, and elegance. On the other hand, dynamic, flowing and changing displays will be used where this makes sense, and displays may be multi-dimensional, with multiple spatial dimensions, color, motion, and sound if these help to make the information accessible.

Project Possibilities

It is most helpful if people who wish to contribute programming or analysis develop projects that are directly interesting. We can help with information, access to data, and advice, but generally have a full plate. There are any number of good ideas, and we will list here a few that need a champion, because although they are worth doing, we don't have enough hands to do them all. Let us know if you do want to work on one or another of these.

• From Allen Ernst

  Muslim prayer time for morning and evening are determined in a very precise manner astronimically, for each local area. Picture the waves of consciousness produced as the sun travels across the orient, with spikes produced as people in large cities of the faithful come to prayer simultaneously by PA address from minarets. Maybe a phenomenon like this might explain ramping data that has not been accounted for otherwise. Since you had such good luck with mass meditations, this might yield something interesting.

  The idea is a good one I think. I am not sufficiently familiar with the timing to be sure there would be a strong focus at particular times, but it may be the case. I believe there are 5 prayer times each day, not just two. I'm uncertain whether those are set, or instead mighe be "called" by the local imams. In any case it would require a good deal of detailed information to set up an analysis, which would probably need to be a signal averaging process. It is a fine project for someone to undertake, perhaps as a thesis project for a graduate student. Or, if you are interested in working it up to the point of precise timing and consideration of the sweep through the 37 timezones, we could extract the corresponding data. In any case, I will make the question and preliminary description part of the project's todo list.

• Geomagnetic correlations have been considered, and though we have a few samples, it would be desirable to take a serious look at the question. The device variance, network variance, and the dispersion measure all could be tested for correlation to the aa index, which is available from government resources. Other cosmic variables can also be considered. The essential requirement is a continuing long-term measure at frequent intervals, at least hourly, preferably minutes or seconds resolution.

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Control Data

Control data are needed to establish the viability of the statistical results from "active" data generated during events specified via the prediction protocol. The GCP controls are based on quality-controlled equipment design, thorough device calibration, and a procedure called resampling. Resampling examines data near but not in the active segments, to build an empirical distribution to compare with theoretical expectations. This is one of the projects suggested in the statistics list.

Data Protection

The raw data are quite well protected against various errors, but it remains possible for some malfunction to generate defective data, or for a malicious attack over the network to inject spurious data. Neither of these is considered likely; indeed they are highly unlikely, but it would be desirable to have automatic conformity checks to assure integrity of data upon entry into any analytic process. While the "active" data predicted to show deviations are immediately interesting, it is important also to test calibration data (i.e., data surrounding the active data) against expectation models. This is the purpose of the resampling procedure described above.

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