International Peace Day, 2015

As we have for several years, we set September 21, International Peace Day, as a formal event.

A growing number of groups and people promote great meditation events, and other kinds of events to gather the forces of "Subtle Activism" to help change the world away from war and toward peace. David Nicol, Uplift, We Are One, Jonni Pollard, Patrick Kronfli, unify.org, Barbara Marx Hubbard, GlobeShift, Oneness Mid-Atlantic, Casa de Metta, Hearthmath, Glocal Coherence Initiative, The Gaiafield Project, Pulse of Peace, Global Intention Experiment, Pathways to Peace, Shift Network, Peace Throuch Culture, Global Invocation Vigil, MedMob ...

The GCP event was set using the specifications from previous years, which follow precise timing given by several groups attempting to enable broad participation and a considerable degree of synchronization across the international community in all time zones. The main events began on Sept 21 at 04:00 UTC and ended 24 hours later, at 04:00 Sept 22.

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The GCP event was set for the 24 hour day beginning at 04:00 on Sept 21 UTC. The result is Chisquare 87263.368 on 86400 df, for p = 0.019 and Z = 2.072.

Interpretation

The following graph is a visual display of the statistical result. It shows the second-by-second accumulation of small deviations of the data from what’s expected. Our prediction is that deviations will tend to be positive, and if this is so, the jagged line will tend to go upward. If the endpoint is positive, this is evidence for the general hypothesis and adds to the bottom line. If the endpoint is outside the smooth curve showing 0.05 probability, the deviation is nominally significant. If the trend of the cumulative deviation is downward, this is evidence against the hypothesis, and is subtracted from the bottom line. For more detail on how to interpret the results, see The Science and related pages, as well as the standard caveat below.

While processing this event for 2015, I discovered that I had somehow missed doing the International Peace Day in 2014. It is too late to include that event in the formal list, but for completeness and to address the question whether strict replication is viable, I processed the 2014 event today. The result is shown below.

Standard caveat

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.