Live H2O June 21 2009

We look occasionally at a category of gatherings of intent to make the future brighter and more peaceful, or to help the Earth. These celebrations are organized by individuals and groups and use the web for communication of the intent and for recruitment of as many people as possible to join the moment. I received a note from Jan Poetschke asking whether we might take a look at the Live H2O event:

Hello Mr. Nelson,

I wonder if somebody likes to analyze the data from yesterday, because there was a world-wide concert for peace going on - liveH2o.org. The thousands of people who were praying, chanting and making music around the globe should have had pretty coherent mindsets and emotions. Also many cultures around the planet celebrated the summer solstice.

Greetings from Germany

Jan

The GCP event was set for 90 minutes as suggested in the Live H2O website where the main organizers propose that people "drum, pray and chant with the vision,...". The timing I could find differed in various descriptions, but there was some consistent focus on 6PM Pacific time, with a 9 minute period that was intended to progress in an 81 minute wave, for a total of 90 minutes. (I apologize for this less than optimal description.)

In any case, the GCP time was set for 00:00 midnight to 01:30 June 22, GMT, corresponding to 18:00 on the west coast of the US. The results show Chisquare 5392.885 on 5400 df for p = 0.525 and Z = -0.062. The history of the data shown in the cumulative deviation graph has some interesting variation, but does not show a consistent departure from expectation.

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.