|
A growing number of protests against "greed and corruption"
have garnered headlines in New York, with a focus on Wall
Street. The protesters have not articulated demands, but are
clear about their feelings that the culture of the money
managers is out of control, and damaging to the whole country.
The redistribution of resources from the middle class to a
small number of people at the top is the basic problem. The
protesters formulate this as the 1% dominating and stripping
99% of the population of opportunity and wellbeing.
Because this is an ongoing "event", isolating a few hours to
represent it is somewhat arbitrary. An old friend and I were
talking about the awful, fascist-style attack of some NYPD
officers on several young women who had been herded together
behind orange plastic construction netting. Videos show an
officer indiscriminately macing the women, and their screams of
pain. They had been completely peaceful but treated as if they
were violent and attacking the police. Pretty sad and shameful.
This moment got lots of coverage in the media (albeit less in
the mainstream than we should expect) so I chose it for a
sample of the protest. The GCP event was set for 1-4 PM local
time (17:00-20:00 UTC). The result is 10925.978 on 10800 df for
p = 0.195 and Z = 0.858. The approximate time of the mace
attack and arrests is marked in the graph.
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.
|