Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Wed
From the crowds of well-wishers lining the streets of Windsor to friends and family members who traveled near and far to ring in their nuptials, Meghan and Harry were surrounded by lots of love on their big day.
The marriage ceremony began in St. George's Chapel at 12 pm BST (7 am eastern time in the States), but guests, including members of the royal family and Markle's former Suits castmates started arriving even earlier than that.
Immediately following the ceremony, the newlyweds took a horse-drawn carriage ride through Windsor streets lined by an estimated 100,000 onlookers. The procession started at 1 pm UK time (8 am eastern), and lasted about 25 minutes. The rest of the day was mostly private, with about 600 guests to lunch and receptions and parties celebrating the event.
Specific Hypothesis and Results
The GCP's exploration was set for 6 hours beginning with the wedding at noon, London time (11:00 UTC). This corresponds to the similar analysis of data collected during the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince WIlliam in 2011. Our prediction is the usual expectation of a positive deviation, yielding a rising cumulative deviation trace. The result is positive overall and has a Z-score of 0.700, which is larger than the average across all formal events. Especially notable is the strong positive trend beginning when Meghan and Harry emerged from the Chapel and began the public carriage ride surrounded by thousands of onlookers.
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.
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.
