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Kumbh Mela is a great pilgrimage. Two correspondents independently
suggested it should be a
GCP event, Arvind Panchal and Mahadeva Srinivasan.
Arvind said on January 10th:
Dear Dr. Roger
The results [of the GCP] have quite encouraging.
I would like to attract your attention one very big event which is going
on in INDIA in a few days.
It is MAHAKUMBH Bath time, when people take a holy dip in the river Ganges in
Allahabad in INDIA. The MAHAKUMBH comes after 12 years and all true
hindus make it a point to visit the place and take the holy dip.
As the newspapers reported yesteday as many as 4.2 billion people took
bath.
Now I certainly feel that this is an event which must show up in GCP. If
not world wide at least in GCP sites in INDIA we must see the change.
I would like to know the results due to the MAHAKUMBH event.
You can see the local newspaper sites to get an update on the MAHAKUMBH
http://www.timesofindia.com/today/
Arvind
Indeed the event does show up. With the help of Chino Srinivasan, a
colleague in the GCP who is familiar with the Kumbh, the prediction was
made for a deviation of the mean across all eggs during the most
concentrated time of the Kumbh. On January 24th 2001, the media were
predicting that 30 million people would try to bathe in the Ganges. We
decided that the daylight hours should be the focus of the GCP
prediction. The following figure shows the period from early morning to
evening, and there is a strong deviation, with Chisquare of 47289 on
46800 degrees of freedom and probability = 0.055.
A control comparison,
using corresponding data from a pseudorandom source, has Chisquare
46493
on 46800 df and p = 0.842. The following graph
displays the cumulative deviation of the pseudorandom data.
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