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The Olympic Opening Ceremonies are a reasonable bet as global events go,
because they are designed to give us a focus, and they succeed in large
measure. In the prediction registry, I suggested that the
opening ceremonies for the 2002 Winter Olympics would be engaging
not only for the people in Salt Lake City, but many millions around
the world who are watching their athletes coming together in this long-standing
ritual of sportsmanship. Even though the games have been sullied by
scandal, they do engage the attentions of people quite deeply and genuinely.
The Opening Ceremonies were scheduled to begin at 18:00 local
time on February 9, 2002,
(which is 01:00 on the next day in UTC)
and to continue for the duration. The ending time was not given in the
schedule, and in keeping with past specifications, I assigned
the period of three hours. The time from 01:00 to 04:00 UTC, 020209
was thus specified as the formal segment.
The Chi-square was 10978 on 10800 degress of freedom, for p = 0.113.
The development of the departure from expectation over the three hour
period is shown in the following figure. An exploratory look at the
context shows a continuous positive
trend beginning an hour earlier, at 5 pm, and continuing until midnight.
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