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For months I and others have wondered how a possible Global
Consciousness might be responding to
the ongoing violence and intransigence in the middle east,
with Palestinian suicide bombers
and Israeli reprisals killing innocents and destroying hopes for a
peace in the region. But how to
identify a "global moment" in this unending turmoil?
A note from Hala Azzam stimulated me to think more specifically
about this.
Finally I decided to take the Passover bombing on March 27, 2002, to
represent the desperation of the suicide terrorism.
The other side of the coin was
represented by a prediction for the Israeli incursion into Jenin a few
days later, on April 4, 2002.
In the following, both events are shown, with a graph for the formal prediction
period, accompanied by an exploratory graph of the full day's
accumulated deviation in each case.
According to news reports, 28 people were killed and 140 injured,
many critically, in the suicide bombing attack. It was
described as the worst atrocity since the outbreak of the current
conflict in Septemper 2000 in terms of
carnage and its symbolic circumstances, coming on the first night of
Pessah at a communal Sedar.
The bomb was detonated at about 7:15 pm (19:15)
in the dining room of a seaside hotel in Netanya, Israel. The
corresponding GMT time was 17:15. The prediction was
modeled on similar disasters, which typically are
specified as a short time before to a few hours after the event.
The formal prediction was for the four hour period from 17:00 to 21:00
GMT.
Analytically, the outcome is neutral, with Chisquare 14414 on 14400 df,
and p = 0.465. Perhaps this is representative of the confusion and
bemusement the whole world must feel at the terribly frustrating
insistence on violence and futile hatred as the best we are able
to do in confronting this persistent, but surely unnecessary disaster.
The first figure shows the result for the formal prediction.
In the second figure, the GCP data for the whole day are shown. There
are 47 active eggs at this time, and their communal trend shows a steady
departure from chance expectation. At the time of the suicide
bombing, the trend shows a sudden drop that, to my eye, looks unusual.
It is magnified and easily noted as a precipitous trend shortly after the
bombing in the figure above.
Technically, such a drop means that the inter-egg correlation or the
tendency to correlated deviations or both are strikingly low for a brief period.
Perhaps this is a reaction to the event, perhaps not. My heart says the
former -- this breakdown of interconnection has the feeling of a
support suddenly removed from a fragile structure.
Hala Azzam later suggested an
event that might reflect the Israeli response, which manifested as a
military campaign with house to house fighting in several West Bank
towns. He suggested specifically, "... April 3rd, at 2:00 am
when the Israeli troops entered the Jenin Camp and the days before
and after that." For a concise period, I decided to use the Jenin
incursion time plus four hours, with the
same parameters as the Netanya bombing prediction. Thus the
prediction period is 00:00 to 04:00 April 3, 2002 GMT.
The result shows a modest positive trend, with Chisquare 14509 on 14400 df
and p = 0.259.
Again, for context, we look at the full day of April 3, with the result
in the following figure.
Beginning at about 14:00, Jenin/Israel time, the data assume a striking
aspect, with a great increase in the Chisquare that persists for the
rest of the day. As in the full day of the 27th, there is a suggestion
of an underlying, consistent reaction to the ongoing tragedy.
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