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CERN Announces Higgs

I received a question about the effect of CERNs announcement of the Higgs Boson via Twitter. No details, but the tweeter proposed looking at the 4th July 2012. This is long retrospective, and too loose for a formal even anyway, but out of curiosity I did the analysis for the full UTC day. It has a modest positive trend, and a nice "spike" of high correlation around 4 am UTC. Not interpretable, of course, but sorta cool.

Note that this day is also the biggest patriotic holiday in the US, the 4th of July, celebrated with picnics, fireworks, and gusto all over the country. This case is an example of why precise timing is necessary to separate one event from the plethora that will occur close in time, likely overlapping the event of interest. In the long run, sharp focus will segregate the identified test cases while possible effects from not-quite synchronized events will wash out.

CERN Announces Higgs

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.


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