Mudslides in Colombia

More than 250 people have died in southwest Colombia following heavy rains, flooding and landslides over the weekend.

Photos from Mocoa, the capital of the Putumayo province ravaged by the disaster, show residents and emergency personnel walking debris-filled streets, digging through rubble in search of victims and waiting to identify bodies.

Downpours caused multiple rivers around Mocoa to overflow and push water, mud and rubble into homes as people slept, killing at least 254 people, Reuters reported. Another 400 people were injured, while 200 remain missing, the army said.

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The GCP event was set for 24 hours beginning at midnight April 1 (05:00 GMT on Apr 1). The result is Chisquare 86556.538 on 86400 for p = 0.353 and Z = 0.378.

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.