School Walkout Protests, March 14 2018

(CNN)Thousands of students across the United States walked out of class Wednesday to demand stricter gun laws in a historic show of political solidarity that was part tribute and part protest.

From Maine to California, the 17-minute walkout -- one minute for each of the 17 people killed at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School one month ago -- began around 10 a.m. in each time zone.

Some participants read the names of each victim; others stood in silence around sets of empty chairs. At Granada Hills Charter High School in Los Angeles, students lay down on a football field to spell out the walkout's rallying cry: "Enough."

There were solidarity protests in other countries, especially in Europe, as well. There is a widespread feeling that this time, the intense commitment will bear lasting fruit, not least because the young people will be active voters in elections soon to come. They will not allow the political status quo to continue.

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The GCP event was set to include all four US Timezones. Rick Leskowitz had sent a note describing the powerful emotional gathering in schools in his east coast city, and the news showed demonstrations across the country, all set for 10:00 local time.

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.