Valentines Day & Scalia Dies

We have a regular analysis of the data on Valentine's day, using the 24 hour UTC day. Each year for the past several, there has been a kind of mass meditation, led by a couple who do and teach toning as a way of "raising the vibrations of the earth."

This year, another big event hit the news on Feb 14. US Supreme Courd Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly, with the overnight death announced early on the 14th. Because he was a strong personality and had a large influence toward conservative activism, his death was widely noted.

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The GCP event was set for the full 24 hour UTC day, and the result is Chisquare 86658.6654 on 86400 df for p = 0.2666 and Z = 0.6232.

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.