Michael Jackson Memorial

From web descriptions of the event:

For the Michael Jackson Memorial, thousands of fans -- selected by lottery from the 1.6 million who applied for seats -- came on Tuesday in variations of Michael Jackson's famed costumes over the years, but mostly in black. They cried, swayed, laughed and gawked in a memorial service that was religious pageant meets awards show.

Broadcast live around the world from the Staples Center, musical titans performed gospel-tinged versions of his songs and their own between testimonials to Mr. Jackson's talent and achievements on and off the stage.

The memorial was scheduled to begin at 10:00 AM Pacific time, and apparently lasted for about three hours. The GCP formal event was set for 7 hours beginning an hour before the start of the ceremony, 16:00 to 23:00 UTC. The result is Chisquare 25162.788 on 25200 df, for p = 0.565 and Z = -0.163. Thus, while the memorial was a touching tribute to Michael Jackson, the network does not show a significant response.

You may be interested also in the results for the reaction to Michael Jackson's death.

An exploratory look at the device variance for the memorial is shown in the next figure. The plot is of the cumulative deviation of device variance from the local mean of that measure, which results in the curve returning to its origin. The graph covers a 24 hour period, and the beginning of the memorial ceremony and the 7 hour GCP event are indicated. The same presentation of data from the 9/11 event is shown for comparison.

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.