Global Conciousness Project

[parappa]

Link. (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/)

Can someone who is familiar with complex stats glance at this and give a quick opinion as to the method, findings, etc? I'm pretty convinced that it's hokum, but can't deal with the stats well enough to defend an opinion. Basically, these guys have a bunch of random number generators set up all over the globe and they're nostradamus-like testing the rng results versus world events in an attempt to measure "consciousness" (why these two things are linked according to the theory, I'm a little fuzzy on). A good deal of this seems to be set up at Princeton. I'm inclined to raise "control group" and sample size type objections but I'm not really understanding it very well. Can someone debunk (or bunk, if it's sensible) this for me?

[ChrisV]

There are some serious problems in their methodology. The major thing is that what they expect to see in response to an event is imprecisely defined, so that any deviation will do. For example, their data for 9/11 includes deviations at 6:40 in the morning, hours before the attack even took place.

http://www.skepticreport.com/psychics/radin2002.htm

[parappa]

Thanks for the link. That helped quite a bit.