[bunny]

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I'm afraid I cant give you the intelligent comentary from a statistician you are looking for (stats was a minor part of my degree). However, I would have to say that quotes like

"Dean observes that "such large changes will eventually occur by chance, of course, but this particular change happened during an unprecedented event, suggesting that this `spike' and `rebound' were not coincidental.""

do not fill me with confidence. I would be interested to see their data in "quiet" periods and see whether the same fluctuations occur from time to time. I looked over their website a little when this was posted a couple of months ago - there is such a lot of data to wade through though.

It does seem like they are also attempting to form a hypothesis and decide on testing techniques ahead of time - this would have much more meaning to me.

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From what ive gathered so far they do test quiet periods, but im not convinced by any means.

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I think the only way I would place any weight on their research is if they successfully made predictions in advance (perhaps focussed on the world cup or events of such importance - I expect (shocking as it may be to americans) that this would have more impact on most people's lives than the 9/11 tragedy). The limited reading I did on their site seemed to show much weaker results here (and from memory they modified what tests they applied to the data after the fact - another red flag in my mind).