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The world's biggest music stars have united in concerts around the globe
to put pressure on political leaders to tackle poverty in Africa.
Concerts in 11 cities, including London, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin,
Johannesburg, Rome, Tokyo, and Moscow played to hundreds of thousands of people.
A TV and Web audience of several hundred million were watching the gigs, ahead
of the G8 summit of leaders next week.
These concerts attracted a great deal of attention, both from music fans
and from political activists. We made a formal assessment with the
hypothesis that the spiritual and civic aspects might be similar to the
organized meditations for peace that we have examined. The whole UTC day
was specified for the analysis, to include all the concerts plus some of
the anticipatory excitement.
The result is a Z-score of -1.561 and p=0.941, almost
significantly low. The trend is very steady for the first 12 hours,
and then levels out. Because the signal to noise ratio is low, care
needs to be taken with further interpretation, but it is interesting to note
that there are several
other cases in the meditation subset with strong trends of this nature,
which are opposite to the prediction of the standard analysis.
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