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From news reports:
Police warnings about the dangers of holding the Love Parade
in the German city of Duisburg were not heeded, the police
union chief said, with the nation in shock over 19 [now 21] deaths in
a stampede at the event. They died when panic broke out at
the techno music festival on Saturday, July 24, in the western city
near to the Dutch border. Many Germans were baffled that
such a tragedy could occur in their highly organised and
closely regulated country.
SPIEGEL ONLINE has reconstructed the grotesque aftermath of
the event in which 21 people were killed and over 500
injured, crushed and trampled because the single entrance to
the Love Parade, through a tunnel, turned into a lethal
bottleneck and authorities had drastically underestimated
the number of visitors.
The event occured while I and many professional researchers were in Paris
for the 53rd annual meeting of the Parapsychological
Association. Matthias Braeunig, a colleague from Germany, turned to me and said
"here is a global event which he was just learning about via
mobil phone. The GCP event was set for 6 hours beginning at the time
Matthias provided, 5:30 local. (15:30-21:30 UTC).
The result is Chisquare 22053.074 on 21600 df, for p = 0.015
and Z = 2.168.
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.
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