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Again this year We planned a formal analysis of the Presidential
acceptance speeches, as part of a
series of replications of political events that,
while US-centric, nevertheless interest huge numbers of
people around the world.
Obama's speech began well after the appointed time (10 pm in
Charlotte, North Carolina). The GCP event was set for a two hour period that
would definitely include all of the Obama address, as well as a bit of
the prelude and introduction and probably at least half an
hour of aftermath.
The result is a negative trend, with
Chisquare 7076.36 on 7200 df, for p = 0.849 and Z = -1.031.
The graph shows a fairly consistent trend, beginning at 10
pm, local time in Charlotte, before the speech began and
leveling off sometime during the speech.
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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