Blue Jewel: Rain in Tunisia |
Oliver Hauck, a film maker from Munich, is making a documentary called the The Blue Jewel (in German, Das Blaue Juwel), about the creative thinking that is directed to making our future on the earth brighter. He organized an exercise called the Rain Experiment, which gathered as many people as possible to participate in making it rain in the Tunisian desert on the 14th of August. Though I indicated the GCP can't do "measurements" of such events because of the small signal to noise ratio, we agreed to make a formal event of it. The actual timing is given in an email from Pauline Taylor, who is one of the people helping.
The GCP event was set for the times given, 9am to 9pm CET. That is 07:00 to 19:00 UTC. The result is Chisquare 43457.972 on 43200 df, for p = 0.190 and Z = 0.878.
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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