Here is a link.
Fight my ignorance. It doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibilty, but at the same time I’m inclined to believe the skeptics that say…
What’s the Straight Dope have to say?
It’s just completely impossible to evaluate this claim, because they give no specifics.
What are they defining as being an event of sufficient importance to affect this random number generator? Once they define that, we can go back over ten years of data, identify EVERY event that matches their stated criteria, and then see if there’s a pattern - that if the machine seemed to sense those events at a statistically significant rate, as opposed to when such events did not take place.
Note that they say the machine went nuts when Princess Diana’s funeral took place - but not when she was actually killed.
Actually, that’s not true at all. Visit http://noosphere.princeton.edu, stop by the real-time data display, or download the data from all eggs for your own analysis going back to, I believe, 1998.
The entire premise behind the Global Consciousness Project is that the Noosphere exists, and that, when a large amount of people are focused on the same thing it effects things in ways that are difficult to measure. There are dozens of these eggs all around the world returning truly random data the the princeton server, which is inside a special casing to protect it from any extraneous waves/radiation/youname it. Their data purport, and indeed seem, to show that during times when many people are focused on the same thing, this random data is suddenly “less random”. This typically means that when people start hearing about a globally impacting event on the news, the data becomes less random.
Using current methods it is impossible to prove that this is what they are measuring. But the data goes to show that they are measuring something.
Roger Nelson is a nice guy and responds to emails, by the way.
I just wanted to point out that while you can do this (i mean literally, you 
), their method is to make formal predictions of events ahead of time when at all possible.
There’s a trivial way to test this. :rolleyes:
Split the net in half. Compare the predictions made by one subnet with the other. If the effect is real they should correlate.
Or, if you suspect the net is sensitive to the location of the EGGs, construct a duplicate net by placing a second EGG next to each existing one.
My take on it? There’s always SOMETHING big happening SOMEWHERE. Without rigorous criteria for what constitutes an event, and rigorous bounds on the time frame in which correlation can be said to take place, it’s easy to cherry-pick news items that happened close to when the net randomly spiked.
Just a WAG
A lot of random number generators listen to atmospheric noise. If every satellite is beaming the same video footage of something across the world…
Could have an impact on background noise, making it less random?
Just a WAG
When the data, and the experimental findings, are submitted to a peer-reviewed and respected scientific journal and published, and when the experimental findings are independently checked and replicated by other scientists, then we have some science we can think about.
Until then, we just have garbage gee-whizz journalism about garbage non-science.
In one sense, there’s no need for any discussion or debate. If these guys are on to something, then in the fullness of time they will prove their case and we will all know they were right (e.g. like the Wright Brothers). If not, then we will know it was garbage non-science. So let’s wait for them to prove it, there’s no need to rush to judgement.
In the 1970s you could read similar articles, written exactly the same way, stating as fact that if you left a blunt razor blade under a scale model of the Great Pyramid it would be sharp again in the morning and that the blade companies were worried (Lyall Watson claimed such in best-selling paperback ‘Supernature’). It isn’t true, it doesn’t work, the companies weren’t worried and they’re still going strong. Has Lyall Watson come forward to apologise for writing garbage? Have any of the journos who wrote gee-whizz stories at the time come forward to apologise for wasting our time?
In the 1970s You could read von Daniken telling you about an iron pillar that never rusts. 30 years later he’s in a TV documentary saying that he’s found out that the iron pillar does rust, so he was wrong. He just shrugs and says ‘what can you do?’.
In the 1970s you could read ‘Superminds’ by Professor John Taylor about the metal-bending phenomenon. That was all garbage too. These days he knows he rushed into print too quickly about a trick he didn’t understand, and about claims that were never scientifically validated.
I could go on, but I won’t.
This article is from the Daily Mail. This so-called newspaper regularly runs gee-whizz articles about any facet of the spooky and the paranormal, with no regard for good science or good reasoning whatsoever.
I say it’s garbage. The work of Jahn and Radin has been discussed many times in scientific and skeptical circles. Check the skeptical sources online and you’ll read some interesting material.
I’m at Edinburgh University and never heard or this. Believe me, I’m surprised that the tabloid-esque Student magazine has not jumped all over this. I find it strange that they haven’t, to be honest.
Go to http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ and click on “random sources” – I’m too tired to comprehend much of that, but it might answer your question.
The list of ‘events’ is hilarious. For instance, “Christmas Eve” (Greenwich, Eastern US and Western US times), but no Eastern Orthodox Feast of Kings, Rosh Hashanna or Muslim or Hindu holidays. “EarthDance 2004” and “Global Day of Peace”. The Oscars, and India vs Pakistan Cricket, but no Red Sox World Series. The tsunami is defined as exactly 8 hours long. The U.S. election is defined as six hours long (what period is this supposed to cover?).
And my favorite event, of worldwide importance enough to affect the collective unconsciousness of the entire world, from Brooklyn to Bombay: “Bob Morris dies”.
I remember where I was when I heard that news, how about you?
Here is what makes me stop reading any further:
So, who’s Bob Morris?
Attention those who have posted in this thread: The OP asked for you to fight his ignorance, not add to it.
They have rigorous criteria. There is a very stringent formal event prediction policy.
There are dozens of scientists worldwide working on the project and the data has been published on the Internet since 1998. The project has only grown with time. Nothing has stopped anyone from setting up their own eggs and publishing the results. You’re entire argument says “they aren’t completely and utterly famous yet so it must not be true”. Sorry but that’s not GQ.
The REGs aren’t listening to atmospheric noise link (as shown above)
Apparantly you missed Kumbh Mela, Johrei, the Buddhist Stupa Ceremony, the MUM Peace Meditation, the Ramadan Muslim Prayer, the World Puja Meditation and others. Not all hindu or muslim specifically, but not absent.
This comment comes across as spreading ignorance IMO. Please stop by the website and come back with your skeptical claims otherwise, why leave things like this floating around?
Anyone care to really take a stab at this?
I’ve read through a couple pages and I can’t quite seem to get this. Please clarify: is the claim (basically) that when people think about something it affects white noise? I don’t quite understand exactly WHAT is being “measured” here.
I made a post about this in the relevant GD thread here .
My brief take after looking at the numbers on their official web page: they’re re-interpreting results after major events happen. This is known as “unblinding the data.” They look at a date when a major event happened, look for any major mean deviations (we’re left to guess how large a deviation it requires for them to record it, but with observation periods of only 1 second for most events (how do they choose these?) , this is a mere 72 trials in which wide deviations can be expected), and then record it as an event.
It would be similar to me making a trial on whether a drug reduces cancer remission. If I find that in blinded trials the drug doesn’t reduce cancer remission, it goes against the scientific method to un-blind the data and begin looking for correlations with respect to other symptoms.
There may be such a policy, but not on the linked page.
The most charitable interpretation of that page is that they declare they WILL come up with stringent criteria at some point, but offer no hints of what those criteria will be (other than “It’s on TV”). Basically the current list seems to be “events that I, as a new-age white American, personally thought were, like really cosmically important, man.”
And I’m ragging on this because it seems typical of the whole site. I haven’t tried to dig into the statistics, but everything I see makes me think these people just don’t understand science. For instance, in discussing the statistical tests, they say
In other words, “the way we do the statistics affects the results, and we’re trying to figure out how to jigger the statistical procedure to get the best results.” It makes me wonder if they choose their events so as to get a good result, too.
Oh, Jayrot, from what I gather, they’re saying that the white-noise generators are (perhaps still white noise; they don’t really say) somehow correlated during these worldwide emotional crises. I’m not sure how; I haven’t looked hard enough to see how they compare the random bitstreams from different generators.
And no, I haven’t bothered to find out who Bob Morris is. Next time I’m in Urbekistan, I’ll ask someone, since evidently his death was enough to send shockwaves around the world.
:rolleyes:
I suspect this might be the Bob Morris in question. I can certainly see how these people would consider him important.
Even if one did accept the dubious premise that many people focused on the same event could affect random number generators, how would this lead to predictions? There wasn’t anyone focused on the tsunami before it happened, was there?
This is the reason double-blinded studies are the gold-standard. You can take the results from any large dataset and group it until you find a “signficant difference” between two subsets–this is the nature of randomness!
A double blinded, prospective study must say in advance what the results should be to prove a hypothesis for this very reason: retrospective data is not valid for causative or predictive features.
I’m in agreement with many of the above. When I read this I thought it was interesting but likely a whole lot of nothing. Pochacco’s suggestions are both good. If these little boxes are really picking up on something, duplicate the boxes at each location and compare the data sets.
Also, on a side note, truly random numbers are very very hard to generate. I read the web page on the boxes they’re using but I don’t know if their method is valid or not–I’m not an expert there. 
Exactly what chronos said.
Few people worldwide were focused on the World Trade Center hours before the attack.
And let’s just say that random noise can somehow predict that something is going to happen someplace sometime in next four to eight to seventy-two hours. So what?
My prediction, now at 4:21 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Monday, February 14, 2005, is that something pretty important is going to happen TOMORROW!
BE PREPARED!