Global Conciousness Project...thingy

[Enola_Straight]

Behold:

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/bsktobsrv/basketobserver.wall.html

What does anybody make of this?

[Chronos]

I make of it that it’s an extremely slow-loading website that tried to tie up my web browser until several seconds after I closed it. Care to summarize?

[badlyburnttoast]

WHAT IS THIS? It’s a Java applet that displays in near-realtime (10-minute delay) the behavior of a network of random event generators (REGs) located at host sites around the world. The network is maintained by the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) and has been running since August, 1998. Random numbers from the REGs are collected via the Internet and archived on a server in Princeton. The Basket Observer gets a new chunk of data at regular intervals, and displays it as changing blocks of color, one for each REG device in the network. The size and brightness of the blocks represent deviations from the expected value for 200-bit trials collected at one per second from each of about 50 instruments. This display cannot generally be interpreted to represent the composite network response to events in the world.

The display is a series of boxes with colored bars and numbers that change every second or so, and there is a constant thumping sound and an occasional bell ring.

There are also buttons on the bottom to change to different graph types.

I have absolutely no idea what any of it means or what the point is.

[Jragon]

It’s a display of data interpreted in different ways from Random Number Generators over the world, the main site has some babble about correlating it to meaningful world events and stuff that I don’t quite understand.

Here’s the “detailed explanation”:

The Global Consciousness Project

[Jragon]

Okay, I think I understand. It seems to be some weird attempt to prove the world has some sort of consciousness by doing things like taking strange correlations in data and comparing them with important world events. I don’t quite understand it, but for some reason it seems to me like saying “omg there were three sevens on election day! This must have something to do with Obama winning!” They claim it’s hard science but… I don’t know, the description seems confusing.

It also seems to be an art project.

[Measure_for_Measure]

Skeptic! Unconscious Research of Global Consciousness
Wikipedia! Global Consciousness Project - Wikipedia
10 pages at the Randi Forum! http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=35352

The first link is probably the most helpful. The Global Consciousness Project apparently has ties to Global Orgasm Day, which will be observed this year on December 21st, 2009.

[canpakes]

i visited the Princeton PEAR lab (where the GCP originated. The PEAR lab was at Princeton University, tho the GCP is not), and the links above don’t seem very good to me. The Skiptic! criticism is less informational than polemical, and wikipedia in this case seems to be quoting critics (Jeffers) who don’t seem to understand the experimental protocols. (That quote at least confuses operator baseline data with calibration data.)

So I’d suggest looking for other information sources. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any that aren’t related either fairly directly to the authors or to ideological detractors. The links above seem to fall into the second category to me, so for balance, I’ll offer some others:
www.princeton.edu/~pear/ is the PEAR lab’s website, and i believe the background for the GCP is in papers on “FieldREG”.
These videos also show FieldREG protocols, which GCP is based on:
http://blip.tv/file/2017352/
http://blip.tv/file/2017356/

[kayaker]

@Measure_for_Measure

The Global Consciousness Project apparently has ties to Global Orgasm Day

Now there is something I can get behind…err…support.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@canpakes

The links above seem to fall into the second category to me, so for balance, I’ll offer some others:
www.princeton.edu/~pear/ is the PEAR lab’s website, and i believe the background for the GCP is in papers on “FieldREG”.

Incidentally, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research group closed shop in 2007. From the New York Times article:

@New York Times

“It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton,” said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.” “Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.”

And here’s a skeptical take-down of the operation: http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-04/042806boots.html

[canpakes]

Hmmm. This ‘takedown’ is factually incorrect. The entire database actually does show significant effects, which can be read in many of the PEAR lab’s summary papers written in the past decade or so. Given that, it is reasonable to look for ‘finer scale features’ (sliced and diced data) to develop plausible hypotheses for future experimental design. The finer scale post-experimental analysis does not form the basis for claiming an effect (as Mark claims), rather the formal variables in the experiment do (which is as it should be).

The objection that investigating ‘finer scale features’ as in retrospective data-mining is statistically invalid, is true in some of the PEAR writings. They do frequently discuss operator characteristics that have not always been isolated as an experimental variable. In the damning quotes that Mark cites, however, it actually seems like the PEAR lab is being transparent about what is statistically significant and what is speculation that could be useful for future experimental design.

From the posting, I can’t tell what paper Mark has taken his quotes from, but I recognize the context in which they would be made, and they seem taken out of context. Having studied PEAR’s work, I don’t think Mark has done a very good review here.

also from the NYT article:

Several expert panels examined PEAR’s methods over the years, looking for irregularities, but did not find sufficient reasons to interrupt the work.