Global conciousness project

[Ramrod]

Report

Website

..........intriguing stuff...

[danielf]

Charlatans if you ask me. The site may be hosted by Princeton, but there's no reference to any (peer-reviewed) publications.

I cannot find any description of what constitutes a deviation from randomness either. I find it very hard to see any type of scientific reporting on the 'scientific work' part of that site.

Originally Posted by danielf

Charlatans if you ask me. The site may be hosted by Princeton, but there's no reference to any (peer-reviewed) publications.

I cannot find any description of what constitutes a deviation from randomness either. I find it very hard to see any type of scientific reporting on the 'scientific work' part of that site.

Agreed, science is the real light into all darknesses, unless experts from the world over jointly investigate and disclose any findings, it's not even worth reading anything from that site.

[Ramrod]

Fair nuff......just thought it was interesting......

[AndrewJ]

Interesting stuff, just shows how little we do know compared to what could and is actually out there.

Top like Ramrod have a greeny, I shall be reading this all night

[Raistlin]

I can't help but think that there is probably a more rational explanation for this.

For example, the events that they've quoted were all "felt" by the machines.....these machines are all powered and connected to the net.....at the time these events were occuring there would have been a massive increase in net activity, there would also have been a corresponding increase in power consumption, as people went online (and turned on TVs/Radios etc) in order to get more information.

I wonder if that's affecting the results somehow

[Gareth]

pish... computers are incapable of generating random numbers unless they use some external source such as a radioactive source decaying, or static noise, or even a lavalamp ( i dunno). On their own, computers generate pseudo-random numbers, because numbers calculated through a deterministic process, cannot, by definition, be random. Given knowledge of the algorithm used to create the numbers and its internal state, you can predict all the numbers returned by subsequent calls to the algorithm, whereas with genuinely random numbers, knowledge of one number or an arbitrarily long sequence of numbers is of no use whatsoever in predicting the next number to be generated.

[danielf]

Some criticism here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_...usness_Project

The methodology of the Global Consciousness Project has been questioned. Most of this criticism centers around how the data are selected and interpreted. It is important to recognize that spikes and fluctuations are to be expected in any random distribution of data. Especially troubling is that there is no set time frame for how close a spike has to be to a given event to find a correlation. For example, on September 11, it was alleged that spikes that occurred hours before the attacks were themselves caused by the attacks, bizarrely asserting backwards causality or subconscious mass precognition.

Another problem is that there is no objective criterion for determining whether or not an event is significant. Events are seemingly arbitrarily selected post-hoc, and only the data from that time period are observed. Data from other time periods are ignored, whether or not they may display similar fluctuations.

Like I said, charlatans...

[Gareth]

It's all too much like Nostradamus to me....

Originally Posted by Nostradamus (...honest)

On the day the sun does rise into a blue sky, mocking birds will sing their cheeful song before he who has no troubles may decide to seek out new challenges

Which translates into on September 11th, a bunch of religious nutters are gonna crash some planes into a couple of skyscrapers

[Jules]

Makes for interesting reading