The Global Consciousness Project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Orgasm

It's an annual event. though apparently only numbers 1 and 3 were included in the Global Consciousness Project registry. The results weren't statistically significant.

Ouch. Bad news for chaos magicians...

(NB Don't miss the "See also" section of that Wikipedia page.)

... whatever floats their boat...

The issue of Explore from May/June 2007 had several articles from the PEAR lab. Throughout these, they described the thing they were trying to measure as “resonance,” but in the final article, “Epilogue” they suggest that “love” would be a better term. The final paragraph reads:

“In most of the papers included in this anthology, we have resorted to the term resonance as a relatively antiseptic substitute for the academically discomforting word love. But as the PEAR spirit prepares to move beyond its present physical confines, it is also time to relinquish this semantic conservatism as well. In its place, we would leave our readers with reiteration of the heartfelt conviction with which we concluded the paper “Information, Consciousness, and Health,” namely, the scientific message is this:
In loving ourselves, we can heal ourselves;
In loving the world, we can heal the world.”

Jahn R.G., Dunne, B.J., "Epilogue", Explore, May/June 2007, Vol. 3, No. 3 339

Ok, interesting reference.
If love is the best description of what is being measured then I wonder why they found significant correlations with events such as 9/11 ...

Having read and discussed about this project many times in past years I kinda feel I will never really get it.
I guess I'll keep asking silly questions and remain very skeptical.

Thanks

Honestly, I don't think you can look into it that deeply... these devices are very sensitive to fluctuations in input power, temperature, and over time they often deteriorate etc... small voltage drops in particular can cause massive bias... they are not designed for what they are being used for, and the way they are being used is picking up a whole load of environmental and power supply issues... just forget it, there is far to much post processing going on in an RNG, in an attempt to get a nice and even stream of 1, 0's etc... That's all we really need to know.

I'd need some kind of plausible explanation for what's going on before I could forget it.

Ok, interesting reference.
If love is the best description of what is being measured then I wonder why they found significant correlations with events such as 9/11 ...

Having read and discussed about this project many times in past years I kinda feel I will never really get it.
I guess I'll keep asking silly questions and remain very skeptical.

Thanks

I find mind-matter interaction research less impressive then the Ganzfeld, dream ESP and remote viewing work. If I ever go into Parapsychology (I'd like to), telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition is where I'd focus my efforts.

I find mind-matter interaction research less impressive then the Ganzfeld, dream ESP and remote viewing work. If I ever go into Parapsychology (I'd like to), telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition is where I'd focus my efforts.

It would take some Nina Kulagina-level feats to be a real game changer, and to find someone with that kind of talent and willing to stand up to scrutiny is highly unlikely. Nina herself allegedly inherited her skills from her mother and she did have children of her own (who may have inherited something, if she was for real), but I consider it improbable that they would cooperate.

I wrote a lot about this elsewhere on Skeptiko, but these devices are very sensitive to power fluctuations, particularly voltage drops and you'll see bias appearing in the ratio of 1,0's, severe in some devices with just a 1-2% voltage drop.

I'd be looking at correlations with electricity demand... Here's one I found randomly for California on a hot day in 1999, very roughly fits Chris's graph above (also see a slow reduction in demand from 6pm), although I don't really know what his graph is showing.

[Image: elec_load_demand.gif]
It's not just based on lack of supply vs demand either, it's a complicated mix of demand/supply and localised activities etc, for example I get very visible brownouts, and voltage drops when any of the neighbors in my street start up an electrical motor, but only when demand is high locally in a residential district...

Sure, this is fine, it shows demand variations during the day...

This says nothing about noise or random numbers.

Honestly, I don't think you can look into it that deeply... these devices are very sensitive to fluctuations in input power, temperature, and over time they often deteriorate etc... small voltage drops in particular can cause massive bias... they are not designed for what they are being used for, and the way they are being used is picking up a whole load of environmental and power supply issues... just forget it, there is far to much post processing going on in an RNG, in an attempt to get a nice and even stream of 1, 0's etc... That's all we really need to know.

You seem to be all about evidence: Can you show me a correlation between randomness, and line noise? Or voltage level?

I don't think that's really been addressed (or maybe I haven't read the part of the literature where it has). Except it's been suggested that the important thing may be large numbers of people thinking about the same thing, so that coherence is the important aspect.

Certainly the events they've looked at are a very mixed bag - disasters and terrorist attacks, sporting events, religious and secular festivals, mass meditation events, astrological conjunctions, global orgasms ...

The number Pi is absolutely random and infinite in length, yet even it has what appear to be non random number sequences. How do they know they found what they were looking for? Their method is similar to using a shotgun; with a shotgun you're  bound to hit something. That something could easily be a result that contraindicates.
A hypothesis is based upon observed phenomena. What are those observed phenomena?  What is their hypothesis?
An hunch seems to be what they call a hypothesis.

The number Pi is absolutely random and infinite in length, yet even it has what appear to be non random number sequences. How do they know they found what they were looking for? Their method is similar to using a shotgun; with a shotgun you're  bound to hit something. That something could easily be a result that contraindicates.
A hypothesis is based upon observed phenomena. What are those observed phenomena?  What is their hypothesis?
An hunch seems to be what they call a hypothesis.

There were various hypotheses at different times, but according to their protocol, for each event the hypothesis - in statistical terms - was defined before the data from the random number generators were examined.

You can find more details on their website, but the hypothesis that they came to use most commonly was essentially that the outputs of pairs of random number generators in the network would tend to be positively correlated during the periods of interest.

But the important point is that - according to them - in this formal series of 513 events the details, including the statistical hypothesis, were always pre-specified before anyone looked at the data. They didn't just look retrospectively for unusual patterns in the data, as sceptics sometimes seem to assume. And it's not at all like firing a shotgun and being sure to hit something or other.