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Night of Hopes

I received an email on May 16 from Yasin AbedRabboh saying "I would like to suggest the "night of hopes", a muslim occasion today as an event for the project. It is more practiced by shiites so maybe the Irani timezone is best."

Since I was not familiar with the event, I responded, "Please give the specific time (including time zone) the event would begin and end so we can identify the corresponding segment of the data stream. Please also give me an Internet source where I can learn about the event and get a reasonable estimate of the number of people who will participate and how much of the world will be engaged." She sent the following information.

Dear Dr. Nelson,

Thank you for your reply. The night is the first Thursday of of the lunar month "Rajab" which was May 16th 2013. On that day many muslims, especially Shiites fast the whole Thursday from sunrise to sunset then proceed to perform the special prayer between the sunset prayer and the night prayer which in Irani time is between 8 pm and 9:30 pm, 3:30 pm GMT and 5pm GMT on may 16th.

Hope that helps, please let me know if you have any other questions. There is also another period of 10 days which all Muslim sects take seriously and that is the last 10 days of the month of Ramadan especially the odd ones, coming up in about 2months. The night of qadr (destiny). Thank you for your time and work.

Sincerely, Yasin

Although it is a shorter period of time than we usually assess, the specification was clear and precise, and the GCP event was set as Yasin indicated. The result is Chisquare 5494.157 on 5400 for p = 0.182 and Z = 0.907. (Note: these values are corrected from an earlier calculation which was in error.)

Night of Hopes

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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