Earth Day 2008

Earth Day in 2008 is on April 22. This year it was on Tuesday, and though it is more difficult for large numbers to participate, there was a lot of publicity. I received input from several sources working on recruiting people to join together. I decided to make it a formal hypothesis test again (previous formal tests in 2001 and 2006). Incidentally, or perhaps not, the day also saw what many consider to be a very important primary election in the US, with Clinton and Obama fighting for Pennsylvania votes. This was going on from about noon UTC, resolving about midnight UTC.

Since 1970, Earth Day has been an annual event for people around the world to celebrate the earth and our responsibility toward it. The Earthday network says, "Volunteer. Go to a festival. Install solar panels on your roof. Organize an event where you live. Change a habit. Help launch a community garden. Communicate your priorities to your elected representatives. The possibilities are endless! Do something nice for the earth, have fun, meet new people, and make a difference."

Earth Day 2000 -- the 30th anniversary -- was expected to stir 500 million people on all continents and in more than 160 nations. Probably the expectations in 2008 should also be high since the environment is getting so much more play in the media, and a continuously growing recognition that we must pay attention to the earth's needs.

As before, consonant with GCP purposes that include helping more people recognize that we can have a better future by becoming more conscious of our interdependence, Earth Day seems a natural event to examine. Since the Earth Day observances are very diffuse, with no central, focal moment, we again have decided that a sensible prediction is to expect the whole day to show the effects of large numbers of separate celebrations, rituals, meetings, and consciousness raising events. The full 24 hours of data for 22 April, 2008, based on UTC time, were extracted, and processed as raw second-by-second composites across all eggs. At the time of processing (on the 23rd), 58 eggs had reported. The figure below shows the cumulative deviation for the 24 hour period. The total Chisquare was 86676 on 86400 degrees of freedom, for a p-value of 0.252 and Z = 0.66, positive but not significant.

Interestingly, a survey of all earthdays from 2000 to 2006 reveals that all have a modest positive deviation, and a cumulative Z of 2.76.

Earth Day 2006


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