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Cruise Ship Disaster

The Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster on Jan 13 2010 was a powerful news item, as the largest passenger ship sinking since the Titanic. It has not actually sunk, and almost all the 2000 passengers and crew have been rescued. Part of the new focus has been on the behavior of the Captain, who abandoned ship rather than commanding the evacuation.

The 1,000ft long ship, one of the biggest passenger vessels ever to be wrecked, foundered after striking a rock off the coast of Giglio just as dinner was being served on Friday night.

The Italian government says it fears an ecological disaster if the ship's half million gallons of diesel and oil start to leak into pristine coastal waters, part of a huge marine national park around the Tuscan archipelago of islands.

The captain was accused of “inexcusable” recklessness on Monday night after it emerged that he steered too close to shore to come within sight of his head waiter’s family home on the island of Giglio.

The GCP event was set for 21:30 on Jan 13 to 03:30 on the 14th (20:30 02:30 UTC). I think the impact that started the disaster was at 21:38, so this period includes a few minutes before to 6 hours after. The result is Chisquare 21500.472 on 21600 df, for p = 0.683 and Z = -0.476.

Cruise Ship Disaster

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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