Registry of Formal Hypotheses and Specifications

The procedures for event selection cannot be strictly formulaic because we are attempting something without precedent, addressing complex issues in a very big world. In brief: Event selection was necessarily flexible at the inception of the Project because we did not have precedents to tell us what kind of events would be useful. We knew nothing about appropriate length or other parameters. Experience has allowed some standardization of the event selection and specification procedures, and for some kinds of events, pre-defined parameters can be applied. For example, events that repeat, such as New Years, Kumbh Mela, or Earth Day, are registered with the same specifications in each instance. For unexpected events like earthquakes and terror attacks, we typically identify a period beginning half an hour to an hour before the moment of occurrence, followed by several hours (e.g., 4 to 8), depending on the type of event. Recent analyses suggest we may not need so much flexibility, and we are testing a simple specification for most events. See a more detailed description.

All formal events to be included in the comprehensive test of the general hypothesis of the Global Consciousness Project are identified in the following table. It includes specifications for the period of time during which we expect the data will show deviations from expectation, the resolution of the analysis, and the specific analytical recipe to be followed. By convention the period includes the second that begins at the begin time, up to the last second prior to the end time. For example, the the first hour begins with 00:00:00 and ends with 00:59:59. All times are GMT/UTC.

In the registry, an asterisk by the event number and No in the Include column identifies events that are not included in the rigorous subset of the Formal Results. Brief annotations indicate why they are excluded, usually because the original specification was not adequately detailed, or the event had overlap with another. The notation DB Rank identifies a few events that were used in an experimental analysis procedure involving ranking against random decoys; they are accepted formal events.

If you need this information for analysis, you can create a text file for download. The file uses a pipe character | for the field separator.

Registry entries