Earth Day 2009

Earth Day in 2009 is on April 22 again. This year it was on a Wednesday, and though it was a weekday, there was a lot of publicity. I received input from several sources working on recruiting people to join together. We now have several repetitions of this as a formal hypothesis test.

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, 2009, 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), 64 eggs had reported. The figure below shows the cumulative deviation for the 24 hour period. The total Chisquare was 86470.093 on 86400 degrees of freedom, for a p-value of 0.432 and Z = 0.170, barely positive but a small contribution to an accumulation of correlations over the years.

A survey of all earthdays from 2000 to 2006 reveals that all have a modest positive deviation, and a cumulative Z of 2.76. This is increased slightly by the 2009 result.

Earth Day 2009


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