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The Opening Ceremonies for the Olympic Games, Athens, 2004 were
predicted to show deviation by both egg hosts in Athens, Panos
Axiomakaros and John Piliounis, as well as by Roger Nelson. This is an
event that is attended by many thousands locally, and by millions world
wide. The Athens event is the third in a series of Opening Ceremonies for the
Olympics that we have examined. We make a prediction for a network
deviation because the event
generates a strong focus of people around the world on the
games. It is an example of a powerful and peaceful means of
interaction among nations.
Panos provided the times as Friday, August 13th, 21:00'-24:00' (local
time), which translates to 1800 to 2100 GMT. The prediction was the
standard positive deviation of the network variance (Stouffer Z²).
The result is opposite to the formal prediction, but it is not significant
although it shows a fairly
consistent trend for the three hour period, culminating in a Chisquare
of 10649.513 on 10800 df, with p = 0.847 (Z = -1.024).
We have two eggs running in Greece, and it seems worthwhile to ask how
they responded individually. The next figure shows that although they
each had some periods with strong trends, they are not obviously more
responsive than the network as a whole.
We also made an exploratory analysis for the ending ceremonies, which
were joyful and lighthearted, in celebration of what all agree was a
successful olympics. Here also we show the Greek eggs separately, in
addition to the whole network trace. The trends are not statistically
significant, but there is a general resemblance to the Opening
Ceremony figure.
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