RNGs detect major events

Now this is something totally weird - a Random Number Generator system that detects and sometimes even predicts major cataclysmic events happening around the world. And this is no paranormal mumbo-jumbo experiment conducted by a questionable psychic society.

From wikipedia: Global Consciousness is the idea that there is a collective consciousness in which all individual consciousness participates in, in some ways comparable with an electromagnetic field. There are many hypotheses as to how the field might operate. A project in Princeton University called Global Consciousness Project is created to study it. It was started in 1998 by Roger D. Nelson.

There is a hypothesis that the global consciousness has been getting stronger for the last decade because of communications networks which create more coherence between individual minds around the globe. (about the dot, if you cannot see it properly, you need firefox)

"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) studies anomalies arising in human/machine interactions" - much of the stuff here belongs to the exciting :) field of stats so I really cannot make sense of much of it but it's conclusions are pretty exciting nevertheless...

The department was created by a Robert G. Jahn, who, in 1979, was Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University.

Their most significant project is the Global Consciousness Project where they have been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The RNG's are located all over the world from NJ, USA to India to Fiji. "The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis."

The data is collected and graphs are created from the random numbers collected from RNG's around the world - but just before the graph is created, a prediction is made on the shape of the graph - in case of a catastrophe that has affected hundreds of thousands of people physically (earthquake or flood) or mentally (reading in the newspaper or watching on TV), a noticeable spike is seen in the results - the probability of these spikes occuring otherwise is very little, < 0.1% - the people running the show here insist that this shows that the Random Number Generators (RNG) are somehow affected by the consciousness of the people of the world and hence, show a departure from the norm.

Some points in time where a major spike was noticed are listed here (notice the last column, "Z-score statistic for the analysis, and its associated probability" alongwith a description including 9/11, Pak-India cricket series 2004 and the Pakistan eartquake in Oct 2005

See this for a near real-time display of the graph

How this happens and what are the implications, no one is sure of it - this is just too wierd and maybe intangible a science to make any use of it... atleast for now...