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External Remote Viewing Experiment: Invitation / Progress

Originally posted by Alexius BoyPaj is not, as far as I'm aware, commissioned by the FT. Fail to see how his work reflects on the mag, or indeed anyone else.
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Indeed. And the pages contain a disclaimer to that very effect.

I've never thought of my little test as anything more than a bit of fun, though sometimes it's a pain in the rear when I'm not around to change the books. That's why I often miss the 10 pm publishing deadline and do it next morning instead.

I wouldn't go to this effort just to make fun of people. There are far easier ways!
:D
 
Participate in the experiment, and then judge

Amanda,
Welcome to the message board! I notice that you pounce right on this experiment and call it rubbish.
Now, before you call it rubbish, you should try to view the book yourself, and have a few rounds of viewing, perceiving, or however you want to guess the book. I've probably done about 20 rounds, and guessed correctly once. For having claimed no ability, that's about right. I recommend you try it to see how you do after a few tries. My take on the experiment is that Paj changes the books randomly, and sees who guesses right or not. Not sure how this is rubbish, except that those of us trying to guess the books probably do not have the ability to "view" well at all.

Having said that, I am sure there are those that could view well. I have seen more than I've bargained for and know that there is more than the purely physical in this world. (And having a strong scientific background, I know all about the physical world.)

Paj is rightly skeptical about many things that he has not witnessed. I also was highly skeptical that people could talk to ghosts, see auras, or "get a strong feeling that something is wrong" with someone they know. *I* know that people can do this, but if I didn't witness it, I'd be skeptical, and leave room for the possibility for it to be true.

Paj, while being skeptical, is not a troll. He has discussed things quite civilly on this board and makes the debate worthwhile. You displayed troll-like behaviour jumping in the discussion and calling it rubbish. (but I'll leave the final decision to the mods ;)) I do applaud you for bringing some liveliness to this discussion. I look forward to the future discussions and debates that take place on this board.

On with the viewing! (or however people guess the books).

And Paj, if I've made assumptions here that are wrong, please correct me. :)
 
Got another one

I just noticed, I got another one correct. :) I gotta try that method more often (picturing the book before I go to the site).

Usually, I just wiggle my mouse and let "fate guide my hand", but sometimes I actually try viewing. That time, it seemed to work. (okay, I saw someone facing left, and that book came closest).

What method do others use to guess? (or view) (or be guided)
 
Anyone

Anyone. . . ? Anyone. . . ?

Anyone still viewing here other than me?
. . . and I use the verb "viewing" rather loosely, as I don't seem to be "viewing" very well at all.

:D
 
Seems to be a few more this time, but it's down to a hardcore.
 
Last call for entries

My long running book test is drawing to a close. At present we have had 104 rounds, but I have decided to end the current experiment at 120 rounds. I feel I have examined this particular protocol in enough depth now, though no one has yet been able to perform in a manner not explainable by chance.

If anyone wants a last bash at stunning the world, you are welcome to join in the final stages.

http://cgi.pagetworld.plus.com/books.php
 
After 120 rounds, the experiment is over.

You can reach the raw results via my sig. I'm just adding a simple binomial probability column, but I don't think there's anything to get excited about.

Of course, this will mean nothing to true believers (who will just say that I cheated anyway), but at least I know that everything was above board and the evidence shows that no one who participated was able to remote view.
 
Oh, go on then. As it's you.

I have just added the probability column and a couple of mildly diverting charts. I have just published directly from Excel, so you'll have to excuse the bloated page code.

http://cgi.pagetworld.plus.com/bookresults.htm

According to the numbers, the best performance was Daenris' with a probability of about one in 35. Still pretty poor though.
 
Ah so it wasn't my imagination that "Holland" kept coming up time after time! :D

Cheers Paj. Shame we couldn't blow the world apart with evidence of amazing Remote Viewing skills. ;)

:_pished:
 
Min Bannister said:
Ah so it wasn't my imagination that "Holland" kept coming up time after time! :D

Cheers Paj. Shame we couldn't blow the world apart with evidence of amazing Remote Viewing skills. ;)

:_pished:
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Oh we may be able to, I believe you will find I have a 100% record
 
Swan said:
Oh we may be able to, I believe you will find I have a 100% record
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Hehe, though I think that is pushing the "quitting while you are ahead" thing a little. :D
 
woohoo!

I rule!!! :)

of course I only did 11 tests... so, not very valid :)

also... did you deliberately skew the book choices with some equation of probability or did the computer just end up with a very non-normal distribution... if it was the computer you may want to look into why it was so skewed. Because, if you were just using a simple random number to select them, and assuming it was actually near-random you should have a pretty regular distribution of book choices, and then you could just do a simple t-test to compare mean hits for each person or as a total versus the expected probability (which would be 1 in 15 if it was actually near-random)

Just a thought.

Overall pretty nice test though :)
Of course my own online tests of clairvoyance and precognition yield statistically significant results... I'm soon going to run another revision to see if they hold up over three experiments instead of just two...
you can check out the results from the first experiment here http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~keitha/ though I'm not sure how long they'll be up since I've graduated and lost access to that page. I'm too lazy and haven't compiled a page of results from the revised experiment, but they were similar... same overall effect with no difference between precognition and clairvoyant trials.

Anyway, thanks for sharing the results Paj :)
 
The random number generator was the same one that jumbled up the order of the books on the page each time. I just used the random function in PHP.

When picking a book, I'd go to the "choosing" address and refresh the page once (to make sure it wasn't a cached image from last time) and see which book appeared at the top of the page.

I know it's skewed, but in just 120 trials it would have been weird if it had been evenly spread.
 
Swan said:
Min Bannister said:
Ah so it wasn't my imagination that "Holland" kept coming up time after time! :D

Cheers Paj. Shame we couldn't blow the world apart with evidence of amazing Remote Viewing skills. ;)

:_pished:
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Oh we may be able to, I believe you will find I have a 100% record
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...and back he sits, resting his chin inscrutably on his arched fingers.

Shame you couldn't actually demonstrate though, innit?
 
TheBoyPaj said:
The random number generator was the same one that jumbled up the order of the books on the page each time. I just used the random function in PHP.

When picking a book, I'd go to the "choosing" address and refresh the page once (to make sure it wasn't a cached image from last time) and see which book appeared at the top of the page.

I know it's skewed, but in just 120 trials it would have been weird if it had been evenly spread.
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I don't know about that. I usually use whatever built in random number generator is native to the programming language I'm using... and they end up with pretty normal results over even 100 or 200 repetitions.

Out of curiousity could you go into more detail about the statistics you used? Just wondering.
 
Well, I just used the Binomial function in Excel to calculate the probability. I'm not a whizz at stats, but a bit of research into Bernoulli trials led me to think that it would give me a resonable steer on how interesting the results are.

Some references:

http://www.automeasure.com/chance.html
http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/Stefan_Waner/RealWorld/stats/bernoulli.html

If anyone thinks I've analysed the data wrongly, feel free to chip in.

Incidentally, according to that calculator, the chance of getting Holland come up 15 times is 0.0077. It's odd, but then odd things happen, don't they?
 
The only issue I could potentially see with this is that Bernoulli trials assume an equal probability of a hit or a miss. You'd have an equal probability with a balanced selection of books -- maybe like a randomized list with each book appearing an equal number of times -- but with such a skewed distribution of book targets, you don't really have an equal 1 in 15 probability of a hit each time.

Of course, that said I can't immediately suggest a better option that doesn't require rerunning the experiment. Though I'll look into it a bit perhaps.


TheBoyPaj said:
Well, I just used the Binomial function in Excel to calculate the probability. I'm not a whizz at stats, but a bit of research into Bernoulli trials led me to think that it would give me a resonable steer on how interesting the results are.

Some references:

http://www.automeasure.com/chance.html
http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/Stefan_Waner/RealWorld/stats/bernoulli.html

If anyone thinks I've analysed the data wrongly, feel free to chip in.

Incidentally, according to that calculator, the chance of getting Holland come up 15 times is 0.0077. It's odd, but then odd things happen, don't they?
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oops... quick correction... I didn't mean to say the trials expect an equal probability of a hit or a miss... that would only allow .5... I meant assume an equal probability of a hit each time... so 1 in 15 or .06667 in this case.
 
Just another thing I noticed briefly... there seems to be a rough negative correlation between the number of times a book was chosen for a target, and the popularity of it with the subjects... I didn't do any statistical analysis on this as of yet, it was just a visual inspection...

odd... maybe people are supressing to the point of negative greater than chance results...
or not :)
 
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