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No. 50: Mar-Apr 1987

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Mind-bending the velocity vectors of marine algae

From the referenced paper's abstract:

"A consciousness experiment in which the Doppler shift of He/Ne laser light was used to describe changes in the velocity and vector of a marine alga, Dunaliella, was reported by Pleass and Dey in 1985. Because the subject of the consciousness experiment is living, we expect strings of baseline velocity and vector data which are, at some level, inextricably time-variant. This complicates the statistical procedures which must be used to analyze the data.

"This paper examines the variation in baseline data strings, and describes two alternative statistical procedures which have been used to determine the probability of consciousness effects. Two levels of control are applied, allowing global comparison of frequency distributions of experimental scores with similar distributions derived artificially from baseline data. In both cases the null hypothesis is that there is no psi effect. The data quite strongly suggest the rejection of the null hypothesis, although the distributions of run scores contain several values beyond 3 sigma and are nonnormal. This limits the definition of probabilities."

(Pleass, C.M., and Dey, N. Dean; "Finding the Rabbit in the Bush: Statistical Analysis of Consciousness Research Data from the Motile Alga Dunaliella," The Explorer, 3:6, no. 2, 1986. The Explorer is a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration.)

Comment. Scientifically, these experiments seem to far transcend guessing Zener cards.

From Science Frontiers #50, MAR-APR 1987. � 1987-2000 William R. Corliss