Excerpt from a January 2008 item in the UK's The Daily Mail newspaper: In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected. Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow. She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established. "The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments." Of course, this doesn't wash with sceptical scientists. Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing. He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area ...
Comments
I've got a question on the funnel plots.
When I look at the dream psi meta-analysis in your book, all individual studies have positive hit rates (allthough four of the earliest ones are not significant).
What I don't understand is how a funnel plot can show negative effect sizes for studies that have positive hit rates?
This probably just shows my incomplete understanding of effect sizes. Up to now I thought that positive hit rates had to correspond to positive effect sizes. How do I interpret an negative effect size?
-Tor
I must have read "cumulative" in the caption about 10 times, but still I didn't "see" it. Preconceived ideas die hard..
-Tor