Williams: New Years Eve Field RNG Exploration 1

Local Field RNG Exploration: 10 Years of New Year's

Eve Data
Bryan Williams

Psychical Research Foundation

In many parts of the world, New Year's Eve is a time when people gather
together to enjoy each other's company, free themselves of the trials and
tribulations of the ending year, and celebrate the dawning of a new one. With
all of the shared attention and social camaraderie that comes with the
counting down to midnight, one might think that New Years Eve could also be
a time when a hypothesized mind-matter interaction-related group
consciousness effect might be momentarily generated on a fairly large scale.
Initial effort to explore this possibility was made by the Global
Consciousness Project (GCP), using the data being continually collected by its
worldwide network of random number generators (RNGs). Preliminary
analysis of the annual New Years Eve celebrations held from 1998 to 2006
revealed a significant reduction in the sample variance among the RNG
devices in the network around the stroke of midnight, offering some evidence
in favor of the hypothesized mass group consciousness effect (Nelson,
2006). And effort by the GCP to explore New Year's has been ongoing in the
time since this result was reported.
Inspired by the GCP effort, I decided when I first began conducting field
RNG explorations that I would also examine the New Years Eve celebrations
being held in the local time zone where I live (the Mountain time zone), using
a cumulative meanshift analysis focused on the 10 minutes surrounding
midnight (modeled after the analysis introduced by the GCP). Considering
how small the effect sizes tend to be in mind-matter interaction studies with
RNGs, it seemed most sensible in this case to adopt the repeated measures
approach taken by Broughton (1999), based on the premise that if group
consciousness effects ...truly represent an influence on the RNG, then
repeated sampling of essentially identical events should substantially
increase the evidence of the effect. And since New Years is an event that
recurs annually, repeated sampling of the event could be taken longitudinally.
Here I present the current result of an examination of the RNG data I've
collected from 10 annual New Years Eve celebrations in the Mountain time
zone, beginning with the New Years transition from 2004 to 2005 (my start

Williams: New Years Eve Field RNG Exploration 2

period when I began doing field RNG explorations). Missing from this
examination are the datasets from two celebrations: 2009 2010, and 2013
2014. The former dataset was lost in a critical computer system failure, while
the latter dataset was not collected in the Mountain time zone (I was on the
East Coast, and thus in a different time zone, at the time I collected data
during the 2013 2014 transition).
To possibly reveal any underlying overall pattern in the RNG data, a
single composite dataset was created across the 10 New Years datasets by
collectively combining the normalized RNG samples across datasets for each
second using a Stouffer's Z. As Broughton (1999) points out, this is analogous
to how an event-related potential (ERP) pattern may emerge when EEG
voltage data are signal averaged across multiple epochs of repeated sensory
stimulation. The result is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Graph of the combined RNG data taken across ten individual New Years
Eve celebrations held in the U.S. Mountain Time Zone from 2004 to 2016. The curved red arc
indicates the threshold of statistical significance (at odds of 20 to one against chance) as
time passes.

From the graph, it can be seen that the combined RNG data in the five
minutes leading up to the stroke of midnight are mostly random as expected.
But then, a notable change occurs in the five minutes following, as the data
take on a steadily increasing positive trend away from expectation that is
significant overall (2 = 665.07, 600 df, p = .033, associated z = 1.844), with
odds of about 30 to one against chance.

Williams: New Years Eve Field RNG Exploration 3

To further get a sense of the finding, one might compare the trend
observed in Figure 1 with that seen in Figure 2 below, which shows an
example of how nominally random RNG data might ideally be expected to
look under ordinary, everyday conditions, without any mind-matter
interaction effect presumably being present.

Figure 2. Graphical example of how RNG data might be expected to look under
ordinary conditions, without any mind-matter interaction influence effects presumably being
present.

Figure 3 shows the combined RNG data superimposed over the 10

individual New Years RNG datasets that were used in the present analysis. As
can be seen on the individual level, the RNG data collected for each yearly
New Years celebration do not really exhibit a whole lot of clear structural
patterns on their own; it is only when they are combined across datasets that
the underlying structure begins to clearly emerge.

[Figure 3 can be found on the next page]

Williams: New Years Eve Field RNG Exploration 4

Figure 3. Graph of the combined RNG data superimposed over the individual traces
of the yearly New Years Eve RNG datasets. The curved red arcs indicate the threshold of
statistical significance (at odds of 20 to one against chance) as time passes.

On the surface, the combined RNG data result seen in Figure 1 seems to
offer some additional preliminary support for the mass group consciousness
hypothesis. However, it should be noted that the total number of datasets
used in this analysis is still relatively small, and so the possibility still remains
that this result could be due to expected fluctuations in the RNG data that
just happen to collectively form a significant pattern by chance. Additional
datasets will help address this issue more as time goes on. So for now, these
graphs are mainly just for show. Lets see what next year brings...
References
Broughton, R. S. (1999). Exploring repeated sampling techniques in field-RNG research.
Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 42nd Annual
Convention (pp. 35 47). Durham, NC: Parapsychological Association, Inc.
Nelson, R. D. (2006). Anomalous structure in GCP data: A focus on New Year's Eve.
Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 49th Annual
Convention (pp. 115 126). Columbus, OH: Parapsychological Association, Inc.