---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote :
http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/32/4.toc http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/32/4.toc It'll cost you $30 to see the text of either the Editor's Comment or the study itself; the abstract of the study you can see on the site. The editor's worldview wasn't shaken in the slightest, nor was he questioning the scientific method. Salyavin's right: What he was suggesting was that the scientific method needed to be tightened up if it could be used to support the TM study's findings. Salyavin, how do you determine what the crime rate was going to be without the intervention? If you had to know that for sure, no study on any method of crime reduction could be considered valid. (The TM folks took a shot with the later DC study at predicting the crime rate without the intervention via a very complicated statistical method--Lawson will remember what it's called.) I think it's called "time series analysis". Do other methods of crime reduction actually try and predict that accurately? Surely they take what data has been collected and try afterwards to come up with social policies to change it. I would have thought an average over the year and compared to similar cities would be enough but there would obviously be a large variation. I looked for the original raw data and found US city crime rates broken down week by week over many years, you can't see any obvious difference for the period of the 1993 Washington course compared to the rest of the year, but the crime rate visibly plummeted a year later due to changes in police methods and gentrification. Might be better for anyone claiming supernatural abilities if they could show a larger than expected variation, like much larger. Big enough to be seen would help people like me who can't be bothered to check the statistical corrections. I remain unconvinced. salyavin, mind you, he was questioning Scientific Method, not any methods used in that particular study, which would be listed in Collected Papers and that would give one the Journal citation. I'll see if I can find it. It was a long time ago.
