No it's not. It's not simply about lots of data. In the Global Consciousness Project, while there's a huge amount of data that is being produced every day, you only have 200 events. It's like an experiment with 200 events or 200 trials. Which is a substantial experiment. But it's not billions of trials. There is a different design than the usual experiment that the data is pulling all the time. But we only look at certain elements of it which we predefine as important to look at.

WTB - statistically it seems that in random number generators with women apparently have have greater significant results effecting an RNG than men, but apparently, usually in the opposite direction then is desired. For example, if they are asked to mentally direct the random number generator to produce a greater number of ones than zeros, women tend to produce a greater number of zeros. Why do you think this is?

Radin - Where did you hear that?

WTB - I think I read that in Lynne Taggart's The Field.

Radin - I would guess that it's referring to studies done at the PEAR lab. In modern times they've done the most studies with random number generators, and also including differences between men and women. It's difficult to generalize their results to everybody else's. So what we can say is that, at least within their lab, they have found this interesting gender effect. But there have been very few applications of gender effect - not just applications, but very few studies from other people have even tried to look at gender effect. I wouldn't have high confidence. Here is a good example of not having high confidence that that effect is due to gender. Because there aren't enough independent replications. As to whether there are gender effects at all, I expect there are probably very strong gender effects. Partially cultural expectations about women's intuition and all that. But these are all generalities. There hasn't been an enormous amount of gender research done in parapsychology, partially because there hasn't been very many parapsychologists. Is only so much that we can do.

WTB - I think the atmosphere is significantly shifting now? Are enough scientists producing enough quality experiments to begin to shift mainstream scientist's myopic view of psi effects?

Radin - In a word no. I would say in more than one word, that for those who are genuine skeptics – they’re open minded but they doubt – and for those who do their homework - of course. To do homework, I have to be motivated in the first place. They have to be somewhat interested in. And doing your homework in this realm is not too easy, because there aren't that many books out there, and specialty journals are not that easy to get a hold of. But if you were motivated - and there is an unfortunate thing that has occurred because of the Web. Most people know never go to the library. If you can't find something on the Web, it doesn't exist. And that creates a significant problem in this field, because, while there are now sources on the Web, there's one extremely good source that is an online bibliography but it's a subscription bibliography, it's not free.  Next > 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8