Ambiguous is as good as false. When you look at the actual US government data for the year, broken down week by week, you can't see any drops in crime levels, sure there are dips all over the place but the one in August is no bigger than the one in March so if you are claiming that coherence causes crime rates to drop then who was meditating in March.
And the crime rate dropped significantly more the next year due to changes in policing and gentrification. It's all on the government website. The thing about sceptics is we almost always originally come at paranormal research from a position of wanting it to be true and looking for confirmation. That's true for me and Susan Blackmore and any amount of people from CISCOP. It's only the constant failure of of world to confirm whether it has provided us with any paranormal abilities to measure that gives rise to what you may think is a narrow minded sceptic. I still hope for the best though, but the TMO could make it easier by making the crime rate fall beyond the level by which they naturally fluctuate. An easily noted 80% drop for instance, that'd be more convincing. I convert for evidence. ---In [email protected], <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Teh statistic was skewed. For one week, the homicide rate was double the average. THAT was what was picked up by the press and extrapolated for the entire 8 week period. True Believers want the research to be true Skeptics are often as desperate to be sure that it is false. The reality is that the study was ambiguous, IMHO. L ---In [email protected], <mdixon.6569@...> wrote : Judy, I don't remember the details but that it was a national concern at the time on all the national news programs. It sure seems that there were more than just ten homicides. Might have been ten homicides and ten or twenty non lethal shootings in addition. On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 5:10 PM, "authfriend@..." <authfriend@...> wrote: This is a bit misleading, Mike. Rates of aggravated assault and rape decreased significantly from what would have been expected over the period of the study. Robberies stayed about the same. And the homicide rate (around 10 per week) over the eight weeks of the study was also about the same as "normal." There was a "spike" of 10 homicides over one 36-hour period (there apparently was some sort of gang battle), but the following week there were only 4 homicides. So it evened out statistically. You just happened to be there the week of the "spike." I think "shootings" would be included in the "aggravated assault" category; that rate declined significantly over the course of the study. One would, of course, have hoped that the homicide rate would have decreased, but no joy. OTOH, the homicide rate didn't increase, contrary to what some reporters claimed. Here's the text of the study as published in Social Indicators Research:: http://www.istpp.org/crime_prevention/ http://www.istpp.org/crime_prevention/ Here's an article by one of the study's authors rebutting a very sloppy article attempting to debunk the study in Skeptical Inquirer: http://istpp.org/crime_prevention/voodoo_rebuttal.html http://istpp.org/crime_prevention/voodoo_rebuttal.html It addresses the 36-hour homicide spike in some detail. I took my *flying* block in DC during the big campaign there. There was a huge spike in murders and shootings at the time. I guess the TM explanation was, *well you should have seen what it would have been like had we not been there.* On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 1:27 AM, nablusoss1008 <[email protected]> wrote: Along with the mounting medical evidence of the various health benefits of meditation, research shows group meditation can actually reduce crime rates in the greater population. http://guardianlv.com/2014/04/research-shows-group-meditation-can-reduce-crime-rates/ http://guardianlv.com/2014/04/research-shows-group-meditation-can-reduce-crime-rates/
