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Frank Ogden, Dr. Tomorrow Passes

I received a note from Jim Semenick, long time friend and assistant to one of our most colorful egghosts, Frank Ogden, known widely as Dr. Tomorrow, letting me know Frank had died.

   Hi Roger,

     It's with sadness that I wanted to pass on the message -  Frank
Ogden / Dr.Tomorrow passed away last night near midnight, at the age of
92...   

     He was in no pain, and it was apparently peaceful.  Old age and an
a reoccurrence of his prostate cancer finally slowed him down.. but i'm
sure he's still out there somewhere..you'll probably see him in your
data someplace.

    Take care

   Jim Semenick / Assistant to Frank Ogden / Dr.Tomorrow.

Although it is not a proposal that this be a GCP event, I felt Jim's remark, which honors Frank Ogden's indomitable spirit, suggested it would be appropriate to set a GCP event to mark his passing. Frank was strongly committed to the project, and was proud to host the only Egg with variable altitude -- it lived in his floating office in Vancouver harbor. I believe he would be happy to know his passing was marked by a look at the data, and I think he would be charmed, as I am, by the coincidence that a nice round number, 7.000 Sigma, is now the bottom-line Z-score for the 14-year data accumulation.

The GCP event was set for a 6 hour period beginning at 9 in the evening in Vancouver. In the graph, the approximate time of Frank's passing is marked. The result is Chisquare 22031.256 on 21600 df, for p = 0.019 and Z = 2.064.

Goodbye Frank! It was good to know you.

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.