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Pakistani Flooding, July-August 2010:
The GCP technology, in particular the analysis stategy, is
designed for relatively short, focused events, so it is
difficult to assess the possible effects of a long-lasting
tragedy such as the flooding in Pakistan. I asked our egg
host in Pakistan for a day that might be representative of
the strong emotional reactions. He suggested four days.
There were three reports that [might have had strong]
effects:
1) Date:July 21, 2010 Location Balochistan province, near
Iran border, when 52 people died.
2) Date: July 22, 2010 again same location, 30 more people
died due to floods.
3) Dates: July 31-Aug01, 2010 Location North West Frontier
Province, now renamed as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) 1400 people died.
From August 02 onwards: Indus river starts from the Kashmir
region passes through KPK into Punjab Province and through the Sind
Province finally into the sea. River Kabul Starts from
Afghanistan side passes through KPK and both combine at the
border of Punjab, thus Punjab received water from two
rivers combined into one, but because it is mostly flat land,
fatal damage to human life was less but the agriculture and animal life
was totally lost.
As regards the status of emotions, people are sad indeed but
as the TV channels are reporting that most people are assuming this
natural calamity is because of their deeds of supporting evil by remaining
silent for such a long time that Nature has decided to get rid of a
generation-much-like the people of Moses that were stuck for 40 years in the
wilderness. How much this is true shall be seen in future, but economically this
seems true-World Bank and IMF shall be reporting the losses in detail, what
we are seeing physically is sixty year of development work gone waste in
the these areas.
It would be important to see how people learn from this
event and what future path is choosen-as I see it the moment of choice has
arrived. We have least one EGG in place to record the developments.
Abdul Samad suggested four days in response to my request for
local perspective, July 21, 22, and July 31, Aug 1. For the
GCP event I have combined them (concatenated them in sequence) as a
single event to represent the ongoing tragedy. The result is
Chisquare 344630 on 345600 df for p = 0.878 and Z = -1.165.
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.
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