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Although most events in our "political" series are about the
presidential candidates, the extraordinary excitement about
Sarah Palin, especially when she was introduced at
the Republican National Convention, was widespread -- even
if not monotonic. Peter Bancel proposed adding
Palin's speech formally accepting the party nomination
as candidate for Vice President to the list of formal GCP
events. The addition was made well after the fact, but as
usual, with no knowledge of the data.
We set the formal analysis using the same parameters applied
to the
Obama address the previous week (and to be applied to
McCain's acceptance speech on September 4).
These speeches are part of a
developing series of replications of political events that,
while US-centric, nevertheless interest huge numbers of
people around the world.
We do not have the exact time Palin's speech began, but
a Google search reveals that it was scheduled for the 9-10 pm
"primetime" hour.
The speech probably started at about 9:30 central time (in
St. Paul, Minnesota). The GCP event was set for a two hour period that
would definitely include all of the Palin address, as well as a bit of
the prelude and introduction and probably at least half an
hour of aftermath.
The result is a positive outcome, with
Chisquare 7379.629 on 7200 df, for p = 0.068 and Z = 1.490.
The graph shows several oscillations but notably a striking
positive trend during the time Palin was on stage.
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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