Letters to the Editor

Abstract

Editor: In the Spring 2009 issue of JSE, Douglas Stokes commented on a paper I coauthored with Lund, Emoto and Kizu that was published in the Winter 2008 issue.  That paper described an experiment involving the effects of distant intention on the formation of frozen water crystals.  Stokes’ critique was that multiple drops of water were drawn from the same bottles, and thus those samples could not be considered statistically independent.  From this, he suggested that the bottle rather than the water sample should be treated as the unit of analysis, and because there were only six bottles used in the experiment, the best possible significance level attainable would be 0.167, whereas we had reported p = 0.03.