The World Cup begins in South Africa on June 11. The games are an opportunity to look at the GCP effect for a special kind of event: precisely timed occurrences of collective emotion. For 64 matches, millions of people will watch live as teams from around the world battle to put the ball past the goalie and into the net. The intense excitement and elation that erupts when a goal is scored will be repeated many times over the course of the games. We know that the small GCP effect occurs, on average, for a broad collection of global events. But we don't know which kinds of events drive the effect. Will the goals scored during the World Cup games be moments which drive the GCP effect? This is the question we'll look at after the last score of the final match.
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But we need your help! We need precise real clock times for each goal. We can't use the official goal times which are given in "game minutes". They do not correspond to real clock time because the game clock stops for injuries and penalties, etc.
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So if you watch a match live, note the exact time of any goals - to the second. After the game, go to the match page on this blog. Enter the time and the team for each goal in a comment. Note where you are, so we can correct for your time zone. That's it.
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Here's an example of how to post a goal time :
South Africa goal at 11:17:01 local time in New York
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The more people that contribute, the more accurate the time-stamp will be. So post your time even if someone else has posted one first.
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Enjoy the games. And contribute to the GCP at the same time!
Thanks!