Many people ask me, 'If I have AstroDatabank, do I need JigSaw?' or the reverse. The two programs are very different and complimentary. They both filter records based on astrological criteria, but that's no big feat. Every charting program in our software shop does that.
JigSaw
What's great about JigSaw as a research tool is that it provides quick graphs of an enormous amount of different astrological factors and it does so in seconds.
There's lots more to JigSaw than straight research. Many people will buy it just for one or two of the other modules. The rectification module is first rate. They've put Bernadette in software. You put in 28 events and it will guess the most likely birth time. The group synastry module is absolutely unique. It even creates reports about the group in question.
AstroDatabank
What is unique about AstroDatabank as a research tool is the ease with which you can analyze charts using multiple astrological factors with the subtlety approaching that of a human astrologer. We call this feature AstroSignatures and believe it is a long-awaited breakthrough for astrology research.
There has been only one astrological study that has survived replication with statistical significance.1 Why did all the others fail? I believe it was because they were doing single factor research. Why would hundreds of researchers do single factor studies like testing Sun signs vs. professions? We all know astrology is more complex than that. (e.g. Someone with a Sun-Saturn conjunction is going to more Saturnine than someone with Sun in Capricorn.) I believe that the answer lies in one of my favorite Maslow quotes, 'If all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.'
AstroDatabank includes a new technique for astrology research called AstroSignatures for analyzing multiple factors. What does an AstroSignature look like? It looks like traditional filtering (show me everybody with Moon in Taurus), but it scores charts instead of excluding them. Instead of looking for all charts with Sun, Moon, Asc, and Mercury in Earth (which would be a very small number), you can get a scored list showing the charts that have the most planets in Earth. Alternately, you could make up a model for arthritis like:
- 5 points for Saturn on an Angle
- 1 point of each inner planet in Capricorn
- 3 points for each aspect to Saturn
Then you could score the charts of arthritis patents to see if they have a higher score than non-arthritis patients.
AstroDatabank also makes control groups so you can find out if the anomalies you find in your experimental data are an astrological discovery or an astronomical artifact. For example, did you know that you are three times more likely to find a Mars-Sun conjunction than an opposition and twice as likely to find a Mars-Sun semi-sextile than a square? If you found these differences in a group of sports champions you might think this was significant, but that's just the astronomical nature of the Mars-Sun relationship.
1. The exception proves the rule. The only research that has survived replication and still showed statistical significance is the famous Gauquelin research on sports champions. They achieved statistical significant by working a very large data set (several thousand) and by testing one of the most powerful factors in astrology - angularity. If they had fewer subjects they never would have achieved statistical significance. In fact, the effect was so weak, that the skeptics were able to make the effect disappear by taking out just a few athletes who had Mars in the plus-zones. If they had used AstroSignatures, the effect would have been more robust.
