The happy feat
ANDREW BURNET

HOW are you expecting to feel when you wake up on Monday 22 January? Gloomy? Chilly? Hard-up? Full of the lurgy? Or just a bit Monday-morningish? Well, you won’t be alone.

Two years ago, the fourth Monday in January was officially designated the unhappiest day of the year. That’s “officially” according to the findings of psychologist and academic Cliff Arnall, who was then based at Cardiff University, having been commissioned by Sky Travel to come up with the ideal date on which to cheer yourself up by booking a holiday.

Using six factors, including post-Christmas debt, midwinter weather and failed New Year’s resolutions, he came up with a tongue-in-cheek formula to identify the year’s most miserable day. The idea caught on, and Arnall’s formulae were commissioned by other organisations, including the ice-cream manufacturer Wall’s, which asked him to pin down the happiest day of the summer.

For Arnall, though, the outcome of this project was not altogether a happy one.

Some members of the scientific establishment attacked him for trivialising the issues surrounding depression and anxiety.

Arnall doesn’t accept this criticism: “I became involved because I wanted to get people talking about depression and cut down the stigma of it,” he says. “Even if it just means people at the pub saying, ‘Did you hear about that daft equation?’ it all adds up, as far as I’m concerned.” Ultimately, though, the university authorities took such a dim view of his media activities that they terminated his contract.

This January, Arnall is not letting it get him down. He happily insists he has plenty of work lecturing, running workshops and consulting individual clients.

But if you are feeling down and want to banish the 22 January blues, what can you do about it? Here’s some timely advice from people for whom human happiness is not just a concept, but a part of their livelihood.

http://www.gm.tv/index.cfm?articleid=24235

Don’t suffer in silence
Apparently Monday the 22nd of January is the most miserable day of the year. We need you to tell us why

How miserable will you be next Monday?

Scientest Dr Cliff Arnall has calcualted that next Monday, the 22nd of January will be the most depressing day of the year.

He has based this formula considering debt, time elasped since Christmas, failing New Year’s resolutions and low motivations at work.

We want to hear from you. What makes you miserable this time of year? And will next Monday be the most miserable and why?

You can email us using the form below, text us on 81189 cost 25p + network rate, or send a video message to 07739 672 673 cost 50p + network rate.

and on topic (well, its an equation…)

Don’t assume that because a paper appears in a posh journal that what it says is true or valid. Check out the sample used in the study (i.e. who are the people used) and check out the design – it may lead to biases. Also feel free to e-mail the key author to share your questions or concerns – though there’s no guarantee they’ll respond.”

I think this stuff is damaging because many of the readers (non-geek, non-academic ones) think that 1) if a ’scientist’ says something it must be true, and 2) that this is the sort of thing that scientists, academics spend their time working on.

Er, except Ben, that is.

“Completely fictional scientists at a made up university have announced today that they have discovered the formula for a successful press release. The newsworthyness of a story, known in the trade as its Arnall quotient, can be written as:

Arnall = B0/10cKs
…”

http://iscience.wordpress.com/2006/06/23/formula-for-a-successful-press-release/

So while there’s unquestionably a strong pro-geek bias, it does also deliver significant real quality control in Google results.

(And, as I write this, the “Arnall’s full of crap” result has slipped to #2.

I remember the first time Cliff Arnall’s January equation thing came out; my colleagues and I (Psychology postgrads) wrote many responses to the BBC News Have Your Say site, with, predictably, no results. Psychology, which is in any case a pretty general catch-all term for a vast and varied field, isn’t exactly the most widely respected discipline in the media / public eye, and it’s sh1te like this that makes it worse. The weird thing is, at the time, we couldn’t find him on the Cardiff Uni website (where the press said he was from, as far as I remember), and I can’t even find his website now.

Although, Google “Cliff Arnall”, and the first result contains the phrase “Cliff Arnall is full of sh1t”. Well done, Google. Well done.

Or maybe he’s planning to follow this story up with a big suicide equation.

Fortunately, their fans sometimes find the time to do it for them.

Anyway, good work.