A vast preamble
Four years ago – I know, in internet terms that's Victorian – I picked up on a story that really, really got my goat. I'm aware (and people who know me are aware) that many things get my goat, but the completely absurd suggestion that a mathematical formula could be used to scientifically identify one specific day in the calendar as Officially The Most Depressing Day of the Year not only got my goat but cooked it up in a curry and rendered the bones down to glue.
It wasn't that some PR company had cobbled together some bollocks to get some free press for Sky Travel that did it. It was the fact that a baffling, incomplete (and, in actual fact, flawed to the nth degree) equation was being used, attributed to a high-level member of staff at Cardiff University to try and attach a veneer of scientific proof to the whole thing.
I tracked down the high-level member of staff and emailed him – not the "Professor of Psychology, Dr Cliff Arnall" that various media outlets referred to; rather a part-time tutor who ran an evening class in relaxation at a night school that happened to be in Cardiff University buildings, common-or-garden Mr Cliff Arnall. Bit of a let-down, that. Anyway, I wanted to know how he came to his conclusions, how to quantify weather mathematically and whether scales were linear or logarithmic, what peer-based review his valuable work had received; things like that. And do you know what? He never replied. Instead his name came up again in June 2005, where this time he was whoring his name for Walls Ice Cream (aka Unilever) with a new formula to prove that a certain day was the happiest day of the year.
At this point I called him out and accused him of being full of shit on my blog. You can still see it here, although where it used to say...
Cliff Arnall is full of shit
... it now says...
Cliff Arnall is full of [redacted due to a request from Cliff Arnall]
... after he sent me a distressed email three years after he ignored my request for clarification. I also removed a part where I jokingly invited him to calculate the best date to shoot himself through the face with a crossbow. (Honestly, all he had to do was come up with a formula proving it's never good to do that.) I'm going to un-redact it sometime soon. Why? Well, I figure you reap what you sow.
What's this got to do with anything now?
I'm glad you asked me that, person in my head. Well, it's coming up to about the same date, and rather than let this PR polyp disappear up its own arse, some lovely fellows at Green Communications PR resurrected it and are running with it, diverting attention from real news (hello Israel, we're all looking at you to avoid looking at our economy) for their own gain. Every year this awful formula is wheeled out to fill column inches with and airtime with sub-standard pseudoscience bullshit. They've started hanging off the coat-tails of charities as well, bouncing around the names of The Samaritans and Mental Health Foundation to try and polish this turd up. Someone at Green described the link they had with the Samaritans last year as 'a bit like being sponsored for the marathon, you can pick a charity and raise money for them but they don't pick you to do this'. It's just a convenient lever into the psyche.
So my problem personally is that something as scientific as a horoscope, bolstered by implied links to charities and founded on an advertising piece for a travel agent, which itself was relying on a dodgy formula, apparently created by a man incorrectly attributed to being a whole magnitude of orders above his station, is still being shovelled out and lapped up by lazy media gobshites. In a nutshell.
I also take issue at the fact that Green have been anonymously rewriting the Wikipedia article on this stupid bloody thing, and are now (under the username Honest Green) desperately trying to turn the article into an advert for themselves.
Also, Arnall has been somewhat threatening (in a legal sense) to the lovely Petra Boynton (a real Doctor and genuine lecturer in an actual university) for daring to call him out (there's some suggestion that his sum contribution to the whole debacle is selling his name and ersatz Cardiff University credibility to a formula actually created by a PR company in the first place). Ben Goldacre (a real Doctor and media luvvie) who has commented similarly has only had a self-satisfied message from him about having been paid for offering himself up to advertisers. From this we can deduce that the rule is to threaten women and brag to men. Classy.
Come on then, let's see your formula
Well, here's a funny thing. It's changed somewhere between 2005 and now. Originally it was published as this unworkable mess:
1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA. Where:
W: Weather
D: Debt
d: Money due in January pay
T: Time since Christmas
Q: Time since failed quit attempt
M: General motivational levels
NA: The need to take action
... which is so bad that it can't be rendered in any equation editor software. Do note the 1/8 and 3/8 parts though, and now try and find them here:
This is the version now presented as proof at the official Beat Blue Monday website. (Don't miss this brilliant line: The equation calculates that Monday 19 January 2009 is the worst day of the year. Can they prove that it calculated it? No. Just accept it, plebeian!) Anyway, it's changed – what happened to the importance of an eighth of one thing and three-eighths of another is anyone's guess.
It's still complete shit.
For one thing, you're adding incompatible units together. I'm pretty certain weather's not measured in Pounds Sterling, and to then multiply that by a unit of time raised by another unit of time (unknown units, but as this is "science" it should be seconds), and then divide the whole shebang by the result of multiplying two feelings together – giving us feelings squared as our unit – is a utter bottom-dribble. For that to effectively give you a date that you can pin-point is as ridiculous as suggesting that every 1/12 of the population will have, by and large, the same experiences each day. But then I would say that, I'm a Virgo.
It's also still written in non-science. Multiplication signs? Lack of an equals sign? D-, Arnall, see me after class.
Keeping the non-science, how do you measure weather and feelings? Are they linear? Logarithmic? Negative and tending to zero?
Best of all, assuming there's no need to take action – because everything's okay in the world – and assuming (reasonably) that needing to do nothing is represented by zero, the whole thing divides by zero, making infinite unhappiness one would deduce. How could this be missed in a peer-based review published in a scientific journal? Well, it wouldn't be would it. But for some reason Arnall doesn't believe in them. He wants to be People's Poet Psychologist!
Sadly, in a country where 'real' subjects in schools like physics and maths are being eroded, replaced by sexy (and easier to get good grades in) subjects like Media Studies and GCSE Podcasting, things like this go unchecked and barely questioned. It's wrong.
Anyway, be on the lookout for lazy page filler on 19th January. Then, I dunno, wish a pox on it or something. (I've not thought it through properly, I admit.) Also, keep your eyes open for the terms "Professor of Psychology", "Cardiff University", "Dr Arnall", "officially" and "scientific" – see how many of them sneak in from the even lazier activity of pulling some copy from the archive...
Appendix
Yep, a useless little wibbly bit that provides no purpose and could be cut out if it goes bad. Cliff Arnall's website – which I won't link to, so as to not skew the results order – doesn't turn up in Google's first page of search results for his name, whereas my classic blog's Cliff Arnall is full of shit page does. A ha ha ha. (It used to be the first result before other sites were leaned on to remove unflattering articles… hey ho.) Anyway, it's a horrible site that attempts to resize your browser window as soon as you visit, so I'm doing you a favour by merely describing it.
Cliff's now into one-to-one life-coaching, which is clearly a good line to be in, judging by the fact he's flying light aircraft around the Brecon Beacons. He's got a rather nice, big house out of it too, if what I've uncovered is anything to go by. I'm considering a career switch – I'm practising answering questions with questions and encouraging embracing change at every opportunity. Am I jealous? What is it in your life that makes you assume that? =)
Disclaimer
I'm just a cheeky chappie, Cliff, and nobody pays the least bit of attention to anything I say. Same goes for you lot, Green.
6 comments:
Irregular,
So your blog today and I thought I should leave a comment.
Here goes: For the record GREEN recognised the kernel of an idea when BBM was first launched by Walls and saw it as an opportunity to promote positive action in support of those suffering mental illness.
It has run every year for the past three years under the banner of Beat Blue Monday.
All the work carried out by GREEN is done for free – as some members of our team have been associated with issues surrounding family mental illness.
The receive no commercial benefit whatsoever.
In essence BBM is creative marketing programme aimed at contributing to the conversation regarding depression and how society addresses it.
Blue Monday is part of our corporate social responsibility programme in support of several charities including Wakefield Hospice, the National Autistic Society (a colleague’s brother is severely debilitated by it), Jumble Aid, World Vision, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Global Action Plan, and Tim Parry Jonathan Ball Foundation for Peace.
While we accept your hostility to Mr Arnall's "formula" is genuine - we are rather puzzled that you should be opposed to a day and campaign that seeks to raise the issue of depression at a time of the year when people are under the weather.
Ian Green
Green Communications
Ha ha!
BBC Online is among the worst for running stories about these studies and related mystical foo-foo.
Pseudo-science in the media really gets my goat too. It takes many forms.
Among my peeves are the shampoo commercials that depict close-ups of swooshing hair strands interacting with glowing globules of benign intent.
Ian, I don't really fault you for taking this approach in your undoubtedly well-intentioned campaign.
Commercial PR people call this "low hanging fruit".
The fault lies with the press for not being rigorous in their approach to science. It does the public understanding of science no good.
Incidentally, Ian, I'd be genuinely interested to see if you've experienced any measurable benefit from the press coverage - in terms of real support for the charities.
Does it work? What are you left with when February comes around?
Maybe Irregular was bit harsh on you here given the circumstances. But it does demonstrate that the real message was lost - on at least one person, being as it was clouded in a flurry of pseudo-scientific guff.
And that's why we're quibbling about this!
All the best.
Thanks Carl,
I have NEVER, EVER used the words: "low hanging fruit".
Nor have I ever used the phrases:
"Blue Sky Thinking"
"Let's run a helicopter around that concept"
Or
"I hear what you're saying".
...sighs
Ian - thanks for dropping by.
I've suffered from depression for a long time (coming up to 12 years) including periods in that time where I've been physically unable to move much more than the few feet from my bedroom to the bathroom back again, found eating so hard that I dropped down to 7st in weight, and been unable to sleep for days at a time due to the cold and shakes. Fortunately, for the past 8 years I've managed it really quite well thanks to a good support network and several healthcare professionals who, frankly, rocked. But still, over the New Year, I was a mess, and I thank my partner for being as patient as she is with me.
As a sufferer I find BBM as patronising as being told to pull myself together, because it hangs off this ridiculous notion that a day can be Officially The Most Depressing Day Of The Year™ because Sky Travel once paid Arnall some cash to say that. It doesn't and never has said a great deal about depression (the illness), concentrating on just feeling a bit miserable instead.
You picked up the hostility to Arnall's legendary formula (not hard to miss!) but choose not to clarify how your company has put values into your version of it so as to ascertain that Monday 19th January 'is' Blue Monday. You've just got the formula there and tell us that it has been used to calculate the day. Seeing as Arnall was so unwilling to quantify things, would you be willing to show your calculations? I should like to see what my personal Officially The Most Depressing Day is, given that I will be paid on the 15th and my resolutions haven't been broken.
Like I said in my post, I don't like the implication that one day is most depressing, based on an advertising campaign for a travel website that paid a man with tenuous links to a well known university to put his name to bad science. I don't like bad science, and I abhor people manipulating figures with bad maths. Shoving things like that together in a PR capacity so as to get five minutes on breakfast TV winds me up because of the lazy journalism - it's fair to say that no Purlitzer Prize winner has ever regurgitated a press release like that.
Basing anything on such dodgy foundations whilst simultaneously rubbing me up the wrong way one a bunch of things I care about is inevitably going to result in me getting hostile, regardless of how well meaning it is.
I should go on, and tidy up my reply a bit, but it's late, my heating has clicked off for the night and I've got work in the morning. I hope this goes some way to explaining why myself and others feel the way we do about the BBM exercise.
Being a laid-back kind of guy, I'm almost prepared to let some of this pseudo-science go past unchallenged. It could be that I'm just lazy. Or it could be because I haven't got a goat.
But one thing *does* make me cry big salty tears into my beer (or possibly soup?) - the sad and sorry state of proper science (and maths) education that recent generations of students have been subjected too. I *love* science. I grew up with an unquenchable curiosity about the world and how it works, and I don't doubt that children these days are born with just the same kind of curiosity. But my curiosity was fed properly by good books, good teachers and a culture that held up science as a Good Thing. Now children get fed sappy pseudoscience, bad journalism and pop-culture that only seems interested in its own hollow celebrity. (I'm always glad to hear of execptions though!)
How can we survive in a difficult and troubled world when all we know is how to play Guitar Hero III? (Fun though that might be.)
I know many have complained about the dumbed-down media. But we do need some real solutions. Let's see if we can encourage the next generation to dig into real physics & engineering & build something better than that hollow & self-serving rectum of journalism portrays.
As for Ian Green. If mental-health issues are important (and they are) then they are better served by portraying them with integrity and truth; and I would encourage you to distance yourself from Mr Arnall's 'work'.
Howard
Hey there, saw this post a little late and just wanted to say thanks for a lovely takedown of a ridiculous formula that trivialises what is a really painful and serious condition. I suffered from chronic depression for a few years in the late nineties and it tore my life apart, it really was the worst time of my life. I've since been prone to milder bouts of depression and am always wary that it may strike again in a more serious form.
Cliff Arnall's formula is basically doing nothing more than making light of those who suffer from depression, suggesting that their condition can be explained by multiplying a few nonsensical factors together. The ideas suggested by GREEN to combat depression are laughable at best and are pretty much an insult. There are better ways to raise awareness of the condition, ways which wouldn't make me want to punch those responsible.
So cheers again for the post, always brightens my day to see someone ripping into pseudoscientific bollocks!
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