17 January 2011

Seasonal Adjustment for a Bad Mood

In my search for articles about seasonal adjustment, I often find articles about seasonal adjustment disorder, also known as seasonal affective disorder. But aside from seasonal affective disorder, there is some truth about moods being seasonal, and I always wish that I could seasonally adjust my moods because December and January can be difficult times.

In the article, "Feeling Blue? Some Say Jan. 17 is the Worst Day of the Year" by Shelley Emling at http://livingston.patch.com/articles/jan-17-the-worst-day-of-the-year. She says that several years ago, a British psychologist named Dr. Cliff Arnall devised a formula that combined "various ingredients" in a "complicated equation" to calculate that the third Monday in January is the "gloomiest" day of the year. The variables include weather, debt, monthly salary, time since Christmas, and low motivational levels.

When I first read about this formula, I thought that maybe he had done some kind of regression analysis, but after more reading (http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/story.html?id=6637dce1-14f7-403b-9b46-a347bd3c8f23&k=53047 for example), it seems that the formula isn't so scientific. He says that most of his data comes from talking to people, seeing when they feel down, and working out a common denominator. The original sponsor of the study was an airline magazine, and the purpose of the study was to encourage people to book travel.

Dr. Arnall has since admitted that knowing the worst day of the year could make it be the worst day of the year. And the worst day of the year would depend on the person.

I was thinking that I should write an application that would run a regression on the amount of sunshine in a day, temperatures, debt, etc., and find the worst week. I wouldn't even need trading day because it's always good to blame Monday as the worst day of the week.

In the meantime, I will try not to think about this being the worst day of the year.

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