When I received this year’s overview of when we group leaders were to contribute to Bionytt, I was a bit amused. The list naturally consisted of dates and our names, but also a comment section behind where me and Katja were the only ones with comments. It said: Friday the 13th. As you know, this is for some (me included) a dreaded day of misfortune, and the first thing that struck me was that I should try to change the day of my contribution with one of the others asap. But then I started to wonder: Is there any research on Friday the 13th and is this actually a day of misfortune? And yes, many serious researchers had taken a closer look at this concept. A quick search in PubMed yielded 3,756 more or less actual hits, of which perhaps the funniest was a dispute between professors about whether the 13th of each month had a greater, equal, or lesser probability of falling on a Friday than the other days of the week. For those who were curious: Professor Iversen had calculated that from 1994 and 28 years ahead there were slightly fewer Fridays than the other days of the week that fell on the 13th per year, while Professor Walter took the calculations a little further and found that in a 56,000 year perspective this would actually periodically vary between slightly more and slightly fewer Fridays the 13th each year. What also struck me was that much of the research focused on how people’s expectations affected the outcome or bad luck on a Friday the 13th. For example, someone had looked at the recovery time after operation’s if it was executed on a Friday the 13th (no effect), and how women managed in the traffic on such an accidental day. Also in this paper, no effect was seen, but they suspected that this could be linked to the fact that anxious women stayed at home that day rather to drive their car, and thus no increase in the accident rate was seen.
However, the research on Friday the 13th made me think a little about BIO, and the time we are in as of now. You could perhaps call it a period of many Fridays the 13th, not only here, but throughout the academic sector and now also many other sectors in Norway. And this is perhaps more evident among employees without a permanent position, who may naturally feel a certain pessimism about the future. Perhaps one can find some support in Professor Walter’s words in 1994 regarding the Friday the 13th frequency: “My calculations indicate that if we can hang on through the current period of bad luck the good times will return”. According to him, things should be better in the year 8400, but fingers crossed that BIO meets better times sometime before that. And I do not think we should do as Radun and Summala suggested in their paper of females and road accidents; stay home and wait for the Friday the 13th to be over.
Good luck today, greetings from Aina
Aina-Cathrine Øvergård
Group leader, Fish health group [Faggruppe fiskehelse]