New York QS Show&Tell #3 - Recap

Steve Dean

Last week we had our largest turnout yet for the NY QS Show&Tell #3. Here is a recap with links.

First, a special thanks to our hosts Cindy Hanson and Colin Kelly of Smart Design who not only provided us with a spectacular space but treated the group to some very smart snacks and drinks. They are doing some great work humanizing technology in fields like aging and healthcare and they also design all those great OXO products.

Tracking To Meet Goals
Bethany Soule showed us her pet project Kibotzer.com, a tool that lets people track their progress toward all sorts of goals. The first graph was autogenerated from data collected at her computer using a few time tracking sites including Rescue Time and Slife Labs. The next graph was weight data generated from her Withings WiFi body scale. At the end she showed us an example mashup of Kibotzer and EtherPad being used by a couple of folks to write a novel for the National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. (Bethany's presentation on Vimeo)

Your Every Move
Josh Schiffman walked us through a couple of demonstration projects that were built using the Xtify API. There's SeeMyWhere which shares your phone's location to record where you are right now and there's MyEveryMove which is more of a diary of where you've been and where you've spent your time. Xtify is building these apps to find out if we can learn something interesting about ourselves once we know how we spend our time and energy. (Josh's presentation on Vimeo)

Things We Can't Measure
Dan O'Sullivan walked us through a fascinating class he teaches at NYU-ITP called "The Rest of You" where students try and quantify things that are more unconscious and less intentional. Dan talked about how we all operate under the illusion that we're seeing everything when in fact we're only seeing a small slice of reality. How do we get around seeing things that we can't measure? To understand ourselves better, how do we quantify those missing things?

One husband and wife team tracked their galvanic skin response as they watched a movie together. They discovered that their responses were very different at points in the movie but also very similar at other times. (Dan's presentation on Vimeo)

What Did You Have For Lunch 2 Days Ago?
Sam Huleatt, Mike Singleton and Eric Friedman showed us their dead simple, lightweight tool called Eat.ly for tracking what you eat by using your phone's camera and email. Take a picture of what you're eating and email it to post@eat.ly --if you see what you ate 2 days ago, it could have an impact of what you decide to eat today or tomorrow.

Lots of good suggestions from the group about measuring emotions at the same time, sharing your visual food diary with a nutritionist and so on. A great tool, check it out. (Sam, Mike and Eric's presentation on Vimeo.)

Your Personal Genome
Esther Dyson, a volunteer in the Personal Genome Project, shared with us her personal genome on 23andMe, a company that genotypes your DNA. What was particularly interesting was a new feature that 23andMe is rolling out called Relative Finder which lets you find people with whom you might share a small section of a genome. (Esther's presentation on Vimeo.)

Although we ran out of time, we will have Garfield back to present self quantifying iPhone apps and Google spreadsheets implementations and David Roddenberry from HealthyWage, a company that pays people to lose weight.

Health Hashtags: A Microsyntax for People and Machines

Mike Kirkwood

NY Quantified Self Show&Tell #3 - Tonight!

Gary Wolf

New York area QS readers should drop by the NY Quantified Self Show&Tell#3 tonight at Smart Design. Steve Dean, who launched the New York meeting, has a great program lined up. Here's his description, from the New York QS Meetup site. If you join the New York MeetUp, you can RSVP, and you will be notified of future meetings as well. Here's Steve's description of tonight's meeting: 

I'm looking forward to seeing you at our next Show&Tell. As in the past, we'll start presentations at 7pm. Each presenter gets about 12 minutes to tell everyone about their self-tracking project, what they are learning and what tools they are using. If you're free earlier, join us from 6-7 for a social hour. We're meeting at Smart Design (below).

RSVP now:
http://www.meetup.com...

We have a great lineup planned:

• Bethany: tracking anything you can put a number on at kibotzer.com
  
• Josh Schiffman: Tracking "myeverymove" using his persistent location beacon
  
• Dan O'Sullivan: Examples of student projects from ITP/NYU
  
• Dierdre O'Brien: a self-tracking project from 1973-74 tracking M&M color count data from a vending machine
  
• Sam Huleatt, Mike Singleton & Eric Friedman: tracking meals with Eat.ly
  
• Joe Dizney: an update on his Ben Franklin project / quirky metrics
  
• Esther Dyson: 23andMe, Personal Genome Project & Keas
  
• Amy Drill: Personal relationships
  

And you can always sign up to present when you arrive.

Our friends at Smart Design have offered to host us at their place 601 W. 26 St, Suite 1820, between 11th and 12th Aves. You will need to show photo ID to enter the building and at Smart you'll sign a short confidentiality agreement.

See you tomorrow!

Have fun, New York QS'ers and I look forward to hearing more about the talks.

QS Show&Tell #9 - Recap

Gary Wolf

The QS Show&Tell #9 was very fun and interesting. Here is a quick recap with links.

We met at Stanford courtesy of Martha Russell of Stanford's MediaX, and the evening began with Martha's intro to her program, which links visionary research to industry applications. A list of fall seminars at MediaX shows a bit of what they are up to. The seminars are open to the public, and full of interesting things for QS types. Martha hosted as at the Wallenberg Hall Learning Theater, a great experimental learning space with high walls, three projection screens, and balcony viewing.


Steve Brown's presentation of 3banana came at a more fair and leisurely pace than at the last meeting, where he was stuck at the end of a long night of talks. Steve was the creator of Health Buddy, a pioneering self-tracking system, which he sold to Bosch Healthcare. 3banana is a more general tool, and Steve talked about his goal to augment human intelligence through giving us access to more efficient external memory. Steve's talk showed a couple of self-tracking trends we've already noted coming together, including SMS as a tracking lingua franca and structuring data with hashtags.


Mark Carranza gave an update on his Social Memory Experiment, first presented at a QS last December. He is working toward taking his personal memory tracking system and releasing it as a social app, and invited all interested parties to help. More on Mark's interesting work can be read here at this earlier post: The Social Memex.

We got to meet Margie Morris, the inventor of the "mood phone" in person, as she was visiting the Bay Area.  Margie's work was described in an earlier QS post: The Mood Phone and the Circumplex Model. Trained as a clinical psychologist, she is a senior researcher at Intel's Digital Health Group. She played us some excerpts from videos with users discussing possible applications. One of the users in the video, a male working in a technical field, explained to the interviewer his practice of concealing his mood in order to avoid conflict, and speculated about the usefulness of a technical system to reveal actual emotional states. This provoked some interesting discussion of the social dimension of mood tracking.

Alexandra Carmichael invited everybody to take advantage of the stellar QS Scientific Advisory Board. These are professional researchers who are willing to field questions about self-tracking and self-experiment, which Alex will collect and transmit. The questions and answers will be published here, so that others can take advantage of the advice. Experiment design, statistical analysis, or other topics are welcome. Alex published her invitation on the blog a few weeks ago, in this post: Introducing the Quantified Self Advisory Board! Take a look at it and see the excellent resources available to you.

Brian Mossop, who blogs at The Decision Tree, a blog about predictive medicine and the future of healthcare, presented an idea for a new smoking cessation company, that gave smokers a decreasing "budget" of cigarettes and rewarded them with permission to smoke cigarettes (withing the budget) when they met exercise or other goals. Brain's father was a smoker, and he suspects that methods of self-tracking and simple rewards, plus some social encouragement, will be helpful to people trying to quit.

Finally, Robin Barooah showed the results of his coffee and concentration self experiment. He posted here about it already. (See: The false god of coffee.)  His post was widely linked, with mentions on BoingBoing, Hacker News, and Freakonomics, and is now the most commented post on QS. Thanks Robin for a great post!

  

The false god of coffee

Robin Barooah

We're back!

Gary Wolf

The posting problem that kept us offline for a few days is resolved now.

Introducing The Quantified Self Advisory Board!

Alexandra Carmichael

Do you need help with your self-tracking data analysis? Is there a specific problem or burning question about your experiment design that you'd love some guidance on? Gary and I are proposing an idea to help - read on for details!

We've gathered an amazing Quantified Self Scientific Advisory Board to be part of our community. It's a star group of international scientists involved in data analysis, data visualization, and self-experimentation. In alphabetical order, they are:

- Alex Bangs, Human Predictive Biosimulation, Entelos
- Gordon Bell, MyLifeBits, author of Total Recall, Microsoft Research
- Jeff Heer, Collaborative Data Visualization and Flare/Prefuse, Stanford
- Gary King, Quantitative Social Science and n=1 experiments, Harvard
- Teresa Lunt, Director of Computer Science Lab, PARC
- Seth Roberts, Self-Experimentation guru, author of Shangri-La Diet, Berkeley and Beijing
- Neil Rubens, Data Mining, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo

The experiment we'd like to do is to encourage Quantified Self members to formulate questions about the personal data that they are trying to work with. Post them as comments or send them to me. We will make sure the questions are interesting and at least partially answerable, pass them along to the appropriate Advisor, and publish the questions and responses here on the Quantified Self blog, as a way to get discussion going and add value to everyone involved.

So let us know what you think, and start asking questions!

Self-trackers' Show and Tell Number 9

Kevin Kelly

We will have our 9th Quantified Self Bay Area Meet Up this week on Wednesday, October 14, 2009. It will be held in Stanford University at the Wallenberg Learning Center (below).

As in the past, this is a user-generated evening of presentations by folks who are self-tracking in one form or another. Each presenter gets about 12 minutes to tell everyone what they are learning and what tools they are inventing.

I was unable to attend the last show and tell because it came during the final weeks of my overdue book deadline (which is now past me!). But Gary Wolf and I will be co-hosting this one, and filming the talks. If you are around the Bay Area go over to the QS Meetup page to get directions and let us know you are coming. I heard the last meeting was swamped, so we'd like to be more prepared this time. (We WILL post the talks from last meeting.)

Taking Blood Pressure at Home - How Often?

Gary Wolf

I measure blood pressure at home. Unfortunately, it is easy to become bored with this procedure, and neglect it. In fact, it is more fun to wonder why measuring blood pressure is so boring than actually measuring blood pressure, so of course that's what I've been spending some of my time on lately. My guess is that part of the problem is that home blood pressure measurements vary a lot. I've had single sessions in which my systolic ranged 11 points and my diastolic 16 points. This measurement range is larger than the likely effect of any intervention I'm going to be making. Therefore, a single measurement session doesn't give me the feeling that I'm adding any information. It's frustrating and stupid. Damn measurements.

Of course a good way to track measurements with a lot of random error is to use a moving average. So here's the question: how many blood pressure measurements does it take to get results that accurate enough to discern the effects of treatment? Here is a graph from a paper published in Hypertension that suggests an answer. I won't break down the method here. There is a link to the paper at the bottom of the graph and you can explore it for yourself. The quick version is that researchers compared the difference between two series of measurements taken at home, varying the number of measurements in the series, and watched the difference decrease as the number of measurements went up. The graph shows a nice, smooth decrease in variation. You achieve 80% of the total drop in variation after 15 measurements.

In other words, if you take three measurements per day, you can get a decent baseline for blood pressure experiments in five days. This seems like good news.

 

Three Bits of Exciting Self-Tracking News

Alexandra Carmichael

I recently came across Mikael Huss' Follow the Data blog, which reports on data-driven trends in reality mining, self-tracking, and personalized medicine. In a recent post, Mikael talks about three bits of self-tracking news that are sure to create tingles up the spines of Quantified Self readers:

1. FitBit ships
At long last! FitBit, the accelerometer with the beautiful clip-on form factor and wireless uploading of exercise and sleep data, has arrived. A one-time fee of $99 puts passive motion tracking in your pocket.

2. DailyBurn launches FoodScanner iPhone app
Tracking your fitness and nutrition is going mobile. DailyBurn has a $0.99 iPhone app that lets you take pictures of the barcodes on foods you eat, helping you more smoothly track your caloric intake.

3. Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell release Total Recall book
Based on their experience with the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research, Bell and Gemmell wrote Total Recall: How The E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. They talk about the future implications of being able to remember everything about your life in delicious detail.

These are definitely exciting times to be a Quantified Self enthusiast!