Data is not a substitute for strategy

When I was in grad school, my data sciences class assigned us this incredibly complex optimization problem where we were supposed to recommend the best place to locate a series of factories given expected product demand, availability of suppliers, distance to customers, wage and materials costs, etc. It was too complicated to solve on a normal PC with off-the-shelf software, so the other students simply gave up treating this as a data optimization problem and instead made recommendations based on strategic considerations.

Me? No, I used brute force: I rewrote the software to run on the more powerful and expensive campus mainframe, applying every trick I knew until I found the “correct” answer. It was tough, and at the time I was quite proud of my computer skills, thinking somehow I had bettered my fellow students.

But when I saw the other answers, I realized how silly I was to think that data could beat strategy. Sure, with sufficient computation power I was able to identify a mathematically-provable solution given today’s data. But who cares? Data keeps changing. It’ll be months, maybe years before some of those factories are operating, by which time all my data assumptions would have been irrelevant. Good strategic thinking, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on fluctuations in the data.

I’m reminded of that lesson in this post from Aaron Carroll (at the Incidental Economist blog), responding to Mark Cuban’s advice that everyone get their blood tested quarterly. Data, says Carroll, is not the problem. If you think that more data is always better, you will likely miss the forest for the trees. Or as the post says:

“Ordering a lab test is like picking your nose in public. If you find something, you better know what you’re going to do with it.”

What's in my microbiome?

Although I was an early customer of 23andme, I found the results unsatisfying because there is so little that is actionable. I mean, you don't need a test to tell you that you have green eyes or that you're lactose intolerant. And if you have some weird disease in your future, the main advice -- eat well, get exercise, buy life insurance -- applies to everyone whether you know you're at risk or not. Although I think it's fun and interesting for its own sake, I frankly understand why normal people wouldn't bother.

That's why I'm now so intrigued with the microbiome, that collection of hundreds of species of bacteria and other microbes that live all over you, inside and out. In total, they weigh about as much as your brain; it's as if your body has a whole other organ that you can't see. Massive improvements in genetic sequencing technology over the past decade have suddenly brought the ability to view and measure this micro-world, and important new discoveries are happening every day.

The best part? you can change your microbes! It can be difficult, because once these things have found a foothold somewhere in your body, they don't want to let go, but at least it's possible, whether through eating different foods or supplements (fermented products, probiotics, fiber) or by avoiding antibiotics (including germ-killing hand sanitizers), your actions have an affect your microbiome. So if you don't like something, you can (at least in theory) change it.

To find out what's in my microbiome now, I bought a $400 kit from the San Francisco company uBiome. For that, I received swabs for my mouth, gut, genitals, nose, and skin. The most interesting one is the gut, which you can buy for $89, and is the one I'd most recommend. After you collect the samples (warning for the squeamish: it involves soiled toilet paper), send them back and they give you results like this:

The microbiome is so complicated -- we're dealing with hundreds of different species, each with its own genome -- that it's hard to summarize in a single, quick takeaway. The web site lets you dive deeper into the various strains of bacteria, looking at the results organized by phylum/class/order/family/genus, digging into more detail at each level. Since each user fills out a detailed questionnaire when returning the sample, you can compare your results to self-described vegans, paleo dieters, and several other categories to see how you stack up to people who have been gaining or losing weight recently, for example.

The tools on the site are fantastic, and they are obviously putting more effort into improving them (they've become noticeably better just in the past few weeks). Better yet, you can download all of your results in XML format to keep forever, or analyze anyway you like.

My only complaint was the amount of time it took to get results: a full three months for this sample. Their customer support staff is very responsive -- I always got a helpful response within a few hours, even on weekends -- but I do wish it didn't take so long.

But frankly that complaint rings hollow when I consider how long it will take me to understand the plethora of fascinating torrent of data I got back. You can see from the chart above that I have more of certain types of bacteria than their average customer. Is that good? bad? neutral? Who knows?

This is not uBiome's fault. Science just hasn't figured out these answers yet. In my case, I'm a healthy, fit, normal-weight omnivore, so I assume that the percentage differences with "Average" are perfectly fine, but I could imagine how somebody with weight or other problems might be concerned if they saw something significantly different from average. The good news is that, in theory, you can change your results, but the bad news is that science really has little clue exactly how to do that, or even what constitutes "good".

Because the technology is so new, you may find that your snapshot looks different each time you take the test. Sometimes people report different results from different locations on the same sample. So it's best not to read much into of any findings yet. Still, it's the ability to change your microbiome that makes all the difference and I expect to learn much more as the science progresses.

Using the AliveCor Heart Monitor

Every few months, I feel a slight flutter in my chest, almost like a cough but coming not from the lungs or throat but from something deeper inside. It seems to come and go randomly, though I’ve noticed it is often triggered if I’ve had wine to drink or if I haven’t had enough sleep. No big deal, just something I observe about myself. Long ago, by coincidence, one of these episodes happened while I was at the doctor’s office having an annual physical, and the doctor too shrugged it off: a heart arrhythmia, perfectly normal. He told me the technical term for the exact type of arrhythmia, but that was long ago and I’ve forgotten. Now, maybe I’ve found a way to know for sure.

For the past week I’ve been using the new AliveCor Heart Monitor, a $200 iPhone case that gives me a high-fidelity Lead I ECG any time, any where I carry my smartphone. Here’s the sample I took this morning, right after waking up:

The device is just a normal iPhone case — with a funny two-part metal bulge on the back that acts as a two-lead electrode. You hold it with your fingers and it measures your ECG. Just like that! With FDA 510(k) clearance and scientifically validated for "excellent sensitivity (0.962), specificity (0.975), and accuracy (0.968) for beat-to-beat discrimination of an irregular pulse during AF from sinus rhythm”, it’s got serious medical chops too. The first time you use it, you send your results to trained technicians, who send you back a report (in my case, summarized as “normal sinus rhythm”). Each time after that, you’re given the option to send the results again as an in-app purchase:  $12 to a US Board Certified cardiologist, $5 for a 30-min turnaround by a certified technician, or $2 for 24-hour turnaround.

Unfortunately, there’s apparently no API, so although you can send each result (PDF) by email, there’s no automatic way to upload to Zenobase, for example, so you can easily compare with other self-tracking results.

The technology was invented by cardiologist David Albert using hardware that communicates with the phone via a clever, patented process that uses low-frequency, inaudible sound waves picked up by the phone’s microphone. No need to pair bluetooth with the device, no need for any physical connection to the phone at all.

Satish Misra is a medical doctor who wrote a balanced and thorough review, pointing out the wonderful breakthroughs possible with such a device, but also noting that because it doesn’t detect some important heart ailments as well as a full-scale ECG, it can provide false security. He notes, incidentally, that the US Preventative Services Task Force rates ECG screening generally (not just for this device) a “D” as a medical test:   “recommends against routinely providing to asymptomatic patients”. (They say that about exercise treadmill tests and coronary calcium scanning too, for what that’s worth.)

We’ll see what happens in my case. I really want to know more about my arrhythmia and it’s nice to know that, the next time it happens it’ll be easy for me to log it accurately.

By the way, whether you have an AliveCor or not, I wish everyone would join the Health eHeart study at the University of California San Francisco. You fill out a medical survey, give them your email address, and agree to be a long-term participant in their study. They especially want people who like to use gadgets — like the AliveCor — so they can collect as much data as possible. (Obviously, they have top-notch privacy standards to ensure your data remains confidential). If everyone did this, science would have a big head start in finding how to prevent heart disease.

Remembering Seth Roberts

Like many people, I first heard about him back in 2006 through a chapter in the best-selling book Freakonomics. His strange habit of tracking various aspects of his life -- his sleep, his sense of balance – appealed to me in a geeky way. As a long-time self-quantifier myself, I found it reassuring to know that there were others out there, similarly interested in the practical day-to-day usefulness of science. Eventually I found his blog, and discovered that he was living near me in Beijing. A famous professor like him – a New York Times bestselling author and all that – might be hard to get ahold of, but one day out of the blue I sent Seth an email, wondering if he’d like to get together for lunch.

He replied in minutes and said sure, how about tomorrow?  I was so excited (such a famous guy!), and I invited him to the cafeteria at my office (then at Microsoft in Beijing). We exchanged unconventional ideas, the kind I suspect are true but that I don’t necessarily want to say in public (but that he posts unashamedly to his blog): how radiation is actually good for you, how if you want to lose weight you should only drink real coke, not the diet kind, about the benefits of homemade yogurt. We talked about Zeo and microbes and personal experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t.  It was a classic Seth Roberts conversation – challenging conventional wisdom, never taking anything for granted -- and I was hooked.

Later I invited him as a guest speaker at Microsoft (that’s a photo below). He introduced me to Steve Hansen, founder of Phonemica and another fascinating expat living in Beijing. The three of us got together regularly after that, always having amazing conversations. We talked about everything – unconventional ideas about pedagogy, the history and future of China, how little science really understands about diet and nutrition, about sleep.

Although Seth was very sharp about most things, there was always one nagging area where I thought he was underprepared. I wanted him to pay more attention to the rise of sensors, mobile devices, and all the incredible new self-tracking and discovery they make possible. He dismissed them mostly as “lipstick on a pig” ideas. Scientists know practically nothing about the real causes of illness and wellness – what good can technology do if we don’t even have a basic framework for understanding the basics about health?

He wasn’t impressed with Zeo, for example. He preferred keeping his own sleep journal, the old fashioned way with pencil and paper by his bedside. Most of his self-measurement was done with a stopwatch and paper. Come on, Seth, at least get an iPhone and enter the information online!

To prove him wrong, earlier this year I built a quick iPhone implementation of the analysis routines he was using on his PC. He had a script written in the statistical language R, and had accumulated quite a trove of data for himself. I made a basic implementation for iOS and showed him: see, you could have the same thing on a device that you carry with you everywhere!

He was intrigued. We got him an iPhone that he can use in both the US and China, and started communicated daily, through email and Skype, about the app. He can be very demanding, very obsessed with things I thought were trivial cosmetics. I would make a new build, send it to him for feedback, and he would always write back immediately, usually frustrated at my basic lack of understanding. Then we’d talk over the phone until I figured out what he meant; I’d go back and program some more, and repeat.

It was obvious that he had been carefully honing for years the techniques that he was (trying) to) teach me. “Imagine if anyone could find out, for themselves, which foods are good for them, which activities hurt their brain power and which help.”  He had already discovered some interesting things about himself this way; he could only imagine what would happen if this self-tracking power were in the hands of more people.

He was just settling in at Berkeley for the summer and we talked about the future. He was more optimistic about the app itself than I was. Normal people aren’t going to use this thing, I said. It’s too much effort. They’ll need to first understand more of the thinking behind it: they’ll need training, books, conferences. Seth will need promotion, turning him into a force like Chris Kresser, say, Dave Asprey, or Tim Ferris.

He thought about it a little and then said, no, the person he really admires is Nassim Taleb: to be able to be associated with an idea like the Black Swan, with friendships and associations with other really smart, unconventional people, with the freedom to think and explore the ideas whereever they lead.

He said this summer he was looking forward to lots of writing, and preparing for a talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium. He wanted to finish his book.  And of course, much, much self-experimentation.

I woke up on Saturday morning with an email for a bunch of changes he wanted from our app. I finished some, sent them to him for feedback, and he replied right away: it wasn’t good enough. I had other plans for the day, so I told him I’d get back to him tomorrow. Then he went for a hike.

A few hardware links to get started

I've been playing with hardware now for a year or so and this may be a good time to summarize some of the interesting products I've found. I confess that most of the real product-making has been done by my colleagues in Beijing, but I try to stay on top of it by playing as much as I can, and here are some things I've learned.

First, for sources of good up-to-date information, it's hard to beat the hackthings blog. Most every day, they feature an interesting new product or idea, often with background of how it was (or will be) manufactured or sold. Whether you're a hobbyist or a potential startup, you'll also appreciate the lengthy list of hardware resources/tools on Steve Blank's entrepreneur site.

If you're going to teach yourself hardware, Arduino is a great place to start (as I did), but you can quickly burn through a lot of parts. Instead, use an Arduino software simulator like the one from 123d.circuits.io.  For a similar browser-based simulator for non-Arduino purposes, try https://www.circuitlab.com/. 

If you're building self-tracking body hardware, you might check out the $500 E-Health Sensor Shield Kit  for Arduino and Raspberry Pi. It comes with ten body sensors, including pulse/oxygen (SPO2), body temperature, glucometer, galvanic skin response, EMG, ECG and more. For instructions on how to just make it all from scratch, see this DIY EEG/EKG/EMG site.

Low-power devices connected to your smartphone will use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and people have suggested I check out the $35 BLE Mini from Redbear Labs, the $100 nRF8001 Development Kit  from Nordic Semiconductor, or the $30 LightBlue Cortado (shipping in mid-2014).

I have a ton more links in a private Evernote folder, as well as on my public Pinboard account. As always, ping me if you have other suggestions.

Charts of RAW data

The Density Design Lab at Politecnico di Milano just released a cool new (free) web site, called RAW, for very simple data visualization. It’s roughly similar to products like Statwing, Tableau Public or DataHero, except this one gives you the entire d3.js source code on GitHub.

I made the following chart using some data downloaded from Charles Murray’s excellent book Coming Apart, that has income and college graduation information for every US zip code. I simply selected the spreadsheet data right in Excel, then copy/pasted it – as is – to the RAW web site. A few clicks later and I had this:

 

The rectangles are US cities with more than 15,000 families organized by state. The size of each rectangle correlates with the median family income, and the color represents the percentage of people with college degrees on a spectrum from blue (lower percentage) to red (higher percentage). That big brown square on the middle bottom is New York City, with a high median family income and a substantial percentage of college grads. The California cities on the far right are bluish-green because they have lower diploma percentages.

Pretty cool, huh? I have a long wishlist for additional features (additional chart types, labeling options, etc.) but you have to admit this is a pretty easy way to do impressive data visualization for free, with only a few mouse clicks.

Krugman on Microsoft and Apple

Paul Krugman is mostly correct:

Back in the 80s, Microsoft and Apple both had operating systems to sell; Apple’s was clearly better. But Apple misunderstood the nature of the market

He argues that Microsoft "won" in the 90s thanks to network effects it exploited when Apple's superior product was not opened to more hardware vendors. Similarly, the iPhone had an early technical lead that is sustained through network effects due to its large base of developers. Steve Jobs' controlling nature resulted in products that do some things very well and reliably, but quickly become difficult or cumbersome when you stray from whatever he thought was good for you.

My take: Complexity breeds sluggishness when promoting anything new. Apple misses plenty of niche markets they might have colonized with a more flexible approach, but they maintain agility to add new things to the existing platform -- and see them adopted. Whether this is a sustaining advantage depends much on their ability to continue picking market winners. During the 90s they lost their sense of which products were worth pursuing, under-investing in things like Quicktake digital cameras, for example, while over investing on existing products like Mac hardware (Powerbook) or OS features (OpenDoc) that proved to be less important.

By the way, I disagree with Daring Fireball on one point: although technically the Mac did ultimately succeed, that was the halo effect of iPod, etc. If Apple had focused just on the Mac, it would have remained a tiny niche.

LINE and more Facebook/Twitter Asian Competition

Before you start to think Facebook will take over the world, look again at new competitors emerging in Asia, including this one originally from Japan and now boasting more than 100 million users.

LINE has everything you'd want in a mobile app: free text and voice (and probably soon, video), cross-platform versions (iPhone/Android/WinPhone, Mac/PC), and plenty of cool features like a way to sign in to your desktop using your phone (perfect for situations, like at an internet cafe, where you don't want to risk typing your password into a key logger).

Think of it like a cross-platform version of iMessage, or Path, or even Skype. There are numerous in-app purchases, including "stickers" that are apparently must-have for serious users. 

The competition, internationally, for mobile and social apps is just unbelievable, and don't expect it to lighten up any time soon.

Feel free to add my to your contacts:  my username is 'sprague'.

[book] Makers by Chris Anderson

"Hardware is the new software".  I'm not sure if that exact phrase is in Chris Anderson's new book, but it should be. It's a trend that has interested me for a while: as hardware becomes more important, it's becoming easier to build. When I first fell in love with computers a zillion years ago, they were mostly hardware -- and scary.  Poor, starving student that I was, every mistake learning or building hardware cost real money, and it wasn't until software came along that I could feel comfortable playing and learning new things at will: software was infinitely tolerant of the inevitable problems.  Software development is a fixed investment: buy a computer and start writing; worst case you just reboot and start over if something goes wrong. Well, now hardware is beginning to look the same way.

Lower costs are one driver: 3D printers go for (sometimes a lot) less than $2,000 -- which by the way is about what my first computer cost.  But even if that's too much, there are so many local shops that will lend you their equipment, either as part of Neil Gershenfeld's Center for Bits and Atoms worldwide bunch of fab labs  (none yet in China or Seattle, unfortunately) or the hackerspaces all over or techshops or in Seattle we have Metrixcreate:Space and the new Makerhaus.  Most of these places let you use this equipment on site for a reasonable cost (dozens of dollars, or maybe a hundred or two for a month), and usually have staff or other friendly people on hand to help. Chris Anderson points out that the original Square hardware was built in one of these shops. (I've been to the Seattle ones a few times -- they're great! )

But it’s more than cost. As hardware starts to imitate the flexibility of software, entire new businesses and ecosystems are possible.  There’s Brickarms.com, by a Redmond Washington engineer who makes Lego-compatible toy weapons or OpenSprinker, a $199 lawn system that cost a total of $5,000 to invent and bring to market. Lego Digital Designer is a free CAD program that lets you design LEGO projects, then generate step-by-step instructions for how to build them. There is a huge gallery from users, and until early 2012 you could order (for a fee) complete boxed sets for whatever you created. There's even Local Motors, a street-legal car 430 horsepower custom car company.

Even biology is getting into the action with Do It Yourself (DIY) Bio like Josh Perfetto with his $599 thermocycler for cheap PCR and DremelFuge, a a 3D head you mount on a Dremel rotary tool to act like a 33Krpm centrifuge for a fraction of the price of the one used by "real" scientists.

Some of this is what Blogger Jason Kottke calls "small batch" manufacturing, how normal people are becoming empowered to become craftsmen, artisans, able to make custom products for people who know how to appreciate them.  A classic example is TCHO Chocolate, the San Francisco-based boutique food maker founded by some Wired people. 

To get started, there are great new marketplaces popping up from crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, RocketHub, FundedbyMe and more, enabling entirely new business models for funding and bootstrapping companies.

Chris Anderson, long-time journalist believes in this enough that he recently quit his job as Editor-in-Chief at Wired in order to go full-time into 3D Robotics, a new aerospace company with revenues that grew from $250K in the first year, to $3M in 2011.  He started this literally in his living room, ran it as a side project using a social networking site to attract a community of users, until it was big enough that he decided to make it his day job.

It’s true, of course, that applying software business models to the world of hardware will bring about important changes in business generally and this book documents how open source and community-driven development will drive those innovations. But it will require more attention to marketing and PR than many would-be entrepreneurs appreciate. It’s one thing for the editor of a famous magazine to start a community and watch thousands of people join; it’s a much tougher proposition, at least at the beginning, for the rest of us.

There’s much more to say about this, but if you want to get started, here’s a great list of tools that Chris Anderson keeps for his own workbench:

Software:

• Inkscape is a Mac/Win open source version of Illustrator
• 3d scanning: Audodesk123D has a windows version
• laser cutting: see Autdesk 123D Make

Tools in his workshop:

• MakerBot Cupcake
• MakerBot Cyclops 3-D scanner
• MyDIYCNC
• Hitachi desktop bandsaw
• Dremel workstation/drill press
• Weller WES51 soldering station
• Picoscope USB oscilloscope
• Saleae USB logic analyzer
• Volleman Power supply / Multimeter / Soldering station
• Software
• Illustrator (for laser cutting drawings)
• Autodesk 123D
• Cadsoft Eagle (for PCB design)
• Arduino, Notepad++
• TortoiseSVN and TotoiseGIT for source code control

Get going!

My first Arduino project: a temperature sensor

I've been saying for two years now that hardware is the future of software, and one center of action is the world of Arduino programmable microcontrollers. You can't really learn what's possible in a new technology field without trying it out for yourself, so I took the plunge and tried my own project, a very simple one to measure temperature and humidity in my house. Here's what I did:

I bought the following items (at Amazon)

• Arduino Uno R3 $21.95
• this temperature/humidity sensor:
  Virtuabotix DHT11 Digital Temperature/Humidity Sensor $5.60.
• and a $22 collection of assorted useful parts from Seeedstudio called Arduino Sidekick Basic Kit (Version 2) that includes:

Breadboard, Jumper wires, Color Led, Resistors, Buzzer, etc., all of this comes in its own handy box for easy transportation and minimal clutter. Parts list: Breadboard X1, Breadboard jumper wire X 70, Red Led X 10, Green Led X 10, RGB led X 1, Ceramic Capacitor (10nF X 10,100nF X 10), Electrolytic Capacitor (100uF X 5), Resistor (330X10,1kX10,10kX10), Tilt switch X 1, Thermistor X 1, Photo resistor X 1, Diode X 1, Buzzer X 1, Push button X 5, switch X 5, Mini Servo X 1, Potentiometer with knob X 1, Resistor Instructor card X 1, Plastic Box X 1

I installed the Arduino development environment on my Win7 PC and then hooked up this simple temperature sensor project:

The temperature sensor is a DHT11 and Virtuabotix has easy-to-understand libraries and other installation instructions.

Here's a screen shot of the sensor and development environment in action:

The entire project took about 90 minutes, including unwrapping the Arduino UNO, installing all software and libraries, and configuring and connecting the sensor.

It's extremely exciting to think about (1) how easy it was, and (2) all the other things I'm able to try now that I have this basic level of knowledge.

Calibre for books

Amazon Kindle has become my main way to buy books, which of course is incredibly liberating because nowwith the Kindle app I can put every book on every device, including my iPhone. Imagine: I carry with me, on my phone, a copy of nearly every book I’ve purchased for the past three years.

 

Unfortunately, Amazon’s not the perfect solution. For one thing, I’d prefer not to be so dependent on a single company for so much of my reading. I trust Amazon today, but how do I know that these e-books will still be readable in 20 years?

 

I’m also limited by the Kindle software and whatever features Amazon gives me for searching/annotating and otherwise enjoying my books. For example, sharing a section of a book: Amazon limits me to short snippets, and those must point back to an Amazon-operated site.

 

Happily, there is a wonderful way around these limitations. The wonderful people of Calibre have created a wonderful free and open-source ebook management system that lets me do whatever I like with ebooks.

 

To answer an obvious question, yes there are plug-ins for Calibre that break the Kindle rights management system, and yes that means that you can probably steal tons of books just as easily as you can steal music or movies. But before you ask any further, let me state up front that I don’t feel right about it, and I won’t “share” any books (either giving or receiving) from you, so don’t ask.

 

But the “fair use” terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act means I’m allowed to use these books on other devices and in other formats, such as if I want to use the much prettier book reader on Apple’s iBook.

 

Today I also discovered another advantage of Calibre. By putting all my Kindle books in a fair use format, my books don’t need to be re-downloaded from Amazon servers when I load a new device. If I want one of my already-purchased books to show up on a new iPad, I just synch with the local copies on my computer. No internet required.

 

Zeo vs. the motion sensors

I don't have a Jawbone UP. I tried to buy one earlier this month but Best Buy wasn't stocking them until the kinks have been worked out. Several of my friends rave about it, though:  it's just a bracelet that you wear and it automatically measures your activity, including your sleep.

The UP is one of a number of devices that try to measure sleep based on your movement in bed. It has a tiny accelerometer that picks up the slightest little twitches of your hand while sleeping. Since sleep phases are often accompanied by such movement,  (the theory is) software can later stitch it together to guess how much time you were in REM sleep or deep sleep. But these twitches are just a proxy for the actual sleep phase,  so I'm skeptical that it can measure it as accurately as the Zeo, which uses special sensors to directly detect the electromagnetic activity in your brain. Still, maybe it's "close enough", especially if (like me) you don't have any particular sleep issues that need analysis to the nth degree.

Movement detection is pretty easy, and there are plenty of ways to do it.  There's even an App for that! Smart Alarm, by Arawella Corporation, cleverly uses the built-in accelerometer, plus the microphone, to measure your movement at night and guess the amount of various sleep phases.

How does it compare to my Zeo Sleep Manager?  Last night I tried both at the same time and here are the results:

 

 

Answer: Zeo is way better. It’s not even clear that the motion-detection app gave useful information, and might even be outright wrong.

The motion detection method was wrong. It says I:

• Slept one hour longer than I did. (9 hrs vs 8)
• Had more phases of REM sleep (6 vs. 4)
• Had less deep sleep (5 vs. 8+)

Look at the charts and you’ll see the difference.

I don’t know how well this compares to an UP, but I bet the motion-detection systems just aren’t very useful.  If you really want to measure sleep, I say get the Zeo.

By the way, my recommendations:  Zeo comes in two forms: an alarm clock version that doesn’t require anything extra; and a more portable, cheaper version that plugs into your smart phone. If you have an iPhone or an Android, the Mobile Sleep Manager is a little cheaper and smaller.  The Alarm Clock version is nicer if you don’t already have a nice bedside alarm clock, or if you don’t like sleeping near your phone.

The Chinese Twitter (English version)

Now available on the US App Store: Sina Weibo 微博 download here: http://itun.es/igk6zp then follow me at http://weibo.com/2140336255 and see why 200M users like it.

Note: to create an account you'll need some rudimentary knowledge of Chinese (either from something like Google Translate or from a helpful friend).  I assume they're working on an English version of the web site too of course.

 

 

Facebook’s addicting even if you don’t admit it

It’s a few minutes before the next meeting. Or maybe it’s right before dinner is ready. Or there’s a commercial on TV. Or it’s time to go to bed. Or get up.

What’s your first thought at each of these moments? Check Facebook! It’s a continuous stream of what’s happening among the people and interests in my life, and it gets more and more useful every day. No wonder more than 100 million Americans log in daily. It’s the most popular web site in the world, and it will keep getting more so.

Many of my friends are silent on Facebook, but I know they’re there, lurking, watching, reading all of my updates. Even the shy ones, or those who think they have nothing themselves to say…they still watch.

Japan’s Mixi social networking service (of which I am a member, though rarely active) has a great feature that lets you know when somebody has visited your profile. I wish Facebook had something like that. I bet we’d all be surprised – impressed – at the number of our silent friends who actually watch everything we do.

Weibo: The Chinese Twitter++

I bet at least 50% of my work friends check Facebook every single day. For those under age 30 it's probably closer to 100%.

Twitter isn't nearly as popular, as far as I can tell; maybe 5% of my colleagues actively post messages under their real names. It's hard to say how many people check their Twitter streams regularly. I'm sure it's higher, but not that much higher.

Contrast that with China, where Weibo is absolutely dominating. Here among my work colleagues I'd guess maybe 25% are active users -- a couple times a day -- under their own names, and probably 2/3rds are active under pseudonyms (though for obvious reasons it's hard to tell for sure).

Why is Weibo better than Twitter? Because it's the first social networking system I've seen that adds a competitive element to status updates. On Twitter, some people obsess about their number of followers; on Foursquare people obsess about mayorships.  But on Weibo, there's an entire scoring system based on how often you post -- and critically -- how well your posts are received. The result is that people are incented to produce better and better content, which results in more readership, which drives more reasons to make content.

Like Twitter (or Facebook), Weibo has the concept of posting links to news items. But thanks to the incentive system, 60% of Chinese microbloggers say Weibo is their main source of news (versus only 9% for Facebook or Twitter-using Americans).

If I can find a good way to post automatically from Weibo to Twitter to Facebook, I'm switching, and I bet you'll want to switch too.

 

 

An Apple File Store

How often have I been annoyed because I forgot to sync something on my iOS device before leaving the house. I store a lot of data in the cloud. There are my own personal files, of course, usually work-related Office documents (Word, Powerpoint, Exchange Outlook emails). But I store a lot of other stuff too:

• Podcasts, music, photos – the normal content you associate with Apple.
• Content apps, like New York Times or Economist. If I forget to download the latest, I won’t have it once I leave the house.
• Personal content apps, like Instapaper or Evernote. These carry important data that fundamentally exist in the Cloud, but are useful to me only when regularly synced to my devices.
• Other private information, like from my banking app, or Paypal, or LinkedIn.

Each of these is useful only if it’s up-to-date. If I have a network connection each time I access it, then it’s up-to-date. If not, I’m out of luck.

One straightforward way to give me this is to have something that downloads the data from each app in the background whenever I have network connectivity. I’d need to solve a few multi-task issues to make sure this doesn’t slow down the rest of my experience, but generally it would work.

But there’s a more clever way. What if there were a single, central store someplace, run by Apple, that apps can plug into. The data from each individual app would be stored there, in Apple’s central cloud. Then it would be Apple synchronizing my device, through whatever mechanism they like, perhaps even taking advantage of whatever newfangled subscription mechanism they can get away with.

How it works:

Apps like the New York Times or Instapaper or Paypal or Kindle save their data to Apple’s store, not to my individual device. Developers can continue to use whatever file IO they currently use; maybe Apple updates it to allow for more fine-grained control so it behaves more like IP packets rather than disk read/writes, but whatever: the point is that your app doesn’t need to care exactly where the data is kept.

My device has a file system just like today, except the data itself is in a cache, synchronized to the cloud, magically in the background, whenever the OS thinks it’s okay.

When I start an app on my device, it gets whatever data it needs from the on-device cache. An app that is currently running gets first dibs on the synchronization, so the experience works just like today.

Apple can also make a number of optimizations to make this system work more smoothly. First, there’s no reason to dump an item from the cache unless it needs the space. Play a YouTube video once and you have it for as long as the cache isn’t full. Same goes for Safari itself: don’t go online unless you know something needs to be updated.

Second, it can tell when the same data is being downloaded multiple times. So for example, if my RSS reader has an article that’s also being downloaded by my dedicated NYTimes app, it should only download it once. Similarly, if I have multiple Twitter clients on my device, it’ll only grab the tweetstream once.

Note that Apple can encourage third parties to do their own optimizations. If content publishers put an “official” copy in the Apple cloud, any app that wants to subscribe to that content can explicitly subscribe to the one from Apple. For example, an app that wants a map, or some Point Of Interest (POI) information in order to compute something can simply link to an Apple-hosted geo database and let Apple take care of storing and sending the original data to the device. The app does its processing in the Cloud: no need to bring it down to the device a second time.

Finally, the data of course can go both ways. Your photos or text messages or any other content you create on the device can automatically go to the Cloud, for backup or for different processing when you want it. You can ask FlickR or Facebook to get the photos from Apple’s cloud whenever it has a chance. You don’t need to explicitly do a thing.

Of course there are a bunch of privacy issues you’d need to square away before this can be implemented, but responsible data storage companies do that stuff all the time.

There are so many obvious benefits for Apple to build a system like this, I think we can assume it’s a matter of time before it shows up on a future iOS update.

I can’t wait!

Kindle Singles and the future of publishing

The print publishing industry thinks a lot has changed in the past 20 years,  but they haven't seen anything yet. The transformation from print to all-digital publishing will happen very quickly.  We are months and years, not decades, from when electronic distribution on Kindles and iPads becomes the mainstream format of choice.  The TED people just announced TEDBooks, available for about $3 each as Kindle Singles, and I can't wait to see many more.

Creating and then publishing to Kindle is  straightforward: create a document in Microsoft Word (though, curiously, they want you to save in the old .doc format, rather than the much more flexible and modern .docx format), test the formatting on Mobipocket Reader, and upload to Amazon.  Besides the odd prohibition against the .docx format, your text also must be free from special fonts or character formats like bullets. You can include .JPEG photos, but you need to be sure they look okay on the Kindle greyscale screen.

Kindle ebooks have several big advantages over internet web sites or blogs:

• The content is final.  It can be referenced later as a single, fixed work. There may be updates or corrections, just like there can be a new edition of a hardcover book, but the original stands as an unchanging point of reference.
• It can be viewed offline.
• Standardized display and viewing conventions.  It can be easily printed when necessary and it "makes sense" when printed because it has an clearly identifiable start and finish.

If the end user cost were 99 cents or lower, or if there were the equivalent of completely free content, then eBook publishing will be open to many more new applications:

• Class notes, published by the instructor or a motivated student note-taker
• Church or other non-profit organizational bulletins and newsletters.
• Company catalogs or detailed product descriptions
• Help and product manuals
• Christmas newsletters, either on behalf of an organization or a family
• Special reports.

In fact, to really take off we need the equivalent to print publishing of what podcasting is to audiobook publishing: free, easily publishable and discoverable content that's as easy to produce as it is to consume. As with audiobooks, there may be a lot of garbage there too, but eventually some quality brands will appear and the publishing world will never be the same.

(photo by John Blyberg)

I like trucks

Steve Jobs is right:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people

But after living with an iPad since it was available last year, I'm thinking I still like trucks.  Most mornings I've been using Flipboard or Reeder to watch my various RSS feeds. But while the iPad is nice for lying in bed, or for spontaneous and quick reads when I have a minute to myself, it just can't beat the power of a truck, er, laptop.

I just outfitted myself with the updated NetNewsWire 3.2.8, the one with the new Instapaper button. I need Instapaper so badly that I considered switching  (to Shrook, the only interesting-looking one in the Mac App Store, but I gave up when I found it doesn't sync to Google Reader), but now that I have it, I'm wondering why I don't stick to Mac for all my serious RSS reading. I also added the NetNewsWire to Evernote Applescript on the Veritrope site; that plus the FastScript utility from Red Sweater Software, and I'm just a command-E away from sending all my interesting clippings immediately to Evernote for safe-keeping.  Try that on your iPad.

Sometimes a truck really is better.

 

 

I’m still here

If you’re trying to find me, and you looked at this blog hoping for some updates, you’ve been disappointed. 

I’m still updating, even more frequently than before, but on Twitter. I’ve found the 140-char limitation there to be liberating, more in tune with the short snippets of attention that I typically can afford most updates.

That said, I have a lot to say, and Twitter is beginning to feel too short. I’m not sure exactly how to replace it, and I suspect this blog may be part of it, if I can figure out how to organize my thoughts in a way that make sense to have on a single web site.

It’s complicated, though, because of the many faces of me. If you’re looking for personal updates, Facebook’s a better medium.  If you want professional information, see me on LinkedIn. But where do I put the rest of me, the hodgepodge of interests I have in technology, Hayek, China, Mercer Island, and more?

I’m still waiting to figure that out. But meanwhile don’t go away.

The Cloakbox Catch

The verdict is in: I’m pretty happy with my Cloakbox VPN router.  I love being able to surf as though I’m on a computer in San Francisco or the UK.  I’ve used it in two places, a temporary residential hotel and now (finally) in my permanent apartment. In both cases I literally just plugged it into the internet tap and it worked.  I love to tinker with settings, so later I adjusted things for higher security (e.g. WPA Personal) and a fixed location (rather than letting Witopia decide).  I also fiddled with the built-in WDS settings to get it to work with another Linksys router.  Everything was easy.

But it’s not entirely free.

Here’s my internet speed without the Cloakbox:

Here’s my speed with the Cloakbox:

My internet connection is much slower.  I assume some of this is due to the overhead of VPN, with extra encryption information being sent with packet. But the biggest problem is that every single communication gets sent across the ocean and back (sometimes multiple times), producing a much higher latency (upwards of 400+ ms).  That’s painful, although I find communication services like Skype are still completely usable.  But still, that’s quite a speed and latency drop.

Fortunately, you can turn off the VPN functionality at any time, and I do, so on longer uploads/downloads when I don’t need to get around any firewalls or when security is less of a concern, I switch it off.  Unfortunately you need to reboot the router each time, which can take a minute or two.

Bottom line: Cloakbox does what I need it to do and I have been recommending it to all my friends. For $199, it’s an easy way to eliminate one of the biggest hassles of living in a regulated internet.