Author Archives: Steven Dean

New York QS Show&Tell #16 Recap

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Steven Dean

Last week we had over a 100 folks attend our 16th NY Show&Tell with a Demo Hour held on Tuesday, May 8th at an incredible space that was generously provided by Digitas, a digital brand agency that has watched and supported QS closely over the years.

Thank you to my co-organizers, Ben Ahrens and Brian Gallegos, who helped pull together this recap for the blog.

DIGITAS LABS DEMO HOUR

Digitas Labs and Ben Ahrens assembled a fascinating group of QS members to share their stories, innovations and experiences in our first demo hour that had a real science fair feel. Some of the demos ran on some awesome touch screen devices provided by Digitas Labs. It started at 6pm with the following demonstrations:


Zack Freedman demos Optigon

Sandy Santra gave a lively demonstration of a truly unique DIY self-tracking system built for the iPad that not only charts psychological changes and their effects, but also provides users with full editorial control over data fields and allows them to customize their own personal experiments.

Kat Houghton, founder of ilumivu, displayed a wearable emotional state detector designed to empower people with the ability to tap into their own behavior and the behavioral responses of children with autism to help facilitate positive health and lifestyle changes.

Folks gathered in the Innovation Room as Alex Smith demonstrated his software called “Timebinder” which he designed to create visual timelines out of timestamped data — particularly useful for bringing asynchronous time series data from multiple sources into a single view for analysis.

Craig Dunuloff took spectators through a virtual blast into the past with his app Rewind.me. Where was that restaurant? How may friends were there? What did the gang do last night? This app allows users to get more value out of what they’ve done in their lives by aggregating data from other services such as Facebook, Foursquare, Tripit, Runkeeper, and more. It also lets you see and compare your activities to those of your friends and the world at large.

Amelia Rocchi gave QS members a behind the scenes look at InsideTracker – a web-based service that helps individuals optimize their overall health and performance by giving them a unique view into their personal biochemistry.

Christian Monterroza unveiled his time-tracking project that uses geo-fencing to passively track and organize daily activity. One of the most fascinating and helpful aspects of Christian’s app is that it allows the user to easily and personally allocate different regions of spaces for different activities, i.e., the park is for running; the freeway for driving; the living room for sitting; the grocery store for food shopping, etc. The app then takes over and auto-logs the activities based on its users geography. Fully customizable – NO LOGGING REQUIRED!

Zack Freedman (@ZackFreedman) was quick to draw a crowd with “Optigon” – a wearable wireless cyborg system that integrates with the user’s smartphone allowing him or her to access all data and keep it in plain site – even view nearby mobile user’s text messages, or as Zack puts it, “read people’s minds”! This awesome demo was every bit as impressive as it looked. Zack is currently seeking partners and investment to turn his devious device into the Arduino of wearables.

SHOW&TELL TALKS

Following the demo hour, we had four inspiring talks from QS members of the NY community.

How analytics improved my personal life and helped a losing soccer team

Stefan Heeke has a background in analytics and wanted to start using this skill for three self-improvement projects.

The first project was measuring his physical health. He was using the Fitbit to track his activity. He discovered that it takes some time at the beginning but then eventually he discovered what works for him. Specifically, he identified three areas: don’t eat fried food, cut out snacks, and cut out alcohol.

The next project was a daily journal. He decided to write down numbers to better understand how he feels each day. He found that he could gather some very actionable data by correlating the right metrics with each other. His approach is to identify both a positive and negative correlation to the activity. For example, he would correlate stress, whether he had a successful day, or general feelings of satisfaction. He also tracked his commuting time. He wanted to figure out how his daily commute impacts his mood. He found that as his personal time available decreased, his food quality decreased and his television time increased. Overall, he found that a) social days are good days, b) proximity to work is important, c) stuff in general has no impact, and d) TV is a time killer.

The third thing he tracked is how to apply personal metrics to a soccer team. He tried to model the most probable outcomes for certain soccer scenarios in terms of likelihood of success. As a result of the tracking, the team made it to the finals of the soccer league.

Ultimately, Stefan learned that whenever you apply data, it has a transformative impact and if you want to improve your life, data can help. He was also surprised at the number of distractions he ran into and how much that had an impact on his life.

Quantifying Diabetes

Jana Beck started her self-tracking journey with the goal of better understanding the impact of her diabetes. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 19 and has been dependent on synthetic insulin for survival since. Her problem is that dosing insulin is not easy and is not a one-size-fits-all thing. It requires a lot of adjustment and impacts people differently. She set out to better understand her diabetes and better optimize her glucose management.

She started using a continuous glucose monitor on the back of her arm last year. This device transmits blood readings every 5 minutes and she gets trend and rate of change information. She has a target goal of keeping her readings between 70 and 130 mg/DL.

Her first experience was shock and her next was frustration. She found it hard to change her patterns. So she developed a hypothesis and set out to test it. Her hypothesis is that she needs to restructure her carbohydrate intake. The first step was to read a book on the topic (Good Calories / Bad Calories by Gary Taubes). The next was to use her monitoring device to track how her glucose changed based on her changes in carbohydrate intake. Her conclusion is that a low carbohydrate diet had a significant impact on her readings.

To run her analytics, Jana built her own statistical analysis program using R that tracks daily percentages over time for each type of blood sugar reading (carb-restricted vs. regular diet) against a target. Her program is called iPancreas and is available on Github.

Her next step is to try and start pulling in other variables (exercise, mood, etc.) to see how this changes her patterns. Ultimately, Jana’s self tracking project taught her how to best eat so that she can control her diabetes.

Walk all of Manhattan

Alastair Tse recently moved to NYC six months ago to work at Google. He hadn’t spent much time in NYC previous to moving here and wanted to better discover his new home city. Each day he commutes from 27th St. to 14th St. in Manhattan. One day he was trying to figure out the optimal route to work and wondered how many patterns are there to get from point A (home) to point B (work). He further extrapolated on this idea to see if it’s possible to walk all of Manhattan, and track it.

He started by writing down his walking experience in a notebook and just using general Google Maps. This turned out to be a bad idea because it wasn’t scalable and Google Maps can be buggy. So he built his own mapping app that uses Google Maps but allows him to map his own routes. The app tracks the streets he goes down and allows him to edit each route. It then tracks the routes he takes and shows his walking history.

He learned that it was possible to track something like where in a city a person walks and it’s very useful. In fact, he found that he hadn’t walked one square block north and one square block south of his apartment, much to his surprise. It got him to wonder, what other areas of the city is he often near, but never explored. The app helped Alastair adjust to living in a brand new city and has given him some ideas for places he wants to eventually explore.

How visualizing health problems could help solve medical mysteries

Katie McCurdy is an interaction designer with Myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune disease that causes muscle weakness in voluntary muscles She’s had it for 20 years and has been taking a drug to help the disease. She decided to take an alternate route and consult a holistic doctor. This was a new doctor so she was very motivated to make sure this new doctor understood her entire 20 year history with the disease. So she decided to make a timeline, from memory. She drew a timeline that included when she was feeling good and when she was feeling bad. She annotated the timeline for when she took certain drugs.


Initially, this was all drawn by hand. But as she worked on it, she decided to digitize it. So she next built the timeline into Adobe Illustrator so the graphs can be more accurately represented.

But it wasn’t enough to see all of her mood timelines separately. She wanted to overlay them so when symptoms go up and down, she can see how they are associated with each other.

Two variables she tracked were gut feelings (physical) and voice strength. These are two areas in which the muscle constriction has a high and very noticeable impact. This experience has helped her tell her story in a structured and coherent way and for that reason, this entire project has been helpful.

She learned that antibiotics were probably making her sicker, that docs are busy and probably skeptical of yet another patient created graph, that better health visualizations can be a great storytelling tool, and that memories are data too. Ultimately, she ended up being inspired and is currently doing more focused tracking in other areas of her life.

See our interview with Katie in an earlier QS post here.

Thanks to everyone who came out. We’ll get the videos up soon. See you this summer at the next NY QS Show&Tell.

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Marie Dupuch on Mood Tracking

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Steven Dean

-This review was written by Craig Protzel for my class DIY Health at NYU ITP (Tisch School of the Arts). In this class, students design systems of self-care that help people take stock of themselves by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon their health and lifestyle.-

Marie Dapuch’s “Mood Tracking” is very much focused on the qualified self and how the user feels.  Dapuch created a rating scale based on colors as a visual metric, and a self-reported quantifiable metric, to gauge her mood over periods of time.  While her process of assigning values is entirely subjective, and one might argue lacking in “scientific rigor,” Dapuch’s project is extremely relevant, highly impactful, and overwhelmingly touching.

Overall, she was able to design and develop a system of enormous significance in the improvement of her own life.  By implementing it on a mobile device, she successfully integrated the tracking process into her daily routine, allowing for even more in depth analysis.  All of this effort gave her the awareness and information to make confident choices in her own life, particularly to pursue a career path in advertising, to not spend so much time with her sister, and, most recently, to avoid the A train.  Her presentation is inspiring in that you clearly see how a simple yet effective system of self-monitoring can have such a positive effect on a person’s life. (Filmed at the NY Quantified Self Show&Tell #13 at NYU ITP.)

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Neema Moraveji on Perfect Self-Awareness

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Steven Dean

–This review was written by Ryan Viglizzo for my class DIY Health at NYU ITP (Tisch School of the Arts). In this class, students design systems of self-care that help people take stock of themselves by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon their health and lifestyle.–

Moraveji asks, “What would it be like to have perfect self awareness?” His talk suggests that having perfect self-awareness means having an optimized mind. He describes an optimized mind as one that is calm, aware, and emotional but not driven by emotions.  Moraveji points out that we can achieve this state of mind by changing and self-tracking our breath.  Moraveji focused on social influence and staring at a computer screen to test change in breath rate. I would like to relate his talk to exercise.

As a runner, it took me years of doing the sport to start understanding the importance of breath.  As we run we get better—run longer distances, feel better, and increase our speed. I realized that when I trained I trained my breath. I controlled my breath; which inadvertently taught me how to manage my body. This poses the question—Can we teach our body to regulate or does our body teach us to regulate?

Moraveji explains that breath connects all of the body’s major and vital nervous systems. If we use our mind self to regulate our breath, our body follows.  I would say agree with this notion. When I run I think about relaxation. I think about my breath being steady, calm and rhythmic. As I think about that I fall into my pace with my breath and my body’s nervous system follows. It all starts with my mind.

This process can be described in a first order feedback loop. Goal: become relaxed, efficient and calm during the run. Action: Thinking about and making breath rhythmic, calm and steady. Environmental distractions: increasing pace, other runners, weather, change of terrain, etc. Sensing/monitoring: BMP (breaths per min.) Comparing my states: Am I breathing slower and feeling calmer as I run? If so I achieved my goal. If not I go back to Action (to start loop over).

I see the breath as a function that is controlled by our mental intention. As we calm our breath it triggers the body’s nervous system to sit at a certain resting state. I think Moraveji is trying to make people aware of the fact that if we are conscious of our breath we can improve our self-awareness and in turn be more productive, happy, and clear.

One issue I had was that Moraveji only measures breath solely on breath rate. I feel like there are other parameters of breath that needed to be included in his study. The study also touched on social motivation. I think that the social motivation piece is not a constant in its ability to keep people self-monitoring.

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Ari Meisel on Curing the Incurable Through Self-Experimentation

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Steven Dean

Ari cured himself of Crohn’s disease by experimenting with some unusual supplements, nutrition and fitness regimens, and tracking every bit of it.

Four years ago, Ari was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. After a couple of years of intense pain, sixteen pills a day, and yet another visit to the hospital, he decided to take control of his pain. So he started to track everything. His tracking regimen included exercise, supplements, sleep, food, etc. He used some popular tracking tools such as the FitBit, Zeo, and 23andMe. He correlated these metrics with how much pain he was in and his mood. The difficult part was trying to quantify the psychological component.

Ari learned to control the pain from Crohn’s. It took a certain combination of food, supplements, exercise and sleep, but the key was collecting enough data through experimentation. The other key learning from Ari’s work was that sharing the data is very important. Sharing included his friends, family, doctor, and others with Crohn’s. This sharing of data helped him analyze the data better and made him feel better about the task. (Filmed at the NY Quantified Self Show&Tell #13 at NYU ITP.)

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New York QS Show&Tell #13 Recap

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Steven Dean

Last month 75 QSers attended the New York Show&Tell #13 that was held on Wednesday, August 24th at NYU ITP, one of our regular sponsors in New York. Thank you to my co-organizer, Brian Gallegos, who helped pull together this recap for the blog.

Ari Meisel

Ari cured himself of Crohn’s disease by experimenting with some unusual supplements, nutrition and fitness regimens and tracked every bit of it.

Four years ago, Ari was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. After a couple of years of intense pain, sixteen pills a day, and yet another visit to the hospital, he decided to take control of his pain. So, he started to track everything. His tracking regimen included exercise, supplements, sleep, food, etc. He used some popular tracking tools such as the FitBit, Zeo, and 23andMe. He correlated these metrics with how much pain he was in and his mood. The difficult part was trying to quantify the psychological component.

Ari learned to control the pain from Crohn’s, it took a certain combination of food, supplements, exercise and sleep but the key was collecting enough data through experimentation. The other key learning from Ari’s work was that sharing the data is very important. Sharing included his friends, family, doctor, and others with Crohn’s. This sharing of data helped him analyze the data better and made him feel better about the task. Watch Ari’s talk.

Marie Dupuch

Marie has fairly popular issue that many deal with everyday but she decided that it was important enough to start analyzing and understanding it better. The issue is mood and her solution was to track her mood three times a day. She created a scaling system from 1 – 5 with 1 being extremely low and 5 being extremely high.

Although she started with post-it notes, Marie created an iPhone app so she could track her mood on the go and started to notice patterns in her life that greatly contributed to her mood.

Marie learned that the best way to analyze her mood data was through visual representation. Her iPhone app gives her a visual way to understand her mood patterns in a quick way and enables her to correlate different mood data points on the fly. Her goal is to continue tracking her mood for self experimentation and share her application with others. Watch Marie’s talk.

Roger Craig

Roger Craig is a Jeopardy champion. But he’s not *just* a Jeopardy champion. He’s the record holder for the most money won in a single game in the history of the show.

But Roger isn’t some savant with perfect quiz show memory. Instead, he set out to find a way to look at the show from a historical perspective and try to understand what types of questions are asked, at what frequency, and for what value. He started by taking a database of all of the questions ever asked in the history of the game and creating a taxonomy to label the question types. He then mapped out the question types, values, and frequency on a plot and identified the highest value question types. Next, Roger built an application that gave him actual questions based on his desired type and value along with a timer to train himself to answer questions in a quicker fashion.

Roger learned that it’s more important to ask the right questions of your data than it is to just have the right data. Watch Roger’s talk.

Yury Gitman and Joel Murphy

We were thrilled to have Yury and Joel come out and demo their open hardware project called Pulse Sensor with the local QS community. The project tagline is “heart rate beats per minute for Arduino, lickety split.” and QS contributed to helping them reach the goal of raising $3,000 on Kickstarter. Read the QS post on Pulse Sensor. Watch Yury & Joel’s talk.

Tereza Nemessanyi

Already a successful businesswoman, Tereza had a couple big events in her life that resulted in major life changes. The biggest of these changes was the loss of a family member that was a primary support mechanism and life confidant. She didn’t know where to turn for advice going forward and had an idea. The idea was to go out and just ask people what they think, collect their feedback, analyze the feedback data, and give it back to the people that she asked. The result is her Web tool called Honestly Now, which is available for general use. All you have to do is create an account, setup a profile and start a conversation!

Tereza learned that collecting feedback from the crowd can help her make daily decisions and there is high value to just asking people what they think. Watch Tereza’s talk.

Adam Leibsohn

Adam was a successful marketing manager in the online advertising industry but he felt like there was something missing. As more and more online tools are collecting browsing behavior of people in an effort to offer more targeted ads, there is more information to filter through and a lot of data that just didn’t have value. He also realized that people have very unique needs and corresponding browsing behavior. How can I track my Web usage?

So he created his own application. voyurl is a browser-based tool that collects browser history and gives you a rich set of reports to help you better understand how, when, where, and how long you surf the Web. Some of the questions he set out to answer was:

* What kinds of sites to I spend my time on?
* How do I break my personal information filter bubble?
* How can I adjust my behavior to balance my browsing in more impactful ways?

Adam learned that by collecting Web browsing data, you can identify patterns to help you optimize your browsing experience and expand your exposure to different content on the Web. He also learned that the visual aspect of representing data and patterns is a very important catalyst for affecting change in a way that data in a spreadsheet just can’t accomplish. Watch Adam’s talk.

Thanks everyone for coming out. Planning is underway for our next event in October. Join the New York group on Meetup.

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Personal Data Visualization

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Steven Dean

In 2007, while training for an Ironman triathlon, one of the many daily QS rituals I did included waking up in the morning and strapping on my heart rate monitor before I got out of bed to measure my resting heart rate (HR). My coach had made it one of the mandatory data points I had to capture during the 10-month training period. If my morning resting heart rate was just 2-3 beats higher than the previous days, then that most likely indicated my body was fighting an infection and I needed to pull back on my training volume no matter how good I felt. I didn’t always follow the advice and in the graph above you can see 3 times when I did not heed the advice of my coach, kept training and then within a few days I got sick (resting HR spikes). I also like seeing how, over time, my resting heart rate decreased to around 50 beats per minute and was a reflection of my improved fitness level.

In the Reflection stage of Ian Li’s stage-based model of personal informatics, he makes a distinction between reflecting in the short-term (right now) and the long-term (later on). In the morning when I read my HR, I could act upon it that day and then over time I could review the data and look for trends and patterns with my coach and modify my training as needed. Visualizing a single variable is pretty straightforward, but add multiple variables and we see how giving visual form to all this data gets tricky. What are the methods and tools that help us visualize our data so that, in turn, we can create actionable knowledge?

At our upcoming first Quantified Self Conference we have created a breakout session specifically focused on how members of the QS community are using visualization tools and methods to make meaning out of their personal data. This is going to be a hands-on session and we want you to bring your data and visualizations and share what has worked for you and the kinds of challenges you face in interpreting the data. I’ll be joined by visual artist, Laurie Frick, who has used QS data of her own and data from Ben Lipkowitz to build really beautiful analog work. Also helping out will be fellow NY QS member, Paul Marcum, who runs the New York Data Visualization and Infographics meetup.

Continue reading →

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Sleep Patterns by Artist Laurie Frick @ Edward Cella in LA

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Steven Dean

Over the summer at NYU’s ITP Camp for adults, I met the artist Laurie Frick who was making some breathtakingly beautiful sculptures and installations that looked a lot like our QS charts and spreadsheets. I encouraged Laurie to take a look at the data our community was producing.
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In Laurie’s words, “I genuinely think there is something inherently comforting in the visual pattern of daily activities both, sleeping and waking.  I started using Ben Lipkowitz‘s daily activity charts, and then got hooked on tracking my sleep data as well.” She draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built works and installations to explore the nature of pattern and the mind.
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If you’re in LA, make plans to attend the opening reception on Saturday, February 12 from 6-8 at Edward Cella Art + Architecture or check out the work through April 2nd.
Laurie will also join us in May at our first Quantified Self Conference and will have lots of stories to share with us.
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New York QS Show&Tell #9 Recap

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Steven Dean

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Last night self-quantifying New Yorkers came out in the rain to witness another fascinating round of QS talks. A special thanks to our hosts Briana, Daniel and the crew at the digital innovation agency Zemoga. They’re doing some great work and be sure to check out their Follow Me app concept that they presented at our last Show&Tell.

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We started off the evening with designer Chris Woebken who critiques and interrogates raw-data driven transactions to uncover what it is that we’ve designed out of these experiences. His talk focused on our relationship to digital money where he melted an Oyster card (London’s electronic transport ticket) down to its RFID reader. It still worked. What do we lose as we move to cashless form factors? Can we design sensual experiences back into data-driven ones?
 
Then Kenneth Wright shared with the group his personal tracking experience using StickK to moderate his alcohol consumption. He’s had great success even though his referee won’t log in to StickK to support him but the group agreed that StickK could be used to trigger the referee to participate.

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Andrew Schaaf walked us through his very simple Mac app that logs data about how you’re using your Mac over time. Get Andrew’s MacLogger now on GitHub. 
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Robert Rabinovitz, a designer and educator, captivated the audience with his talk on mind mapping his own design process to a brain seizure he had in 2007 and the minutes leading up to the life-changing event.

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Colin Schiller an entrepreneur who, with the arrival of his new baby, saw a decrease in the elasticity of his own time. He undertook some very rigorous time management and productivity experiments using the Pomodoro Technique to discover that he netted out at about 85% efficiency.

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To cap off the evening, we had the pleasure of a visit from John de Souza, the CEO of MedHelp, the world’s largest online health community and a sponsor of the Bay Area QS meetups, to share with us his own personal self-tracking experiments and some of the incredibly detailed things that folks are tracking on MedHelp.
Thanks to everyone who made the evening possible. We’ll get videos up soon. See you again in December.
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New York QS Show&Tell #8 – Recap

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Steven Dean
A week ago the NY Quantified Self group convened on the 4th floor of NYU’s ITP program where over the summer I was pleased to be a part of their new ITP Summer Camp program where a bunch of us got to perform, compute, craft, process and visualize all sorts of digital stuff. It was a kind of “mash-up of artist residency and summer camp for adults” where lots of QS ideas were forming everywhere.
We started the evening with a social hour complete with munchies and wine provided by our first annual sponsor HealthTap. We also had US correspondent from German National TV & Radio, Beatrice Uerlings, interviewing a bunch of us self-trackers for derStandard. The article is here in German.
Our first talk was from one of our most enthusiastic QS advocates, Esther Dyson who started us off with a beautiful and inspiring story about statistics, options, decision trees and numbers as a guide to one’s health prospects. You’ll want to see the video but until they’re posted, you can read Esther’s article, Life by the Numbers, on HealthTap’s blog.

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Next up was Brennan Moore who presented a system he developed with Max Van Kleek while at MIT called Poyozo. t’s a free, open source tool that runs in Firefox and it aggregates much of your personal web-based data to create a more complete picture of your life through interfaces and visualizations. 
Bethany Soule returned to QS to present with her colleague Daniel Reeves their head-to-head challenge and bet of $2,000 that they could meet all kinds of goals over several months including weight, parenting, work and doing pushups. They almost lost.
Academic researcher Regina gave a talk on the use of biofeedback techniques among teenagers in a classroom setting to improve cognition. And Mark presented his research findings on the physics of pathogenic zones or the artificial electromagnetic fields that may be dangerous to human health.

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Paul Marcum showed us his latest project FatDrop.pr that integrates our favorite body weight scale, Withings with “weigh-in” tweets from Twitter to generate a global weight loss game. Since ITP alum and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley was in the audience, Paul pulled up his profile to share with the group his current status. A new form of public weigh-ins at QS Show&Tells?
Our last presenter was DJ Edgerton from Zemoga who shared with the group a 5-minute video that outlines a concept his team is working on that provides a way for doctors, family members and caregivers to stay connected and up-to-date on a patient’s health status and progress. It’s called Follow Me and you can check it out here.
We’re working on the videos and we will let you know once they’re posted on Vimeo.
In the fall we’re planning a joint QS Show&Tell with the NY chapter of IxDA on self-tracking and interaction design. We’re looking for talks by self-trackers who are using interaction design to track, visualize and learn from what it all means. We’ll announce the date soon on Meetup.
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New York QS Show&Tell #7 – Recap

Posted on May 19, 2010 by Steven Dean

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About 40 or so self-quantifiers showed up despite the heavy rains on Broadway to witness another fascinating night of self-tracking projects with enough surprises to keep the interest high.

Thanks to Dan O’Sullivan and Mustafa Bagdatli we got a chance to return to the well-wired labs of NYU ITP.

Videos will be posted to the blog and Vimeo soon. Here’s a quick recap of our 7 presenters:

Steven Lehrburger presented his project Where Do You Go, a web app that visualizes your foursquare check-ins as a heat map that you can share with others.

Esther Dyson brought us up-to-date on the rapidly changing world of consumer genomic sequencing with a report from the GET Conference.

Gyula Borbely from BodyTrace gave the group a demo of his body weight scale that uses the GSM network to transmit your weight to their website.

Robert Carlsen took us through mountains of data (literally) in his Visualizations of Cycling project including his iPhone app, Mobile Logger, that gained hundreds of new users after the Gizmodo mention last week.

Taz Delaney who describes himself as a 56-year old lifelong multimedia artist, technophile, xenophilic mystic, beat-hippie-punk druggie animist anarcho-socialist anti-war anti-corporatist animal and eco activist talked about his dreams and odd events journaling that he’s been doing religiously since 1968!

Zach Taylor showed us his Android prototype project called Fit*ly, an incentive-driven mobile application for personal improvement. I mentioned the Snaptic Challenge and then Esther piped up that she’s a judge! Zach, get your submission in.

Marco Castro presented his NYU ITP thesis project, Weighting Chair, a chair that weighs you as you eat.

A special thank you to Mustafa and the ITP team for providing a 5-camera view streaming solution and Evan Creem for videography.

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