Topic Archives: What We’re Reading

Happy Friday! Here are some fun and inspiring things we’ve been reading lately, to kick off your weekend:

What Do Kids Really Learn From Failure? by Alfie Kohn: “Research certainly doesn’t support the idea that failure or disappointment is constructive in itself… We may want kids to rebound from failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s usually going to happen — or that the experience of failure makes that desired outcome more likely.”

Should QS Researchers Protect Themselves With Disclaimers? by @measuredme: “The point of the disclaimer that I have in mind is not to restrict access to data or research… What I am really concerned about is those rare instances when our data and findings could lead to liabilities or involuntary involvement in legal disputes, due to misuse or misinterpretation.”

If Behavior Change Is Belief Change, a conversation with Buster Benson, Ernesto Ramirez, and others: “Can we forcefully change our own identities and beliefs about ourselves? Will writing something down every day have a positive (or negative??) impact on our desire to believe something different than we actually do?”

This collection of links is inspired by NPR’s #bestthingallweek hashtag on Twitter. What’s the best thing you read this week?

Behavior Change is Belief Change by Buster Benson: “Anyone that tells you that you just need to ‘walk one more bus stop every morning’ in order to be a healthier person has reversed the formula (putting the easy thing first) in order to sell it to you. In order to be a person who walks to the bus stop every morning you have to change your core identity of yourself into a ‘healthier person who walks a lot.’”

Startup = Growth by Paul Graham: “Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them… We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week.”

Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated: The (Troubling) Theory and Practice of Control from Within by Alfie Kohn: “Just because motivation is internal doesn’t mean it’s ideal. If [people] feel controlled, even from within, they’re likely to be conflicted, unhappy, and perhaps less likely to succeed (at least by meaningful criteria) at whatever they’re doing.”

Quantifying Kids, an interview with Bill Schuller: “A child’s performance in the educational system is quantified at every step of the way. The difference in what I am doing is increasing the fidelity, increasing the time horizon, drawing correlation between the data and teaching my children to look at the results and reflect on them.”

Building that Perfect Quantified Self App: Notes to Developers, Part 1 by Measured Me: “The diet logs now are not just about counting calories, but also tracking allergies and more serious ailments, and effects of ingredients on mental and physical performance, or sleep. Happiness has been already tied to location, and will soon probably be linked to the weather, quality of sleep, or activities on Facebook.”

Growth Hacking – Lean Marketing for Startups by Mattan Griffel: This is a great slide deck talking about “a set of tactics and best practices for dealing with the problem of user growth.” Thanks to Chris Hogg for finding it!

Here is some fun and provocative Monday morning reading for you, from Gary, Alex, and Ernesto. Enjoy!

From 0 to 100 Years in 150 Seconds
An Amsterdam filmmaker collected tiny video clips of 100 people on the street from ages 0 to 100. It’s like witnessing a startling progression of human life, and motivates me (Alex) to work on solving aging!

Empowerment Through Numbers: Biomedicalization and The Quantified Self
In this interesting post from the Cyborgology blog, sociologist Whitney Erin Boesel describes some important ambiguities in the Quantified Self movement. How empowering is it, really? Whitney will be at the conference and invites comment and discussion.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
This amazing book by Natasha Dow Schüll, the product of more than a decade of research, describes in detail one context where behavioral science appears to yield genuine control over human beings: the design of machine gambling systems such as video poker.

“Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse” (pdf), by Paul Dourish and Scott Mainwaring is a welcome, explicit call for those of us interested in ubiquitous computing to think about the colonialism implicit in our methods and vocabulary. I (Gary) liked it especially because it is accessible (in the sense of not being polluted by jargon or academic point-scoring) while also very challenging to conventional practice.

Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data (video)
MIT researcher Sandy Pentland talks about the streams of hidden data all around us -what it means for predicting trends and how it forces us to reinvent ourselves in a data-driven human society.

Men and Women Really Do See Things Differently
A fascinating study out of Brooklyn College discovered that women are better at differentiating between shades of colors, while men are better at noticing details of fast-moving things, especially at a distance. Remnants of adaptations from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

And just for fun, from Ernesto and Alex – check out this hug clothing!

Nine nifty nuggets for you to read today…

Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill: The demands on medical professionals to be compliant may bias their understanding of others.

Could rosemary scent boost brain performance? Speed and accuracy were both improved, and the authors propose that positive mood may improve performance where aroused mood cannot.

Bad Habits? My Future Self Will Deal With That: An interesting look at research regarding the choices we make and how they relate to our connection with our “future self.”

How games saved my life: A powerful story of how playing Sim City pulled a teenager out of a planned suicide.

Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Both Write on Insurmountable Poverty: Two writers whose work is based on compassionate & honest witness.

Abundance is our future: In this talk from the recent TED conference, Peter Diamandis of X Prize presents an inspiring, optimistic view of solving the world’s major problems.

App Intervention to Treat Addiction (and It Runs on Android): A wrist sensor connected to a smartphone to detect physiological signs of craving and offer in-the-moment support.

The Calming Effect of Sighing: Spontaneous sighs are more stress-relieving than instructed sighs.

How Habits Hold Us: A short, but interesting look into habits and learning by insightful science journalist Jonah Lehrer.

Thanks this week to Neema Moraveji, Martin Sona, Dan Dascalescu, Daniel Reda, Ernesto Ramirez, and Gary Wolf.

Seven Sunday snippets to stimulate your synapses…

Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus. Can hooking up your brain to a battery induce a state of flow? New Scientist explores this question.

The Zynga Abyss: A fascinating excerpt from an essay by Benjamin Jackson in the new Distance quarterly on games and design that highlights the use of dark patterns in social game design.

The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile: A dozen predictions by investor Vinod Khosla of where disruptive new technologies will emerge. Mentions Quantified Self, for all you amazing QS toolmakers!

We, the Web Kids by Piotr Czerski: An essay on what is means to be part of the generation that grew up with the web as an omnipresent part of their lives. Touches on ideas of information, creation, and democracy. A great read.

Quantified Health Prize results: We didn’t catch this earlier, but Less Wrong did a contest asking “What are the best recommendations for what quantities adults (ages 20-60) should take the important dietary minerals in, and what are the costs and benefits of various amounts?” The winner explored potassium and sodium, and they will be running another contest soon.

The Patient of the Future: A look into Larry Smarr’s quantified self journey and possible future of truly personalized medicine.

Light Therapy for Seasonal and Nonseasonal Depression: Efficacy, Protocol, Safety, and Side Effects. (PDF) A very interesting review of light therapy for different flavors of depression, including SAD, bipolar, and major depression. Interestingly, it covers both dosage and *timing* of light administered.

Thanks to Ernesto, Gary, Daniel Reda and Simon Frid.

Here’s some good Sunday reading from your friends at QS!

Kickstarter & Double Fine: A Seismic Shift? The detailed story of a game development project raising over $500,000 through Kickstarter.

Avoid misinterpreting your emotions. A beautiful post from Less Wrong about emotional intelligence – mood is weather, not climate, and can give us important insight if approached correctly.

Zeo Sleep Experiments. A really, really thorough examination by Gwern of sleep tracking and experiments using the Zeo.

9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn. Leo Babauta’s post on Zen Habits sounds like a great recipe for raising the next generation of self-experimenters. They’re not bad skills for adults to learn, either.

The age of big data. An interesting article about the rise of data and statistics.

How Dr. Hew Len healed a ward of mentally ill criminals with Ho’oponopono. An amazing story of healing yourself in order to heal others. I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.

Thanks to Gary, Ernesto, Daniel Reda,  and Ioan Mitrea.

Here’s some weekend reading, without the eye-straining bullet points this week! Thanks to Kevin Kelly, Gary Wolf, Ernesto Ramirez, Rajiv Mehta, and Daniel Reda.

Your Body Is an API: 9 Gadgets for Tracking Health and Fitness. Includes our Basis friends and other gadgets from CES.

Lifestream blog’s summary of the CES experience, including new health and fitness gadgets.

Harnessing experience: exploring the gap between evidence-based medicine and clinical practice. This fascinating paper describes the inevitable gap between “evidence based medicine” and actual clinical practice, and proposes an interesting idea, “evidence farming,” that acknowledges the range of available evidence beyond randomized controlled trials.

Ten years after its first publication, Welcome to Cancerland by Barbara Ehrenreich still has the power to explode your brain.

The Creative Destruction of Medicine by Eric Topol. We’ve been looking forward to this one.

Here is this week’s QS reading list. Hope you enjoy:

• Ken Snyder’s surprising Magnesium survey results of 146 QS’ers (PDF on his site).
• A new Harvard Business Review piece on approaches to translate self quantification to business.
• Ariel Garten’s TEDx Toronto talk: Know thyself, with a brain scanner.
• iDreamSaver project on KickStarter: an interesting product using infrared technology to track sleep and wake you up intelligently.
• Embracing Personal Experience on Our Rise Through Science: an inspiring and thoughtful piece about what it means to be scientist.
• Century of the Self (BBC documentary): A journey through the history of the Self, from happiness machines to crowd manipulation to the policemen in our heads.

Thanks to Ernesto Ramirez, Ed Dench, and James Wilson. If you’re reading something interesting you want to share, submit it to us here.