Now that there are multiple companies selling genome scans, and urging their use as a guide in making decisions about health, the sociologists are following close behind. Marcie Lambrix, at Case Western University, contacted me recently to seek research help in putting together a report on consumer attitudes and experiences with personal genomics. The research…
I was curious to see if I was the only one crazy enough to share my health data publicly, so last week I posted two questions as my Facebook status. “Would you track your health on Facebook (weight, calories, sleep, exercise) for all your friends to see?”, followed by “What if it was completely private…
The dead end. The cul-de-sac. The walled garden. These are three different ways (using 2.5 different metaphors) to refer to services that allow you to communicate and display information but not to copy, transfer, or share your data with outsiders. It’s an internet dogma that dead ends, culs-de-sac, and walled gardens are bad. I subscribe…
Just a quick follow up to the last post about Tweet What You Eat, inspired again by Flowing Data and by a telling anecdote from a recent health conference, where I concluded that ubiquitous self-tracking is coming, but perhaps not from the direction expected by many health professionals. At the conference I met the CEO…
A column by Olivia Judson in today’s New York Times touches on both scientific and literary testimony about the self-blindness of human beings. In “Wanted: Intelligent Aliens, for a Research Project,” Judson points out that we are terrible self-analyzers, at least using the tools of our ordinary understanding and perception. If there is anything living…
Lately I’ve been obsessed with a hard problem that seems easy. You do things that generate data. You have a machine that measures something and produces a number. Sometimes the machine even stores the numbers, so you can look at old measurements. Maybe, if the company is very advanced, the machine will bounce the numbers…
From [Ethan Zuckerman’s](http://ethanzuckerman.com/) always interesting blog, [My heart’s in Accra](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/), comes [this story](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/07/29/social-lions-fiscally-literate-mobile-phones/) of a prototype of a social tracking device that helps teenagers notice patterns in their social behavior – and also alerts their counselors: Ennea, a project from students at the Eindhoven University of Technology is one of the cooler things I’ve seen…
In April, 2005, the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy launched a [task force](http://www.genome.gov/10001808) on genetic testing. The task force, which had broad academic and industry representation, tried to outline the issues, and recommend possible guidelines, for the coming age of consumer genetics. It was already obvious that cheap and ubiquitous genetic testing…
Sometimes the future shows up in odd places. In the infancy of the public Internet, if you were poking around various gopher sites to see what they might contain, you picked up an accidental education in the mental health issues faced by American college students. [Gopher](http://www.codeghost.com/gopher_history.html), an early document-sharing protocol, happened to be embraced by…
My curiosity about real world applications of objective techniques of self-discovery and self-management let me recently to some classic work by [Albert Bandura](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bandura), who introduced the idea of [self-efficacy](http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/self-efficacy.html) into cognitive psychology. Self-efficacy is different than self-confidence or self-esteem. It is not a personality trait, or a set of general beliefs about oneself. Rather, it…
The history of “recreational” drug use and medical self-experimentation is deeply intertwined, especially when medicine is broadly defined to include psychology. In San Francisco, where I live, there are numerous [cannabis clubs](http://www.sanfranciscocannabisclubs.com/) selling pot to holders of medical marijuana cards. Over the last few months there’s been a burst of attention to the sometimes humorous,…
In a hospital or a doctor’s office, you are usually asked what medications you have taken recently. Under conditions of distraction, I’m sometimes uncertain if I’ve given a correct answer. I think to myself: “okay, if I’m a professional question-asker, and I’m doubting my memory in this situation, how often are incorrect responses given by…
I want to become more rational. So do many people I know. But shouldn’t the quest for more rationality itself be conducted rationally, so that we can avoid damaging mistakes? We probably all know people whose Spock-like anti-emotionalism does not seem to correlate with very good decision making, people who show outward signs of being…
The idea of quantitative self-reflection – knowing yourself better through numbers – is only interesting if the knowledge you get is not more easily available elsewhere. It’s the counter-intuitive knowledge, the “surprise” knowledge, that is the most fun, the most interesting, and perhaps even the most valuable. So, in the spirit of foiling intuitions, here’s…
