Steven Dean

November 9, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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