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.

We’re excited to announce that the videos from the Quantified Self Europe conference in Amsterdam are starting to come online! I’ll be posting them individually here on the blog, but if you can’t wait for that, you can find some of them here on Vimeo.

Also, QS Amsterdam member Kees Plattel put together this beautiful video impression of the conference, to give you a flavor of what it was like, or to remind you of your experience there. Enjoy, and see you at the next conference (to be announced soon!)

You’ve all heard the buzzwords being thrown around these days, “social media”, “social networking” etc. With the explosion of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other social services it seems like you can’t go anywhere online these days without being bombarded with buttons yelling at us to “Share this!”, “Like This” or “Send this to a friend”. Why the proliferation of social sites and services? All of this shouldn’t be a surprise, after all we humans are social creatures. Rarely do we exist in complete isolation. Cliches like “No man(woman) is an island” are so popular because, well, they’re just true. So how does this relate to your Quantified Self practice?

You are a product of your social environment. We’ve known in the behavior sciences for a long time that the actions of one person can impact the actions of another. One of the most common concepts we’ve used to explain this is social support. To put it simply the social support represents the idea that we our behaviors are influenced and supported by our social structure (friends, family, colleagues, etc.). There are four fundamental types of social support that have been identified as being beneficial for starting and/or maintaining a behavior (follow the previous link for more detailed descriptions):

Emotional support – empathy, understanding, and caring  from others. 

Tangible support – material assistance (money, goods, tools, etc). 

Informational support – guidance, both subjective and objective knowledge. 

Companionship support – inclusion in a social group. 

One of the great things about Quantified Self is that we attempt to provide these four types of support at our meetups around the world and at our annual conferences. I’ve personally been able to find all four over the course of the last year and a half and consider myself immensely lucky to have found caring and smart people willing to support my self tracking journey. But, maybe you don’t have a meetup in your area or you’re not comfortable asking for support from a fellow group member, then what now? Well, one of the ways to enlist social support is to just ask someone who you trust and feel comfortable with to help you. This can be a major step for most people, but in most cases it is a step worth taking.

Briefly, the take away here is that when you are starting or looking to continue in your self tracking practice it is worthwhile to consider eliciting social support from others. Although we call ourselves the Quantified Self the notion of “self” does not mean our practices must be done in solitude. In fact, we celebrate and encourage informational support through our Guide and the Quantified Self Forums. We work hard to create collaborative learning and knowledge exchange and we’re always working on fostering the other aspects of social support, but I encourage you to look outside your local QS community to others in your social circles that may be able to provide you the support you need.

For a more specific example of the power of social support I highly encourage you to take the time to read the Transformative Power of Sharing Mood post by the wonderful Alexandra Carmichael.

I had the great pleasure of attending a QS meetup in Los Angeles this past weekend, hosted by Eric Blue. There was a great group there, 30 or so folks. One great comment in the introductions was from someone near the end of the circle saying, “This is totally blowing my mind!”

Eric has put together a compilation of slides and links from all five LA meetups so far. Here it is:

Show & Tells

1. Ernesto Ramirez gave a presentation (My Bits of Fit) on his Fitbit data and activity patterns, including some great visualizations (Thanks to @chloester)!
• Slides at www.slideshare.net/e_ramirez/my-bits-of-fit
2. Marina gave a presentation on InsideTracker (bloodwork analysis & recommendation) and her own project for tracking Happiness – the Ultimate Answer
• Slides at Inside Tracker – QS LA Presentation
• The Ultimate Answer
• Introduction to the Happiness Formula
3. Brian Dorsey gave a presentation on his product Work Food Out
• Site at workfoodout.com/
4. Eric’s presentation on location tracking and personal travel journal
• Slides at www.slideshare.net/ericblue76/la-quantified-self-meetup-1011-location-tracking
5. Eric’s personal device collection, along with other QS devices in the market, and future devices
• Slides at www.slideshare.net/ericblue76/la-quantified-self-meetup-0811-device-show-tell
6. Eric’s personal project (TRAQS.me) for consolidating his Quantifed Self device data into a central dashboard
   • Demo at traqs.me
   • Slides at www.slideshare.net/ericblue76/traqsme-presentation

Other Links

• Chloe Fan - Visualizations for My Bits of Fit
• Fitbit + Google Spreadsheets = Awesome
• Fitbit Hacks - Eric’s original unofficial API to scrape data
• Fitbit’s Official API
• Cake Health
• Healthcare.gov
• Avado
• InDinero.com
• Creating the Ultimate Personal Travel Journal
• Eric’s Personal Memex Project
• GeoLocation (GPS) and Self-Tracking
• Gordon Bell’s My Life Bits Project

We here at Quantified Self Labs wanted everyone to know that tonight (Feb 7th, 2012) Gary Wolf will be speaking in San Diego on a panel with Dr. Eric Topol, Larry Smarr and Dr. Joseph Smith about “Quantified Self and the Future of Personal Health.”

The panelist for the event include:

Gary Wolf is the co-founder of The Quantified Self, a global collaboration among users and makers of self-tracking tools. His is also a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he writes regularly about the culture of science and technology. His work has appeared The Best American Science Writing (2009) and in The Best AmericanScience and Nature Writing (2009). In 2010, he was awarded the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism prize. In 2005-2006 he was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine parnertship, and hold the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School. Dr. Smarr has recently been profiled by Xconomy about his ‘10-Year Quest for Quantified Health‘

Dr. Joseph Smith is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Science Officer of the West Wireless Health Institute, Dr. Joseph M. Smith leads initiatives to identify and accelerate the use of health care innovations and technologies to advance the Institute’s mission of lowering health care costs.

Dr. Smith has an extensive career at the intersection of clinical medicine and engineering. Prior to joining the Institute, he was most recently Vice President of Emerging Technologies for Johnson & Johnson in their Corporate Office of Science and Technology. He also served as Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Guidant / Boston Scientific, Cardiac Rhythm Management.

Although this event has been sold out for those in the San Diego area, CALIT2 is able to stream a live webcast of the event. If you would like to tune in please set your calendar reminders for 7PM PST and follow the instructions below. Once you’ve downloaded the appropriate software be sure to tune into the live stream at: calit2.net/webcast. 

Calit2 On-Demand Streaming in Windows Media 

Calit2 webcasts require Microsoft’s Windows Media Player or compatible software and a broadband Internet connection.  Our typical webcast stream runs at 512kbps at 640×480 pixels.

All Windows PC users should have a built-in version of the player, or click here to download the latest version.  (Our webcasts require Version 9 or higher)
[Troubleshooting Windows Media Streaming]

Mac users can download a free software program called Flip4Macthat will allow their Quicktime player to play back Windows Media formats.

Troubleshooting playback on a Mac?www.flip4mac.com/support_wmv.htm

In Linux-based environments, free open-source multimedia players such as MPlayer and Xine can be used with the correct codecs installed.

We will also be taking questions via twitter during the event. Please use the #FHSD hashtag if you would like to ask the panelists a question during the Q & A period.

Ewart de Visser had a friend who “didn’t like the whole work thing” and started speculating on foreign currencies. When Ewart asked him how much he was losing in his first few months, his friend wasn’t sure, so they set up a spreadsheet to start tracking his trading performance. In the video below, Ewart describes how he used data to modify his friend’s trading strategy to prevent big losses, as well as the interesting benefits of being tracked by someone other than yourself. (Filmed by the Washington DC QS Show&Tell meetup.)

Will Lam loves coffee. As the chief blogger over at Indie Coffee Blog he’s constantly trying new roasts, new places and letting his readers know about good coffee spots around his hometown of Toronto. In 2011 he decided to go a step further and really track his coffee habits. Let’s look at a few of his awesome insights:

Number of Cups of Coffee Consumed (total and by type):

Frequency of Coffee Consumption:

Total Spending by Location on Coffee:

I highly recommend reading his fascinating blog post about what he learned by tracking his coffee habits over an entire year. You can find that here. Will also used his new found love of data collection to steer him to his local QS Meetup. Way to go Will and thanks for letting us learn from your data!

We got such great feedback on the orignal NFATW post that we decided to turn it into a regular feature. Every few weeks be on the lookout for new posts profiling interesting individuals and their data. If you have an interesting story or link to share leave a comment or contact the author here.

Adam Loving wanted a very lightweight way to track what he did each day, without tweeting it to the world. He built a simple system where he can tell Siri what he did, and it gets recorded in a database. Some data gets automatically entered through if this then that. Adam found that it has motivated him to continue his pushup/situp routine, and keeping his system simple has helped him uncover some funny problems for future improvement. (Filmed by the Seattle QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

About three years ago, Gary Wolf wrote a detailed post on Measuring Mood — some tools are complicated enough to get you grouchy! Gallup goes through a lot of trouble to gauge the US happiness level on a daily basis. Others take a simple approach, such as Eric Kennedy’s recent talk at the Seattle QS meetup on Tracking Happiness.

Ross Larter believes an emphasis on simplicity and community (especially of people who you don’t know elsewhere) has been key to broad acceptance of his happiness-tracking MoodPanda.

Q: How do you describe MoodPanda? What is it?

Larter: MoodPanda.com is a mood tracking website and iphone app. Tracking is very simple: you rate your happiness on a 0-10 scale, and optionally add a brief twitter-like comment on what’s influencing your mood.

MoodPanda is also a large community of friendly people, sharing their moods, celebrating each others’ happiness, and supporting each other when they’re down.

People post many times a day – some tracking their mood from the moment they wake to the point their head hits the pillow at night! We organize people’s posts into their personal mood diary where they can view it many different ways: graphically, as a mood feed, broken down by metrics and even location based on a map.

Q: What’s the back story? What led to it?

Larter: MoodPanda got started in a pub in Bristol, England. A friend was asking people round the table how their day was and somebody replied with a 10/10.  My response was if today was the best day ever what happens if tomorrow is the same as today but then something else amazing happens (I think it included the “pussy cat dolls”), and we chatted for a while on this. The next day I started thinking about the question and told Jake (Co-Founder) about the idea and it went from there. We both work in software development so building the site was not an issue.

We are on MoodPanda version 3 at the moment. For the first 2 versions of the site we built it to track just your own mood. It was only once we added commenting and “hugs” to the current version that we realised that people wanted the interaction with each other. This is when our user based really started to grow.

Q: What impact has it had? What have you heard from users?

Larter: Since the iPhone app has gone live it is growing quickly with many thousands of new user every month, over 60% now come from the Apple app store. We’re seeing about 1000 active user ratings a day. Hugs are a very popular feature. Panda users give out hundreds a day.

One thing we’ve learned is that there seems to be a strong demand for a place online where people can share their feelings with others who don’t know them in “real life”, people who won’t judge them. We see this in the data: only about 35% of mood ratings are passed through to Facebook and only 2% to Twitter. And we’ve heard this directly from users who have posted that its nice to talk to people that are interested in mood and wellbeing and don’t judge them.

Feedback from users has been fantastic, and in some cases very heartwarming. We’ve even had users tell us that they’ve “lived with years of hurt until they discovered MoodPanda”.

We’ve now got so many users in the UK that our mood map is pretty representative. Our UK live mood map was quite similar to the UK Government official one from last year. We also put together a nice infographic of all of our data from 2011.

We are always trying out new ideas, and some have not been well received. We had done some complicated graphs and visualization in the past, and we’ve learned that keeping it simple is the key to moodpanda.

I also never quite realised how much time is needed after all the technical work is done. I spend a ton of time talking on the radio, public speaking, blogging, twittering, etc. about MoodPanda.

Q: What makes it different, sets it apart?

Larter: What makes MoodPanda stand apart are its simplicity and community. Other mood tracking apps are very clinical and can often be intimidating to people first trying to track their mood. We keep it simple: rate your happiness from 0-10 and, if y