Fitbit Flex

July 23rd, 2013

In the beginning of June, I began wearing a Fitbit Flex. I decided to purchase one for two reasons. First, wearable computing is growing very quickly, and is increasingly more interesting as well. Second, the idea of measuring (a few elements of) my health on a daily basis is fascinating to me, so I thought it might be beneficial to do so.

The Flex has become a much larger part of my daily routine than I thought it would. If you are unfamiliar with it, the Flex is a relatively unassuming wristband-bound device that tracks how many steps you take and your movement while you sleep and syncs that data to a companion iPhone application using Bluetooth. The iPhone application shows you (approximately) how many steps you made each day, what (approximate) distance you walked, and (approximately) how many calories you’ve burned. In addition, the application allows you to log meals as well.

Typically when I begin using some kind of system that’s supposed to improve my life in some way but requires constant input from me, I use it for a while when I’m excited about it, until one day when something gets in the way (life) or I just forget, and from then on I forget to use it altogether. To do applications are the best example of this; to be useful, they require constant user input. As a result, once the user fails to enter a new task, the motivation to continue using it begins to disappear.

I assumed the Flex and meal logging would follow that same pattern—I would use it for a couple weeks because I’d still be excited about a new piece of technology, but once that newness wore off and once I forgot to log a day’s meals, I would stop paying attention to it. And then it would be another device in a drawer.

After nearly two months of use, though, I’m still using it. And not just using some of it, like step counts—I’m also using meal logging and sleep tracking as well.

I think that’s because the Flex provides a certain amount of information without any effort on my part. As long as I wear it, I can see how much I’ve moved around each day, and a (good enough) approximation of how many calories I’ve burned. That’s quite informative on its own. Actual data (over a fairly large period of time) makes it much more clear to myself that I need a sustained plan for getting in better shape, and crucially, it also is much more rewarding on days when I am quite active. Seeing how many miles I’ve moved, and feeling the pleasant little buzz the Flex makes when I cross my daily goal, is surprisingly powerful. It’s certainly more powerful than the vague sense I had before that I wasn’t active enough.

As a result of that “free” information, I have a large motivation to also log my meals, because doing so will show me my (rough) caloric input versus my (rough) caloric output. We all know that certain foods are very high in calories, carbohydrates and fats, but it’s an amazing thing when you can get a fairly good idea of how many calories you’ve already eaten for the day, how many you’ve burned, and what that piece of chocolate cake is going to do. Suddenly, there’s a higher internal cost to eating badly, because you can see it all laid out for you.

But interestingly, logging my meals—something I’ve gotten in the habit of doing for the above reasons—has had a more subtle effect, too: eating well consistently is much more satisfying than it otherwise would be. Each time I check in that I had fruit or vegetables rather than chips or french fries, it’s gratifying. It makes it a bit of an accomplishment. I didn’t expect that at all, but at least for me, there’s absolutely a feeling of accomplishment that results from consistently eating and logging healthier meals and snacks.

Because I now have immediately accessible information about how much I exercise and what I eat, it’s given me much more motivation to plan my meals and exercise, and to stick with it. Before, it was fairly easy to skip out on a day’s exercise (which turned into a few days, and then weeks…) or to shrug off a day of poor meal choices as a one-time fluke (even if it wasn’t), because I could. It’s much harder for me to do that, though, when the information is right in front of my face. That’s important.

What’s important, too, is that it hasn’t turned me into a calorie-counting, joyless automaton. It hasn’t turned eating into something that’s purely for providing energy and nutrients. I don’t always avoid large meals or dessert because it might bump me over my calorie target for the day. In fact, it’s been liberating, because it’s helped me impose a bit of discipline in my regular eating, so having an occasional large meal or a dessert doesn’t feel shameful at all—it’s something that I can enjoy without worrying that I’m eating terribly. I know I’m consistently eating well, so occasional indulgence won’t hurt.

It’s interesting how powerful a little information can be.

Tomely has put together a terrific ebook bundle that includes Jack Cheng’s These Days. The bundle is completely DRM-free, a portion of proceeds goes to charity, and if These Days is an indication of the other books’ quality, it’s a damned good collection.

Plus, this is just a good idea. I love this kind of thing.

July 22nd, 2013

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July 22nd, 2013

The government is arguing in court that only the executive branch is capable of deciding whether American citizens pose enough of a threat that they should be assassinated:

Mr. Hauck acknowledged that Americans targeted overseas do have rights, but he said they could not be enforced in court either before or after the Americans were killed. Judges, he suggested, have neither the expertise nor the tools necessary to assess the danger posed by terrorists, the feasibility of capturing them or when and how they should be killed.

“Courts don’t have the apparatus to analyze” such issues, so they must be left to the executive branch, with oversight by Congress, Mr. Hauck said. But he argued, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has in the past, that there are multiple “checks” inside the executive branch to make sure such killings are legally justified.

Just to make what the government claims a little more clear: the government is arguing that the executive branch should have the legal power to decide wholly on its own which American citizens need killed.

What rights do we have when they “[cannot] be enforced in court either before or after” the president kills one of us, and if the president has the power to decide who should be killed?

July 22nd, 2013

My thanks to Digg for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. This should be especially applicable to everyone, so go give it a look!


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July 13th, 2013

Antitrust scholar Randal Picker:

There’s a simple story about publishers wanting to change prices and failing until the white knight appears in the form of Steve Jobs. But there’s a flip side to that. Apple would say: “we didn’t do anything here that we didn’t have an independent interest in doing, independent of whatever happened in e-book prices.

July 11th, 2013

Reihan Salam links to a post by Ross Eisenbrey which argues that government, not business or markets, is primarily responsible for innovation we’ve seen in technology:

Mazzucato suggests that, given the extent to which tech companies like Apple and Intel owe their great good fortune to the federal government’s investment in R&D, they should share more of their profits with the taxpayers. Instead, of course, Apple has been offshoring profits to avoid taxation and most of the tech industry is contributing to the efforts of the U.S Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the organized business lobby to cut corporate taxes and shrink the government. As Mazzucato makes clear, cutting taxes and the government is no recipe for an innovative, competitive future—just the opposite. 

Mazzucato points out that many of the iPhone’s core technologies, such as solid state storage, capacitive sensors and GPS, all have their roots in government-sponsored labs. She presumes, then, that government is therefore largely responsible for the innovation itself, and so (1) we should continue supporting government-funded research projects, and (2) those companies that benefit from taxpayer “risk-taking” should “share” more of their profits with the government.

But as Salam points out, companies have no moral obligation to do so. The government funded much of that research for its own purposes. Salam writes:

The U.S. government devised the technologies Mazzucato identifies for its own, usually defense-oriented reasons. Mazzucato implicitly suggests that in a counterfactual universe in which the Cold War had never taken place, and in which defense expenditures hadn’t diverted spending from other domains or forced higher tax levels, etc., innovations in information technology would not have taken place either. The decades that preceded the Cold War, during which there was considerable private sector innovation in early information technologies, suggests that this is not the case, but of course we can’t really say.

What’s worse, though, is that requiring some formative compensation for that research would undermine the very innovation that Eisenbrey and Mazzucato claim that the government was actually responsible for. Salam again:

As Amar Bhidé often notes, an Englishman pioneered the World Wide Web under the auspices of the government-financed CERN laboratory in Switzerland, yet the U.S. has been the main source of consumer internet innovation. U.S. internet firms do not, however, pay the Swiss and other European governments a formal innovation bounty. Part of the reason is that everyone profits from the free flow of knowledge, which is why excessive patents are such an economic scourge.

The reason is that doing so would reduce that free flow of information, and therefore the actual work it takes to create a useful product and bring it to market. Eisenbrey conveniently skips over the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s where technology companies invested huge sums of capital and work into developing these base technologies into something useful for consumers, and into something consumers would buy. There’s an implied derision at that effort as something other than innovation, but it absolutely is, and it’s what actually makes those technologies useful for people. Without those companies continuing to iterate on solid state storage, and without other companies creating salable products that utilize it, solid state storage never would have been anything more than a curiosity in a lab. Similarly, without Intel developing the microprocessor, and without Apple, Microsoft and the PC makers creating PCs for those microprocessors that appealed to consumers, they never would have developed like they have, either. And as a result, those technologies never would have evolved enough to create a handheld, touchscreen phone that’s always connected to the web. It would have been impossible.

Note, however, that story doesn’t minimize the role of government-funded research. Rather, it shows that it plays a role in innovation, but it is not the entire story by any stretch. And it shows, too, why the free flow of ideas and technology is so important. Without it, there can be very little actual innovation, because “innovation” inherently means seeing a connection between disparate ideas and technologies, how they can fulfill a need for people, and putting them together such that it creates something that didn’t really exist before. Innovation may be greater than the sum of its parts, but it is nonetheless the summation of many different things that already exist. Placing formal restrictions on those ideas, such as overbearing patents or, in this case, requirements to pay back more to the government which claims responsibility for them and state direction of innovation, impedes that flow of ideas and innovation as a result.

This is why simplistic stories about where new ideas and products come from, and simplistic moral stories about who deserves what for those ideas and products, can be so damaging—they elide much more complicated systems.

July 11th, 2013

Apple’s New Beginning

July 9th, 2013

At WWDC this year, Apple announced the most dramatic update to iOS since iOS 2 introduced the App Store and SDK for developers. The update is also the most controversial.

In 2012, Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice-president (SVP) of iOS, and distributed his responsibilities among Apple’s executive team. Craig Federighi became SVP of software, unifying the iOS and OS X teams under one leader. Eddy Cue received the title SVP of “Internet Software and Services,” unifying Apple’s iTunes, iBooks and App stores, iCloud, Maps and Siri. And in addition to hardware design, Jonathan Ive assumed responsibility for Human Interface design as well in the shake-up.

At the time, Adam Lashinsky reported that Forstall refused to sign an apology for iOS 6′s Maps release, and that sealed his fate. While his refusal may have been what precipitated his firing, Lashinsky says that Forstall didn’t get along with Ive. I’ve heard similar things as well, and that those difficulties were not isolated with Ive.

I don’t think Cook decided to fire Forstall simply because he didn’t get along with others in Apple’s management team, or because he refused to take public responsibility for Maps’s issues. Rather, I believe it was a result of Cook re-organizing Apple’s management structure to reflect his becoming CEO. Cook is not Steve Jobs, and he does not pretend to be, so he decided to change Apple’s structure to reflect that.

Jobs fulfilled a rather unique role as CEO of Apple. Rather than oversee and manage the work of others, Jobs was intimately involved in product and product design decisions. No detail was too small for Jobs’s attention. Jobs both originated product ideas and took part in iterating on them, but more importantly, Jobs acted as a filter for Apple. All product decisions ultimately passed through him; he approved new products and new directions, and vetoed them, too. As a result of this role, collaboration among his lieutenants and teams wasn’t as important; indeed, Jobs was known to foster competition and even conflict among individuals and teams to try to elicit their very best work, and then he would choose what he saw as the superior work and direction for Apple.

Cook, as far as I know, doesn’t scrutinize each pixel of an application’s design. He doesn’t have Jobs’s ability to understand what makes for a good product. Jobs was one-of-a-kind, and Cook recognizes that. Recognizing that, however, means that he couldn’t continue Jobs’s management style. Instead, Cook needs to rely on his management team to replace Jobs’s role. Each member must take absolute responsibility for their area of focus and must be incredibly talented at managing it. Most integrally, though, because Apple no longer has the singular filter that all larger product decisions pass through, that management team must work together. Apple could withstand conflict and islands—even benefit from it—with Jobs because each area ultimately ran through him, and because he directed each area. Since Cook can’t fill that role, he needs supremely talented people in charge of each area working with each other to set Apple’s direction. Jobs’s Apple could feed off of discord, but Cook’s Apple must feed off of collaboration.

In Apple’s introduction video for iOS 7, Jonathan Ive says that “We see iOS 7 as defining an important direction and in many ways, a beginning.” While Ive may have meant they saw it as a new beginning for iOS, iOS 7 also marks the beginning of Apple’s new management structure.

When Cook fired Forstall last year, it wasn’t clear what it meant or whether it was for the better. Embarrassingly, Cook hired John Browett to head retail in April 2012 and fired him in October along with Forstall. One way to read that—and many did—was that Cook’s leadership was failing; he had hired an obviously bad fit for retail and was forced to get rid of him in six months. In that light, Forstall’s firing and Apple’s management restructuring looked like it could be the result of a struggling management team.

Until WWDC this year, it wasn’t clear whether that view was correct, or whether it was a part of Cook’s reorganizing Apple to work best under new leadership. Today, though, I think it’s clearly the latter view that was correct.

With that out of the way, I believe that this year’s keynote was meant to establish the foundation for Tim Cook’s Apple. In episode 19 of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Marco Arment, John Siracusa and Casey Liss discuss the keynote introduction video, which explains Apple’s motivation. Siracusa says that while he liked the video, he thinks that it suggested they were about to introduce something groundbreaking, and that OS X Mavericks, the new Mac Pro and iOS 7 didn’t live up to that. Siracusa might be right, but I think he misses its intent. This wasn’t meant to congratulate themselves for being great; rather, it was meant to affirm Apple’s motivation for what they do. Along with their “Our Signature” ad, I think they are the equivalent of the “Think Different” campaign for the Cook era.

Famously, Jobs said that the people at Apple shouldn’t try to make decisions by asking themselves what he would have done. Instead, he said, they should just do what’s right. Clearly, Cook took that to heart. This is Cook’s Apple, and they are not constraining themselves by what feels Jobs-like. Cook hasn’t confused the trappings of Jobs’s Apple—how Jobs managed the company—for its heart: an irrepressible desire to make insanely great products that improve people’s lives and give them joy.

Apple, then, has changed significantly since 2011. Things are quite different at the top than they were then, and to my eyes, Apple seems more open to the world than its ever been in important ways, too. But those changes have all been made so that Apple can continue doing what they always have. This may be Cook’s Apple, but the core is just as it’s always been.

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July 8th, 2013

Over at the Basil blog, I wrote an overview of making great barbecue for the Fourth of July.

There’s not much better than good barbecue, it’s a lot of fun to do, and it’s really not very hard, either. If you want to give barbecue a try, I think this is a great place to start.

This weekend is going to be a bit of a cooking fest for me. For the Fourth of July itself, my girlfriend and I are going to be making grilled steak banh mi, with a creamy avocado and salsa verde sauce, cilantro and home-made pickled daikon and carrots. And on Saturday, my Dad and I are going to smoke a pork shoulder (my first time trying pork shoulder, so it should be fun).

I love cooking. It’s incredibly satisfying to make a good meal for family and friends yourself, and it’s so much fun learning new dishes and experimenting with them. If cooking isn’t quite your thing, give it a try sometime. You might like doing it, and it’s a terrific way to spend time with your significant other, family and friends. The time spent together with people while cooking in the kitchen or backyard is almost always special.

Happy Fourth of July to you all!

July 1st, 2013

Malte Spitz, member of the German Green Party’s executive committee:

Although we would like to believe in the Mr. Obama we once knew, the trust and credibility he enjoyed in Germany have been undermined. The challenge we face is to once again find shared values, so that trust between our countries is restored.

Perhaps instead of including a quote from James Madison in his speech, arguing that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” Mr. Obama should have been reminded of the quote from another founding father, Benjamin Franklin, when he said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

July 1st, 2013

Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman argue the NSA’s spying is illegal:

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg and David Ignatius.

This view is wrong — and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

July 1st, 2013

Reihan Salam points out something that’s obvious but is rarely mentioned in the little discussion we have about global warming—the hardest challenge is in the developing world:

Canada has 35 million people. Africa has just over 1 billion. But rather remarkably, Canada consumes about as much energy as all of Africa, according to Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Power Hungry, a provocative look at the global energy industry. As African economies grow, however, it is a safe bet that African energy consumption will grow with it, just as energy consumption has increased in China and India and around the world as hundreds of millions have escaped poverty. And that is the key challenge facing those who hope to do something about carbon emissions, including President Obama.

The developed world may be able to wrestle its carbon output within reasonable bounds (although that will come with great sacrifice, too), but doing so in the developing world will be a herculean task. But what’s worse, is it seems hardly moral to force people in the developing world, who are just now on the precipice of enjoying a greater standard of living, to do without the benefits that fossil fuels bring to their lives. The developed world has burned its way to prosperity, to the point where it can decide to control its carbon output, but much of the developing world hasn’t. How is it that the wealthy West can ask people who never enjoyed the same privileges to give up their right to them?

Global warming is often portrayed as a problem that can be solved with relatively pain-free solutions—increase gas-mileage requirements for car-makers, use public funding to accelerate development of renewable and “clean” energy technologies—but that conveniently ignores the scale of the problem, and the moral difficulties of doing so.

July 1st, 2013

Reihan Salam:

This past weekend, a friend mentioned that if San Francisco had the population density of Manhattan, it would have a population of 3.3 million, far more than its actual population of 825,000. And I calculated that if San Francisco had the population density of the five boroughs of New York city, including relatively low-density outer boroughs like Staten Island and Queens, it would have a population of 1.2 million. Despite San Francisco’s reputation as a hotbed of progressivism, the city is in many respects very “conservative,” which is to say resistant to change.

July 1st, 2013

Spying in the U.S.A.

June 26th, 2013

I don’t have much time lately, so this piece will be shorter than I intended, but I want to write briefly about the NSA’s spying programs.

The NSA is collecting, it seems, phone records for all U.S. citizens. They are collecting “metadata” on our phone calls—that is, what number a subscriber called, where they called from, and for how long the call lasted. The Obama administration tried to minimize this by claiming that the information collected did not include the subscriber’s identity or the conversations themselves.

That’s brazenly dishonest and preys on the public’s ignorance. While the program may not directly collect the subscriber’s identity, or the identity of the person they called (maybe! we really have no way to know, since the program is classified and this statement came from an anonymous administration official), it’s trivial for the government to look up who that phone number belongs to. Moreover, the information they are collecting is arguably more important than the conversations themselves, since they provide a very detailed picture of where a person goes, who they’re in contact with and at what times. The only way it could be reassuring that the NSA is not collecting identities and recording conversations is if you don’t understand how powerful a phone call’s metadata is, and how easy it is to look up who owns a phone number. This administration’s attempt to minimize it is, therefore, absolutely vile and reprehensible. It is not only dishonest, but disturbing. They are trying to use the public’s ignorance of the issue, which is a result of their tireless effort to keep these programs a secret, against us to prevent us from coming to an accurate understanding of precisely what the government is doing.

That is as worrying to me as the programs themselves. This administration has pursued leakers with a zeal and ferocity that this country has never seen before. President Obama claims that he does so in order to protect the lives of U.S. troops and intelligence agents in the field, but the administration’s response to these leaks shows another purpose: they are attempting to batten down the hatches to prevent the public from gaining an understanding of precisely what the government is doing to us in our name.

The end result is this: we have a government that collects all of our phone records, has access to nearly all of our personal, private online communications, and that not only refuses to tell us what they are doing, but attempts to cloud the issue and mislead us. They say that there are ample rules and safeguards in place to ensure this information is not abused. Bullshit. The only court overseeing it is a secret court whose decisions we cannot see, and who provides no real direct oversight whatever. And even if that were the case—even if they were using this information correctly and guarding it jealously from abuse—recording our every communication is inherently an abuse of our rights. It is an abrogation of the right to privacy when the government can record any and all communications we make. There is no privacy, just the government’s word that they won’t use their great power to harm us. This is not the beginning of a slippery slope; we have already fallen straight on our asses, slid down it and lie crumpled and battered at the bottom.

Our government spies on us all and lies to us about it. There is no gray here. It is wrong, and our government is doing us harm. Our government has convinced itself not just that it needs this power, but that it deserves this power, and that it deserves our trust. It does not deserve the power to collect any communications it pleases, nor does it deserve our trust that it will not use it to harm us.

In Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address, he said:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

If there is a tight summation of Obama’s governing philosophy, this is it—the question is not how big government is, but whether it works. Through his actions, Obama showed his philosophy to be false. He did not restore the “vital trust” between the people and our government—he undermined it by doing his business behind closed doors and by ruthlessly ensuring that anyone who dared leak information to the public about that business is prosecuted. But worse, this shows why the size of government—that is, the extent of government’s power and its reach into our lives—is so vitally important. As the government’s power coalesces, and as it reaches further into our lives, the likelihood of abuse of power increases and the magnitude of its effect does, too. Worse, this philosophy justifies the very abuses we see now and the abuses that Obama criticized so much before running for president: if those in power feel they can use it without “unnecessarily” (the definition of which is, conveniently, defined by the government) impinging on our rights while still protecting our security, then it is justified—because the standard used is effectiveness.

That philosophy provides for a dangerous level of confidence in all levels of government, and confidence in their motivations and ability to prevent abuse. As James Madison wrote, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But humans are not angels, and power tends to alter people’s sense of right and wrong in unbecoming ways. That recognition implies that we should be skeptical of government and skeptical of increases in government power, because abuse is so easy a road to end up on. Obama dispenses with that skepticism and embraces a focus on how well it works. The NSA’s spying, the most espionage prosecutions of any president in history, and the government’s attempts at misleading us are the direct result of that.

There’s nothing else to be said than this: it is wrong, and it should not stand.

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