WNYC’s Note to Self recently asked its listeners to share stories about using mobile apps and fitness trackers to quantify their daily progress—with dieting, sleeping, fitness—for the episode, Your Quantified Body, Your Quantified Self.
I’ve maintained a pretty ambivalent attitude towards the new wave of trackers that have emerged over the last decade with the advent of the smartphone and the proliferation of wearables. In the mid-2000s, I used to employ a heart rate monitor to do interval training for bicycle rides. I have since soured on the practice. After sinking hundred of dollars on a couple of Polar devices, I learned that the best way to train is to simply put in the miles and find a few hills along the way. Of course, others swear by it so your “mileage” may vary.
However, I have unwittingly resumed tracking my activity after getting an Apple Watch. The stock Activity app not only counts my steps, but it awards me circles for meeting daily goals. If I keep active for thirty minutes throughout the day, I get a green circle. If I avert sitting for a full hour, twelve hours throughout the day, I get a blue circle. And if I burn 870 calories, I get a red circle. I regularly meet these goals, but unless I bike more than fifteen miles or take a very long walk, it’s easy to miss meeting the calorie-burned goal. Thus, no red circle for me.
In the episode, we hear about people becoming anxious in meeting their goals, including walking laps around their kitchen before bedtime in order to walk the requisite number of steps. This resonated with me because, once, I was twenty calories short of my daily goal. My solution? I walked to the corner pizza shop to burn those twenty-plus calories and to get that elusive red circle. But I also bought 300-calorie slice of pepperoni.
Obviously, it would have been better not meeting my calorie-burned goal. The Apple Watch and its activity tracking couldn’t save me from my own poor eating choices, and because it does not record my eating, it was none the wiser.
We also hear that for many who obsessively tracked their fitness, dieting, or sleep, they almost invariably were overcome with anxiety, fearing they would not meet their goals. Ultimately, this anxiety leads to their abandoning the trackers. One participant noted that instead of using the notifications to make exercising a regular habit, she noted that dismissing and ignoring the reminders became the habit. Overall, the participants all soured on the experience, much like I did with heart-rate monitoring a decade ago and with journaling and habit-tracking in recent years.
I should note that I have found this podcast series and New Tech City—its predecessor as a segment on WNYC radio—to be bothersome. The host is too technoutopian for my taste and seems very cozy with the technocratic entrepreneurs that she profiles. In this episode, instead of conceding that trackers offer only temporary benefits for most, she imagined possibilities for “what will they think of next?”
You might take a personality test before you choose a tracker, one that understands that you are a social butterfly, and you need social support. You need that competitive edge with your friends… Or you would respond better to a fitness tracker that lights up in soothing colors, indicating it’s lovely outside, the sun is about to set, and right now would be the perfect time to take a twenty-minute walk.
Did you get that? It’s not that constantly tracking our eating, sleeping, and exercise are unnatural processes that as humans we will invariably abandon. It’s that the tracking devices and apps simply don’t have enough data. Yet.
An ad for Soylent 2.0, as it appeared via The Deck.
When I first saw the small boxy ad with a brief text description, which is common to all ads powered by The Deck, I thought it was a joke. Did someone really make a food-drink called Soylent?1
Soylent is indeed real. It is a food substitute, launched in 2014 by Rosa Labs, a Silicon Valley–type startup based in Los Angeles. It aspires to be the future of food.
It’s a Startup
After poking around the Soylent website, I was stricken by how much Soylent uses the lexicon of contemporary tech startups. The website promoting Soylent is mercifully responsive, peppered with little jQuery animations, and styled in the minimalist aesthetic that will someday soon date websites as “soooo 2013.” As you scroll down the page, you’ll find a requisite feature list, illustrated with those circle-masked images that are all the rage these days. The Soylent store is powered through Stripe, and there’s also a “sandwich” video.
Your food has a feature list, illustrated with circle-masked images.
Spend more time on the website and you’ll wonder whether Soylent is a software platform, and not an actual drink. First, Soylent is versioned. The 1.x line was a powder mix, which has undergone several iterations. There are release notes charting the evolution. Though Soylent 1.5 is still for sale, the current 2.0 version is a ready-to-consume drink. It is, after all, a major upgrade. Second, they also open-sourced Soylent for anyone interested in mixing their own Soylent. Third, there is also a beta program to test future versions of Soylent. And lastly, there are the user forums.
It’s “The Future”
Some members of the Soylent Forums appear to belong to a sect of techno-utopian futurists who are determined to save time and money by cutting out food.2 Some active discussions surround pairing Soylent with MealSquares, another food substitute. Others wonder how to deal with the lasting hunger that comes from drinking your meals. But, by far, my favorite discussions come from the polyphasic sleep crowd, who have come to regard sleep as a waste of time and are interested in maximizing net-waking hours. (Full disclosure: I am a coffee napper.) One friend asked what these people are doing with all the extra time they’ve saved by not sleeping or eating: are they researching new ways to save even more time?
I asked a machine learning company to try to find nutrition databases of readily available, deliverable foods from Amazon and to cross reference those databases against the Amazon delivered price in one urban city. The goal is to create the least cost, deliverable daily or weekly menu of food that meets a high level of nutritional requirements for individuals and families.
Although I presume he’s referring to actual food, not necessarily meal replacements, it’s not a stretch to wonder if something like Soylent could be a compatible solution.
It’s “Food”
Despite being initially hesitant, I couldn’t stop thinking about Soylent. I succumbed to my curiosity and ordered a case.
At first taste, I thought “soy milk.” That’s not a stretch given the product’s name and that its primary ingredient is soy. A friend sampled it and reported a more nuanced tasting note: it reminded her of “soy milk left over after finishing your cereal.” That dispelled my first concern, whether it would taste bad. It doesn’t.
That same intrepid friend and I split a bottle recently, before watching Frederick Wiseman’s newest film, In Jackson Heights (2015). Our initial plan was to eat dinner after the screening and drink a Soylent tide us over until then. I even naively quipped about the movie, “it’s not like it’s going to be three hours long.” I was wrong. The documentary ran 190 minutes. I can report that while I was craving food throughout the screening, I didn’t get a headache, feel low on energy, or get “hangry.” I circumvented needing to eat so I could watch a three-hour film. That half-bottle of Soylent did its job.
While Soylent is technically food, it’s hard to see this as a sustainable and nutritionally complete food substitute, even if its stated aims are to be sustainable and nutritionally complete as food. Celebrated food writer Michael Pollan sees Soylent as little more than “Silicon Valley” hype:
Soylent! Soylent is not new. We had Nutrament; you can go to the diet aisle of your supermarket and find all sorts of equally disgusting food substitutes. The genius of Soylent is that it comes out of Silicon Valley, and anything that comes out of there is assumed to be new and technologically advanced and wonderful. But it’s nothing of the type.
Although the company is actually based in a Southern California, I take his point. Soylent is poised to “disrupt” food.
Future of Food is Food
The year before last, I regularly ate dinner at the dining hall at Fordham University. Having broken up with my girlfriend at the end of the summer, I was too depressed to make myself food. Also, because the faculty dining room was being remodeled, the university discounted our meals—to five dollars—so that we would eat with the students living on-campus. While I was excited to eat a cheap, balanced meal, I was surprised to see how many students bypassed the buffet and opted for only a bowl of cereal at dinnertime. Not even pizza or hot dogs could entice them away from Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Lee Hutchinson, an early Soylent adopter, jumped into the polemics of “food vs. ‘food’” and carefully judged it as a “tool in a toolbox.” In his article, he also considered the various people who struggle with food, both those who fear making it and those who don’t much like the taste of food. Soylent offers these people a simple solution: like the undergraduate students who ate a bowl of cereal before heading to their rooms for the night, presumably to study, to game, or both. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it solves the food problem for a while.
But that’s just it: it is ephemeral. The history of food diets—like technology and mass culture—are notoriously riddled with passing fads that don’t endure. Right now, it’s the era of Paleo and gluten-free. Next, we might eat only vegan and raw food. By the end of the century, someone might open an retro, early-21st century place that serves beef and pork. I’m not foolish enough to try to predict whether Soylent will be around in five to ten years. But, like the wave of hot new tech startups and the aesthetics of web design that accompanies that wave will teach us, the future of food might not be as futuristic as some might expect.
Soylent
A “nutritionally complete” food substitute that comes in a white bottle.
I do remember seeing an ad for this a while ago, but this time it made an impression, both in terms of grabbing my attention and getting my money. ↩
I really hope someone archives these discussions so that historians and anthropologists can study them in the future. ↩
Yesterday, a court in California ordered Apple to assist the FBI with bypassing the iPhone’s encryption and security features to recover the data stored on an iPhone 5c used by one of the San Bernardino gunmen. The court order requires Apple to write and install a special software file.
This software file, which one astute observer labelled as FBiOS, would enable the FBI to…
bypass the auto-erase (“poison pill”) feature that kicks in after ten incorrect password attempts;
enter a series of passcodes electronically, without doing so by hand on the iPhone touchscreen;
eliminate the delay that the iPhone introduces after more than four incorrect attempts.
iFixit’s solution to fixing “Error 53” is to remove the old Touch ID cable from the old display and transplant it to the replacement display assembly.
Did you catch that?
After showing us how simple it is to regain access to your iPhone by matching the Touch ID sensor to its cable, the iFixers insist that Apple needs to hear our voices and to write a “simple software tool”:
The request is simple. What we need is a software tool that allows you to re-authenticate your…new Touch ID cable and the Touch ID sensor with the Phone. If they make that simple software tool available, it will un-brick these thousands of phones…
Presumably, iFixit’s request for Apple to write a software tool to bypass security will have to wait until Apple finishes dealing with the FBI’s request for Apple to write a software tool to bypass security.
In information technology, there’s almost always a tradeoff between security and convenience. The more convenient something is to use, the less secure it is. Otherwise, you could leave your front door unlocked, leave your car running, and have 123456 be your password for everything. However, as you know, that is far from secure. You need to lock your front door, you need to turn off the ignition, and you need to have unique, strong passwords for each of your online accounts. This inconvenience yields some measure of security.
The Guardian reported last week about a “fury” from iPhone users against Apple for bricking iPhones that have had their screens replaced by an unauthorized, third-party repair outfit, which inadvertently tampered with the Touch ID sensors during the repair process. Thereafter, the phones stopped working altogether.
If I were to open a repair shop, such as this one, I would call it “Error 53.”
According to various users quoted in the article, an iPhone 6 or later will report an “Error 53” and not function if a third-party repair person has replaced the screen or the home button and if the user has upgraded the phone’s operating system to iOS 9. The issue is prevalent enough that iFixit reports over 180,000 queries to their user forums about “Error 53.” The maligned users and Miles Brignall, the Guardian author who reported on the “fury,” all but accuse Apple of bricking these repaired iPhones in order to force users to only repair their phones through Apple or to buy a new replacement.
Could Apple’s move, which appears to be designed to squeeze out independent repairers, contravene competition rules? Car manufacturers, for example, are not allowed to insist that buyers only get their car serviced by them. Apple charges £236 for a repair to the home button on an iPhone 6 in the UK, while an independent repairer would demand a fraction of that.
Pointing to an economic motive is all too simplistic. Although Apple is certainly concerned with being profitable, these accusations always surface when Apple does something to “brick” someone’s computing device or peripheral. It happened when Apple…
replaced the serial port with USB and rendered a lot of printers obsolete,
eliminated the floppy disk drive in favor of optical drives on the iMac,
replaced SCSI with FireWire,
eliminated swappable batteries in their notebooks,
and, most recently, replaced the 30-pin connector with Lightning.
And when these changes occurred, critics accused Apple of doing so in order to sell expensive adapters.
Instead, these are moves to destined improve the product and the experience. USB and FireWire were far superior to the serial port, ADB, and SCSI, as Lightning has been over the previous 2001-era iPod connector. Similarly, the only reason anyone ever needed a swappable notebook battery was to work longer than two hours, and the built-in batteries in the newer notebooks far exceeded that runtime, making toting those bulky batteries obsolete.
In this case, “Error 53” is to protect the security of the device. An Apple spokeswomen, quoted in the article, says as much:
We protect fingerprint data using a secure enclave, which is uniquely paired to the touch ID sensor. When iPhone is serviced by an authorised Apple service provider or Apple retail store for changes that affect the touch ID sensor, the pairing is re-validated. This check ensures the device and the iOS features related to touch ID remain secure. Without this unique pairing, a malicious touch ID sensor could be substituted, thereby gaining access to the secure enclave. When iOS detects that the pairing fails, touch ID, including Apple Pay, is disabled so the device remains secure.
However, Brignall scoffs at this explanation, labelling it overloaded with “jargon.”
But, to any reasonable technologically competent person, this explanation is certainly sound. Apple’s own philosophy is that iPhone users store all kinds of private information on their devices, and that is Apple’s responsibility to prioritize the security of that device, even at the expense of user’s going to the corner repair shop to fix a cracked screen.
When I dislocated my pinkie finger nearly three years ago, I had a little taste of the American Healthcare System. It was gross. A teammate walked me from Central Park to the emergency room at Mount Sinai–St. Luke’s Hospital. There, the attending physician…
ordered a sets of x-rays to determine whether my finger was broken. It was not.
yanked my finger back into place, which immediately straightened the digit and made it stop looking purple.
ordered another set of x-rays to make sure he didn’t break anything. He didn’t.
bandaged my cut.
administered an intravenous antibiotic to prevent any infection due to my open wound.
prescribed an oral antibiotic for even more protection against infection.
The bill for this treatment was over $6,000.
Once my health insurance reviewed the charges, the hospital immediately reduced the bill to about $2,500. (Imagine if I didn’t have healthcare insurance. Thanks, Obama!) The insurance covered most of it, and I was stuck with the co-pay and the deductible, which amounted to about $600. I eventually paid the bill over time through a hospital collection service’s website. I remember the website looking atrociously dated, but it was at least functional enough that I could save a few postage stamps and pay with my AMEX card.
Earlier today, I was helping a relative pay for an ambulance bill, and the website for paying the ambulance bill demonstrated to me that the hospital collection industry is due for an upstart competitor to enter this field. As of today, their website has four critical problems:
First, go to myambulancepayments.com/. Did you get a 404 error page? I did.
Silly, me! I neglected to prepend www to the URL. I should do that because this website predates the convention of not requiring www to connect to a website. I think that has been standard practice since about 1998.
Second, there’s a warning from Safari that my connection to the website is not secure.
It appears that their SSL certificate expired a few days ago, on February 5, 2016. Did they forget to pay their certificate authority? Ironic, isn’t?
I know what you’re thinking: “who uses Safari?” Perhaps I should fall in line and use Chrome.
Oh, my! That Chrome-generated error page looks even more alarmist that the Safari error page.
Third, though I’m advanced enough to recognize the risks and not enter any personal information, such as my name, address, or credit card information, I proceeded to site.
But, wait… why am I here in the first place???
Fourth, in my Safari installation, which doesn’t have Flash installed and doesn’t load any such content, I noticed some missing Flash content and a plea to install it.
Since Chrome still supports Flash, though maybe not for long, I see that the all-important Flash content is some propagandastic animation, reminding you that you should pay up because they saved your life.
At least, for the many, many people using a mobile device, none of which support Flash, they’ll be spared this visual reminder of the Hobson’s Choice that is the American Healthcare System:
Earlier this week, I submitted the grades for my first online, winter-session class. As I wrote earlier on this site, this was my first experience with a fully online course, either as a student or as a teacher. Aside from speaking with a couple of students who have taken online classes and colleague who has taught a language class over the Internet, I developed this course in a vacuum. This was both liberating and challenging. I felt free to use whatever tools I wanted, but I was also plagued with the uncertainty of whether I was doing things The Right Way, or what technologists refer to as “best practices.”
Since I have taught this class face-to-face for several semesters, I adopted the course into twelve media technologies. Each media technology constitutes a learning unit. The structure is basically as follows:
Manual to Mechanical Media
Writing
Early Print
Mass Print
Photography
Electromechanical Media
Telegraph
Telephone
Motion Pictures
Sound Recording
Electromagnetic and Digital Media
Radio
Television
Computers
Internet
My colleague, who I’ll refer to as Claudine, suggested that I divide the class into a series learning units, each consisting of objectives, assignments, and assessments. I took her advice and, for each media technology, I assigned students to…
read a chapter from Irving Fang’s textbook Alphabet to Internet and a condensed version of an article from the fifth edition of the anthology Communication in History,
After studying four media technologies, I assigned students a midterm exam consisting of essays.
The course was mostly asynchronous. Because the course was online, I wanted to provide students with some flexibility. Nothing about the course was live. They did not have to “tune in” to a lecture. Everything was designed to be completed at his or her own pace. However, because the winter session schedule was so compressed and had to “squeeze in” an entire semester’s work in three weeks, I did require students to complete four learning units per week to keep apace.
Here’s how I set up each learning unit of the course:
At some point last night, someone tried to change the password on my Facebook account. My account has been deactivated since last August, but I learned about this intrusion attempt because I received a notification alerting me to that fact. By the way, it’s well-know that the easiest way to get into someone’s account—Facebook, email, and any other account—is to request a new password, provided you can access your target’s email or know the answer to a challenge question.
As far as I can tell, no one accessed my email or my Facebook account. Nonetheless, I went into my Facebook account to make sure no one did anything fishy. While going over my security settings, I saw that I can assign a trusted Facebook friend to take care of my account after I die, known as a legacy contact. For this bit of digital estate planning, I appointed my brother to act as an executor.
Facebook has a whole process in place to deal with someone’s death, including memorializing the account or permanently deleting it.
Come to think of it, dying might be the only way to ever fully delete your Facebook account. Logging in to my account was really easy, and everything was there just like I remembered it. Having a deactivated account for sixteen months didn’t erase any bit of my presence there.
The New York Attorney General’s office is asking the public to test its broadband speeds to determine whether customers are getting the advertised speeds to all network services.
The test measures the connection to several different CDNs to determine whether those connections are “healthy” enough to be considered “network neutral.” If a connection to a particular CDN is consistently too fast (or too slow), it could lead investigators to learn whether an ISP is deliberately accelerating traffic to its partners or debilitating the throughput as an anti-competitive measure.
Unlike voting, you are encouraged to take this test frequently to help provide the AG’s office with more data on the health of those connections.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
A common sight of the smartphone era is watching people hunt for and then tether themselves to an AC outlet to charge their phones. Prior to the iPhone, mobile phones didn’t use much power because, as I’ve written elsewhere, old phones and PDAs didn’t do very much, and if you did run out of power, you could swap your battery for a freshly charged spare.
But an even older hunt is the search for a strong cellular radio signal. For the most part, I’ve been pretty lucky living in places with strong cellular reception. I have only had problems using my mobile phone when in basements: I lived in one between 2006 and 2007, and I have been working in a subterreanean office at NYU since 2010. Over the years, IP services over Wi-Fi have offered some workarounds to weak or non-existent cellular connections.
iMessage has allowed me to “text” other iPhone users since that is an IP service becaue it uses Wi-Fi first before falling back to the cellular network
My Google Voice number rings all my phones, including a dependable landline phone, where I can place and receive calls. It also allowed me to message friends not on iMessage.
FaceTime Audio works over Wi-Fi, not only the cellular network, and has allowed me place and receive “telephone calls” with even better audio quality than the legacy telephone network.
And, of course, there’s a litany of messaging apps available for smartphones that circumvent SMS over cellular.
As an AT&T customer, the last and best fix finally arrived recently in the form of Wi-Fi Calling. iPhone has been capable of routing phone calls over Wi-Fi for over a year. For example, it was available on T-Mobile after last year’s release of iOS 8. It was finally activated this year, with iOS 9, for AT&T customers using an iPhone 6 or later.
Glenn Fleishman offers an extended tutorial on how to activate Wi-Fi calling for iPhone. The process involves a few steps:
Go to Settings > Phone > Wi-Fi Calling and turn on that feature.
Enter your address in the event you call to make
Allow Wi-Fi Calling for your other devices.
Since activating Wi-Fi Calling, I’ve seen the “AT&T Wi-Fi” text only intermittently. It works at my basement office at NYU, where I can’t reliably access the cellular network but have decent Wi-Fi coverage. It also worked a handful of times at my parent’s house in Southern California, which has some spotty coverage, but it does not work at my own home, where I am almost always connected to Wi-Fi but have reliable cellular reception. The last situation proves that Wi-Fi Calling only works as a fallback to the cellular network.
Nonetheless, I appreciate that I finally can place and receive telephone calls from those places with spotty cellular reception, without resorting to using an IP service like FaceTime or Google Voice. Calls go through using my old plain old telephone number.
Moreover, because SMS is also routed through Wi-Fi Calling, I can send and receive messages to my “green bubble” friends without confusing them with a phone number generated by Google Voice or using a dedicated messaging app, like LINE or What’s App. Gross!
With only three weeks before the start of the fall semester, Final Draft is offering an eighteen-week trial for students at eligible educational institutions. Eighteen weeks should be enough for a semester. After that, students can purchase the software for $129—a discount of $120 off the standard pricing—and then regular upgrades for $99.
