"Beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else."

Beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.

from Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

2010-12-17: They did WHAT?

Quick links from the past week of experiments in the World Wide Lab

The Stanford Prison Experiment at America's airports: A biased article, but I like the insight comparing the Stanford prison experiment to recent changes in TSA regulations. My personal spin is that we've willingly traded security theater (gotta' love that term) and a measure personal freedoms for the perception of safety.

Daniel Rubin: The essence of fame: One man's social experiment to become famous. To be fair, he produces Howard Stern's show, so he's got a little bit of a leg up than most of us would have. As in all experiments, I wonder what he'll measure, and what his definition of success is.

Is Wi-Fi killing trees? Maybe: An interesting meta-story about science and the danger of results being reported before a proper experiment was run. What is the role of such a "preliminary" experiment?

Obama on 'Mythbusters': What happened with his 'death ray'?: The president selected the Archimedes Heat Ray (a device to focus sunlight onto approaching ships, causing them to catch fire) for the test. I love the MythBusters show and I think it's a brilliant way to popularize engineering and skepticism. I like the comment one of the shows stars made:

But at the end Jamie explained that failure in science isn't bad. It's just the beginning. You've ruled something out, and you never know what else you might discover. For instance, to somebody on the boat, the mirrors were very dazzling and distracting, to the point where suspicious attackers might just have sailed away.

Adele's freaky dream cheese experiment: As part of an upcoming book, an author is will direct six volunteers to eat cheese for six consecutive nights, recording their dreams. Be prepared, though, for someone who says "my dreams stink."

Chrome Experiments - "Google Gravity" by Hi-ReS!: I'm not a Google Chrome user (I have too many Firefox shortcuts and plugins I'm tied to), but I love this site for its creativity and sheer fun. Here the goal is to make it easy for people to experiment with web technologies. I like it because play is important in science, and is one class of source of accident and discovery.

After Quick Redhead Experiment, Cher Is Back to Black: I bring this up because it seems to me at once frivolous and profound. Frivolous because, well, who cares what her hair color is? And profound because playing with our identities is an important class of experimentation, certainly when we're growing up, but later as a tool to shake us out of our self-image.

YouTube Experiments with New, Personalization-Heavy Homepage: Another example of the value of testing new ideas before rolling them out. I don't know in the case of YouTube how "light" this product was to create, and most of us don't have their audience for testing, but we can certainly apply prototyping to our personal lives.

Kinect For A Healthier Life - An Experiment In Weight Loss: An example of how making a new technology widely available inspires experimentation.

Imagining Gorging On Your Favorite Food Eases Cravings And Helps You Eat Less: I'm immediately turned off by prose starting "This amazing discovery," Think, Try, Learn says "Don't trust me, show me." Anyone want to try it? The idea:

If you want to lose weight, imagine that you are devouring your favorite food repeatedly; apparently your cravings will ease, you will end up eating less food, and your diet is more likely to be successful,

Is There a Self-Experimentation Gender Gap?

[cross-posted from Quantified Self]

As I get to know the QS community and the wider life-as-experiment one, I've noticed something troubling. In some areas there seems to be more men participating in our work than women. In this post I'll try to identify the problem, suggest a couple of causes, and then get your feedback on what you think is going on and how we might improve things. (Note: I present this in the spirit of making our work accessible to everyone, and in hopes of getting a discussion going. I'm taking a bit of a risk here, so if I accidentally ruffle any feathers, please be generous and let me know so I can fix it up.)

The problem

This first came to my attention during a conversation I had earlier in the year with a very bright friend I was collaborating with on my Edison project. While discussing who our possible users might be, she made the casual remark that self-tracking tools are a "guy thing." To back this up she pointed out that most of the experiments created in Edison are by men. She went on to wonder whether the very idea of treating life as an experiment appeals more to men than women. "What woman would want to look at relationships as experiments?" she asked.

She was being intentionally provocative to make the point, which worked because I've been thinking about it ever since. I didn't (and still don't) believe that there's anything intrinsic to our QS work that's not gender-neutral, but I think there are factors that go toward explaining what she noticed.

Let me give you a few very rough data points from asking around the community. Please note that I don't offer these examples as concrete evidence, but to make the point that, at least by some measures, there's a gender imbalance that we might need to be aware of.

• QS comments: I looked back at the most recent comments here going back a few months. I found about 80, ruled out ones by me and my fellow contributors, and came up with an approximate male-to-female ratio of 80/20 (20% of comments were by women, the rest by men).
• QS videos: I also reviewed the videos that've been uploaded to the QS Vimeo page and found the same approximate ratio: 80/20.
• Boston QS Meetup: Eyeballing the last two meetings (both of which were excellent thanks to Michael Nagle), I estimated around a 90/10 ratio, men to women.

Possible factors

This got me thinking about what might be going on. Here are a few questions.

Tools vs. community: Could it be that having a gadget or tool focus selects predominantly for guys? My colleague suggested that while men are attracted to tools, women are more drawn in by community and collaboration. In an email conversation, Alex told me she'd talked a bit about this with a researcher who wondered whether men like tracking numbers and women like tracking thoughts/stories, like in diaries.

Topic of interest: For sites that are specific to one area of tracking, does the domain attract one gender over the other? I ran this past Alex, who said that at CureTogether ~2/3 of her members are women. In this reply she suggests a hypothesis:

Thanks for the question, Faren! According to a 2004 Kaiser report, more women are affected by chronic conditions than men. However, it is also possible that since we started with women's health conditions at CureTogether, we have attracted more women than men to join as members.

Gender and science: Above the level of tools and sites is the perspective of poking, prodding, and measuring as a way to go about the world. Is there an underlying social bias that keeps women away? In my Think, Try, Learn work I argue that the urge to discover is a fundamental characteristic of being human, but there continue to be disturbing gender barriers to women in science. For example, see the Boston Globe article Women, science, and the gender gap and The Daily Beast's Women in Technology: Is There a Gender Divide?

Initial population: How important to gender make-up is the seed group of people who first heard about the work? When I talked with Michael about this at the last QS Boston meetup, he mentioned that his network included many technical folks, a field which is still biased toward guys. For Edison I tapped my productivity blog, which for some reason appealed to men. And as Alex pointed out above, she started with women's health conditions.

Site design: This might be a little out there, but does the appearance of a site matter to gender participation? The controversial post He Said, She Said - Web Design by Gender, in spite of critiques, got me thinking about this. Beyond look-and-feel, I'm curious about how the interaction of quantitative and collaborative tools might influence gender usability.

My take

My belief is that the ideas and tools we talk about here on QS can appeal to anyone who wants to make his or her life better, regardless of occupation, gender, or background. If there are unnecessary barriers to someone getting involved, then I want to lower those. I'm also motivated because as the father of a 10 year old daughter I have a strong desire to give her tools to make her successful, including the perspective of an experiment-driven life. We've already applied this to things like social engineering (exploring ways to work with the principal to get a "hat day"), repairing things ("Let's try using duct tape!"), testing the foibles of human memory ("I have to floss again tonight? But I *know* I did it last night!"), and investigating cause and effect relationships (tracking her mood to see how it relates to needing a snack).

Questions for you

• Do you think there's a significant gender gap in self-tracking?
• If you're a woman, what barriers do you see in learning about QS or practicing it?
• If you have a self-tracking product or site, what gender information have you learned about your customers or members? What do you make of it?

Is success a function of the number of experiments you try?

Or is it more about which experiments? In my Think, Try, Learn writing I'm working to go deeper into the idea that "There's no such thing as failure, because you can always learn something," which is thin. It also goes to the "A for effort" idea, which again, doesn't address our desire to have our goals reached.

Going back to the question, you can try lots of experiments, but they might not pan out. That's one of the characteristics of trial-and-error discovery. But how do you know which experiments to try? After all, we have limited energy.

Thoughts?

Announcing Edison 2010-12: Privately-shared experiments, Facebook Connect, and more!

I am very pleased to announce the following new Edison features. While it's still early days, these are important steps on the way to my vision of a comprehensive Think, Try, Learn platform. A huge thanks to my early Edison users, and to the folks who helped make the release happen: Andy O'Shea, Zinj Guo, Liza Cunningham, and Graham Westerlund.

Please let me know how you like them. If you haven't tried Edison yet, then give it a shot - it's free! As always, contact me if you have any comments, questions, requests, or bugs to report.

Happy experimenting!

• Private Experiment Sharing
• Facebook Connect

• Stop and Re-Start Experiments
• Linkified URLs
• Quick-Create Experiment Links
• Bug Fix: Category Ordering

Private Experiment Sharing

We've added the ability to control the level of visibility for your experiments. Previously there were only two choices - visible to everyone, or only to you. This release extends the latter so you can invite people to privately view and comment on your experiment. If you invite no one, then the experiment is private and visible only to you, as before. Here are a few examples of experiments you might want to share privately:

• Trying different birth control methods
• Solving a relationship problem at work or home
• Changing a medication dosage
• Experimenting with different ways to get a date

It's simple to use. New experiments start out public and are visible to anyone on the web. The green button and globe icon indicate this. To change visibility, click the button to open the sharing controls. If the experiment is public then you'll see this popup:

To change sharing to private, click the button, and you'll see the popup change to this:

When you first switch to private, you are the only person who can see the experiment. To add other people, type their comma-separated emails into the text box then click the "+" button to the right. This will send a one-time invitation by email. The sharing settings will then look something like this:

If they choose to participate, you invitees can log in to Edison and view and comment on your experiment. To remove an invitee, click on the gray "x" next to his name.

When you close the popup you'll see the sharing button has changed color and icon to show the new visibility setting, .

If you're an an invitee viewing an experiment that's been shared with you, you can click the sharing button to see who else has been invited. Because you're not the owner, you cannot add or remove people. For privacy, you can only see their Edison usernames and not their email addresses.

Facebook Connect

We've added the ability for you to log in to Edison using your Facebook account, rather than having to create an Edison one. Also known as Facebook Connect, all you do is click the button (found in the banner, and on the join and login pages), and log in to your Facebook account when you're presented the popup window:

This window is a secure connection coming from Facebook, not Edison, so we never have your login details. At that point you can get started browsing experiments, commenting, and starting your own.

(An aside: Getting that simple-looking blue "f" icon working was more complex than I anticipated, both technologically and team-wise. My first experiment, Outsource Facebook Connect, was a failure, but fortunately my trusted developer Andy freed up some time to nail it. It helped the second time around to make some simplifying decisions on how account and profile interconnections should work. My colleague wasn't surprised by this; her experience was that integration and authentication between systems is always complicated.)

Stop and Re-Start Experiments

As requested by our users, we've added the ability to switch an experiment's state between "Running" and "Completed." Previously, completing an experiment was permanent. There are two ways to complete an experiment, either by clicking the button or by clicking the "Completed" radio button in the "Status" section when editing an experiment.

When viewing a completed experiment, you'll see that the "Mark as Complete" button has changed to with a yellow-colored checkmark.

Linkified URLs

Edison now automatically turns URLs in experiment details, comments, and observations into clickable links. People have been inserting URLs before for things like resources, data-tracking results, and documentation (e.g., pictures), but they weren't real links until now. I'm excited about this little feature because it supports a use of Edison I had hoped would emerge: Using the context of an experiment as a platform for conversation. People love to share what they know, and we love to learn, and Edison users include links and references. One collaborator cleverly noted that an experiment is a little like a specialized blog. Here's an impressive example from the experiment Walk from Munich to Nuremberg in 6 Days that links to his route:

Quick-Create Experiment Links

I'm enthusiastic about this feature because it is a tiny step in my strategic plan for the platform, specifically the role of Edison partners. Briefly, the thought is to provide a "white label" feature where partners could set up Edison for their own users' experiments, with one-click buttons that allow users to easily create particular experiments related to the partner's work. The buttons could be on the site, in blog posts, or in products. This would be a novel and enticing way to create community, not just around discussion boards and blog posts, but around the excitement of actually trying things, getting help and support from others, and seeing if stuff really works.

In my case I'll be adding "Try It Now!" links to my You Did WHAT? and Where the !@#% did my day go? ebooks to encourage my customers to give the experiments a try. My hope is this would help self-improvers move from passive readers to active experimenters.

Here are a few little examples from You Did WHAT? 99 Playful experiments to live a healthier and happier life. You'll need to log in to your account (creating one if necessary) to get started, and ideally you should customize your answers to the questions:

• Mindset: For three days try some learned optimism training: When a bothersome event happens, tell yourself it is 1) external (not you), 2) temporary (won't last forever), and 3) specific (doesn't apply to everything in your life). What were the results?
• Emotions: For three weeks keep a "worry logbook" and schedule "worry time" at the end of the day. Simply write the troublesome thoughts down the moment they happen, and then think about them at the appointed hour. Did their power over you change?
• Relationships: For a week try this trick for remembering names: Say her name back to her, use it once during the conversation, and repeat it in your head when she looks a way, coughs, etc. If it's important to me you can mentally review her face and name the next day. Did it help?

Please let me know if you'd like to put some buttons on your own site for experiments of interest to your readers. In fact, you can simply copy the source above.

Bug Fix: Category Ordering

Finally, we've fixed a but in the Categories tab where the oldest experiments were shown instead of the newest ones. This feature is still experimental, and I haven't figured out how people are using it, if at all.