Seth's Blog

• Rating prisons on Yelp. Quantified Institutions.
• Widespread fraud at Indian drug company that makes generic drugs widely sold in the United States. Maybe this article will cause people to stop buying their products. It isn’t obvious to me what to do about this problem, although apparently the fine was too small. Jail for the owners?
• Poisoning at Tsinghua University
• Association of Restless Leg Syndrome with glutamate

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Andy.

A la Google Glass, Gary Wolf announces a Quantified Self contest/give-away:

In conjunction with our upcoming QS Europe Conference in Amsterdam on May 11/12, our friends at BodyMedia have agreed to donate a complete personal SenseWear System (retail price $2,500), a state-of-the-art wearable sensor that allows raw data output. That’s going to be our prize. So if you have good questions, we can supply you with a way to collect the data.

The best answer wins the sensor.

• The state of self-tracking by Ernesto Ramirez and Gary Wolf
• Schizophrenia (the negative symptoms) improved by folate and B12 supplementation but only in patients with impaired folate metabolism
• Why more Type 1 diabetes in Finland than neighboring Russia?
• A scientist tries to cure his own cancer
• Resveratrol disappointment
• Where do allergies come from? ”Foreign-born children residing in the United States had half the risk of developing allergies than those who were born here.”

Thanks to Peter McLeod, John Batzel and Joseph Sinatra.

The first Quantified Self meetup was held at Kevin Kelly’s house in 2008. Tim Ferriss has posted his notes from that meeting. I was one of the speakers and his notes show how much I repeat myself.

Inside Tracker sells blood panels — for example, 20 things measured in your blood (e.g., hemoglobin, magnesium, Vitamin D). It was founded in 2009 in Boston, Mass., by Gil Blander, a biology Ph.D., and two other people. They started offering the service in late 2011. Their main customers are athletes (20% professional, 30% amateur) and many Quantified Selfer’s (20%). I recently interviewed Dr. Blander:

What have you learned from the data you’ve collected?

Around 60% of the population has low Vitamin D.[What's low Vitamin D?] As of today, if you look at the ranges of the diagnostic companies, they are saying that everything below 30 ng/ml is low Vitamin D. We are giving you your optimal zone based on age, gender, athletic activity and ethnicity. We also compare you to your peers. (more…)

• Fermentation forum
• Fruit and vegetable consumption today predicts happiness tomorrow
• multiple sclerosis and mercury exposure
• some bacteria protect against acne — a good reason to not take antibiotics for acne
• A fecal transplant eliminated a serious intestinal infection (in mice)
• The Iris Code (a 2004 article about Iris Chang)
• Zeo (sleep tracking) out of business

Thanks to Paul Nash and Adam Clemens.

• Why do few journalists become politicians?
• Another crowd-funded human microbiome project (in addition to American Gut, which I’ve mentioned earlier)
• Psychiatrist keeps prescribing Adderall to boy in spite of warnings from the boy’s parents that he’s addicted
• Life-logging workshop in Rome. “This creation of lifelogs . . . will enable us to better understand ourselves.”
• Indian fermented food
• Sleep helps solve difficult problems but not easy ones

Thanks to Dave Lull , Bryan Castañeda, Patrick Vlaskovits and Tucker Max.

• Quantified Spouse
• Downsides of treadmill workstations. The biggest problem I had with my office treadmill workstation was that it made too much noise. It was also very tiring.
• Anticipation of interaction with a woman reduces men’s cognitive performance
• Look back at Is There No Place on Earth For Me?, a profile of a schizophrenic woman by Susan Sheehan
• Why do Finnish students do so well on PISA (an international comparison)? Finnish students do much better than Norwegian students even though the two countries are quite similar.

Thanks to Phil Alexander, Vic Sarjoo, and Navanit Arakeri.

• Kamal Patel’s quantified self experiment, week 1. Will a lot of quantification improve his health? I wonder if he is measuring too many things.
• Glenn Greenwald on the Aaron Swartz case. Sign a petition to fire Assistant US Attorney Steve Heymann.
• Chernobyl wildlife. “Abundant and surprisingly normal-looking.”
• American Gut Project. Via Mark’s Daily Apple.
• Widespread failure of Johnson & Johnson hip replacement. I am curious why this problem was not noticed in early tests of the device. Leave aside FDA approval — why was the device approved by Johnson & Johnson?  Too-early failure is not an obscure side effect.
• Heather Brooke TED talk about exposing government corruption. The current “information enlightenment,” says Brooke, is “about searching for the truth, not because somebody says it’s true, “because I say so.” No, it’s about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested. That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God.”
• Nassim Taleb points to history and the Davos moderator has a curious response: “Who wants the money back?”

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Dave Lull.

• The spread of self-tracking.
• Sitting down and getting up from floor test predicts longevity. Your score depends on how much support you need. “[The correlation with mortality] persisted when results were controlled for age, gender and body mass index, suggesting that the sitting-rising test score is a significant predictor of all-cause mortality; indeed, subjects in the [lowest] score range [score 0-3] had a 5-6 times higher risk of death than those in the reference group [score 8-10].”
• Psychiatric diagnoses, such as depression, widened by psychiatrists who take money from drug companies. One psychiatrist “was skeptical of efforts to reduce the financial ties to industry.“It has gotten to be a witch hunt,” he said.“Most academics have taken money from pharma if they’re successful,” he explained.”

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky and Tim Beneke.