S2E10: The Deep Thinking Gap

Two new shows are joining Fiddly.fm, taking time off to write, making effective data visualizations, the deep thinking gap, the 2015 Quantified Self Expo, the Quantified Self movement, the challenges of measuring and visualizing complex things, Elijah’s workshop at Forward.js 3, and the instructor as entertainer.

Show Notes

Fiddly.fm

• Our podcast network.

Pour Over

• A new tech podcast by Jason Heppler and Paul Zenke coming soon to Fiddly.fm.

The First Draft - S1E9: The Greatest Lie the Writing Devil Ever Told

• Jason and Paul discuss writing, note-taking, tagging, and outlining with Tree, Scrivener, Gitit, Evernote, FoldingText, Mendeley, Zotero, Editorial, Markdown, Copy, LaTeX, Pandoc, MacVim, TextMate, BibTeX, and DEVONthink.

Mac Power Users

• "Learn about getting the most from your Apple technology with focused topics and workflow guests. Creating Mac Power Users, one geek at a time since 2009."

Gestalt Principles for Data Visualization: Similarity, Proximity & Enclosure

• "But let me suggest that gestalt is very much a pragmatic aspect of creating data visualization, in fact a necessary aspect if you plan to do more than simple bar and line charts (and perhaps even for those simple charts)."

Machines in the Valley: Growth, Conflict, and Environmental Politics in Silicon Valley

• A digital history project that serves as a companion to Jason's dissertation.

Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson

• "Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson set down the riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson’s portrait touched hundreds of thousands of readers."

Katz, S. N. (2005). Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century. Interdisciplinary science reviews, 30(2), 105-118.

• "Computing and digitisation are transforming not only the conditions of work for humanists, but also the ways in which humanists think and their disciplines are configured. The digital world both enables and compels new ways of thinking. And, significantly, it is just as transformative of teaching as it is of scholarship. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the new digital humanities environment may be that the distinction between teaching and scholarship is itself being eroded. The database is fast becoming the principal site of work in the humanities."

The Washington Post - Why Silicon Valley needs humanities PhDs

• "Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011. Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?"

The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent by Andrew Hacker | The New York Review of Books

• "Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: “The United States is falling behind in a global ‘race for talent’ that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.” In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives. Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM."

A Science of Literature | Boston Review

• "For some years, humanities scholars have sought to integrate computing technology into their research. These efforts—the “digital humanities”—have inspired public debate well out of proportion to the number of researchers involved or the scope of their findings. P.T. Barnums and Chicken Littles have proclaimed that computation will mark the end of humanistic inquiry. Actual literary research in this vein suggests otherwise."

2015 Quantified Self Expo, QS15

• "The 2015 Quantified Self Exposition highlights the wearable devices and apps that give you intimate and direct feedback about yourself, from how you sleep, eat, and exercise, to what triggers fear and joy."

Quantified Self - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• "The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging."

Quantified Self, About

• "The Quantified Self is an international collaboration of users and makers of self-tracking tools."

Beeminder

• "It's reminders with a sting! Or, goal-tracking with teeth. Mind anything you can graph — weight, pushups, to-do tasks completed — by replying with data when Beeminder prompts you. Or connect with a service (like Fitbit or RescueTime) to report automatically. We plot your progress on a Yellow Brick Road to your goal. Keep all your datapoints on the road and Beeminder will always be free. Go off the road and you (literally) pay the price."

Beeminder - 1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements

• "It’s amazing where one trivial user-visible improvement per day will eventually get you to. We’ve made 1000 user-visible improvements (UVIs) to Beeminder in the last 1000 days. [1] We had to or we’d have owed one of our users $1000."

stickK

• "stickK empowers you to better your lifestyle. We offer you the opportunity, through 'Commitment Contracts', to show to yourself and others the value you put on achieving your goals."

Pact

• Getting fit and staying healthy are hard. Pact uses cash stakes to help you achieve your health goals, week after week.

The Web We Have to Save By Hossein Derakhshan

• "I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares."

Nicholas Felton's Personal Annual Reports

• "Nicholas Felton spends much of his time thinking about data, charts and our daily routines. He is the author of many Personal Annual Reports that weave numerous measurements into a tapestry of graphs, maps and statistics reflecting the year’s activities. He was one of the lead designers of Facebook's timeline and the co-founder of Daytum.com. His most recent product is Reporter, an iPhone app designed to record and visualize subtle aspects of our lives. His work is a part of the permanent collection at MoMA. He has also been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Good Magazine and recognized as one of the 50 most influential designers in America by Fast Company."

Daytum

• "Daytum was conceived by Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton as an elegant and intuitive tool for counting and communicating personal statistics."

Reporter

• "Reporter is a new application for understanding the things you care about. With a few randomly timed surveys each day, Reporter can illuminate aspects of your life that might be otherwise unmeasurable."

RescueTime

• RescueTime gives you an accurate picture of how you spend your time to help you become more productive every day.

Forward - Web Technology Summits, Workshops and Online Content 

• "We're at it again. Forward 3 will be held July 29th, 2015 with workshops scheduled for four days around the main event. Join us in the historic Regency Ballroom in the heart of San Francisco."

Thank you for listening –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.