 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be too offended by it. I know some people have issues with that terminology. We got an overview. Yeah, we got an overview. We cover a variety of things of interest to librarians. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, as are our recordings of our shows as well. We do sessions for an hour live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can go to our website and watch all of our recordings from previous shows. We have recordings up there if there are any presentations involved. Links to various sites that might be mentioned in your shows. All that information is available in the show notes afterwards. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, many training sessions, interviews. As I said, anything library-related, we are happy to have on the show. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations. And we do have bringing guest speakers sometimes. And this morning, we have a combination of that, actually. Usually the last Wednesday of every month is our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers, who's sitting next to me. Good morning, Krista. Good morning. Michael is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And once a month, he comes to the show to share any tech news of the month. And, pretty much every time, almost, has a guest speaker on to talk about something they're involved with. Generally, oh, library-related, but a techy slant to it. So that's what we have this morning with us, Michael. And I'm just going to hand it over to you, Michael, to take it away and tell us if you've got on the show with us this morning. Good. Thank you, Krista. As she said, I'm Michael Sowers on the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And I always like it when I'm able to kind of start out the episodes that I do with a little bit of a story. So I'm going to do that just to tell everybody how this came about. I am a user or a wearer, depending on how you put it, of something called a Fitbit. It's a step-tracking tool, and it tracks how well I sleep and how many steps and things like that. And then it uploads all that data to a website, and I share that data publicly. And some people ask, why do you do that? And I'm like, you know, I just do it because it's kind of fun. And sometimes some things come out of it. And this is one of the things that have come out of it. Because one of the things Fitbit will do at the end of the year is give me kind of a report for the year. What was the day with the most number of steps? And what was my average number of steps and things like that? And I blogged that and tweeted that information out. And then that information was retweeted by an account. And about two weeks later I got an email. And I'll just read some of this email. And it says, hi, my name is Gary Wolff. I run a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools called the Quantified Self. I saw your Fitbit stats, which made it to the QS Twitter feed. And I thought I'd reach out because a friend of mine got me thinking a few years ago about the intersection of QS and libraries. Our mission is to help people get more personal meaning out of their personal data. And this involves regularly sharing knowledge and tools in a way that is analogous, excuse me, for my voice, to a literary campaign. So he said he'd been holding on to this idea of maybe partnering with libraries and starting to talk to libraries about how maybe libraries as custodians of public knowledge, I like how he said that, might be able to get in on this conversation. So I immediately wrote back to Gary and I said, yeah, I would love to talk to you. And in fact, not only would I love to talk to you personally, we've got this show. And I thought, how convenient, this would be a great guest to not only talk to Gary and learn about the Quantified Self and what that is and what that means, what the possibilities are and maybe some of the problems with it, but also open that conversation to other librarians too who might be interested in this topic. So we have Gary on the line. Gary, can you say hello? Hi. I'm going to read his quick bio here before I hand it over to him because I got this email and he pointed me to some links and I'm like, Gary Wolf, that name sounds familiar to me. And as a longtime reader and subscriber to Wired Magazine, I quickly realized how I know his name. This is Gary Wolf as the co-founder of Quantified Self, excuse me, and a contributing editor to Wired Magazine. His New York Times Magazine cover about the Quantified Self remains the definitive description of the movement. He contributes to the emerging practice of self-tracking and has been covered in publications like Fantasy Fair, The Economist, The Financial Times, and many others. Gary's 2010-10 talk on the Quantified Self has been watched by more than 350,000 people and we'll have a link to that presentation in the show notes. He's also a founding executive editor of HotWired, Wired Digital, where he launched one of the first daily technology news titles, Wired News, which continues in publication today. So I've been reading a lot of what Gary's been doing for years with Amy, not even realizing it. And Gary, I am so happy to have you on the show today. Why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about what the Quantified Self is and how you're involved with that? Michael, thank you very much. And I really appreciate that nice introduction. And I think what I'll do is just give you a very short presentation about why I contacted Michael and some background on the Quantified Self. I've had to keep it to under 20 minutes. And then open it up and hopefully you can help me a little bit and I'm happy to help you if I can in exchange some knowledge. So Michael, if it's okay, you just say yes and I'll go ahead. Go right ahead. Okay, great. So in 2007, my friend and colleague from Wired Magazine and I, Kevin Kelly, got together and did something that we've done many times over the past years. We had a two-person editorial meeting. And Kevin and I had been part of Wired Magazine when it launched and HotWired and Wired Digital, which was one of the first commercial web publications in the early 90s. Kevin's history of working at the intersection of technology and culture was back much further than that. He was the editor of the Holder's Review and he worked with Stuart Grant on the Holder of Patalog and he was one of the founders of The Well, which is one of the early online bulletin board systems where I was a member and got to know him there. So this is really a multi-decade, even multi-generational research project that we've been involved with trying to understand what are we doing to ourselves and for ourselves with technology. And in 2007, we got together and we're thinking about what should we work on next. Neither of us were particularly interested in the social media trends that were going on at that time. And we thought there may be something important and interesting happening in the world of technology and culture that we could describe and beyond kind of friending everybody and expanding your blast radius of weak personal influence through posting on social media. And we put some things up on a whiteboard that I think anybody would recognize at that time as being interesting technologically, small computing, mobile computing, computing in phones, sensors on the body, storage of data in the cloud, and ability to do some more complex analytics that you had access to then remotely. And we put a circle around it and we said, what is this called? Editors and writers like to put titles on things. It's a way to sort of focus the story. And I proposed the name Quantified Self because it was the story of computing. Quantified is sort of a synonym for computing, coming all the way in very, very close to ourselves. Now, one of the ways I like to explain it is I like to ask, what would you have thought 40 years ago if someone asked you what is computing for? I think you would have had an easy answer, say in 1960, you would have said computing is so that scientists and managers and administrators can do calculations so they can better understand and make decisions about the world. But now we think about, and that's kind of the end of that era of computing in what was then a mini-computer. Now we think of computing differently. We think of it as being for communication, for education, for self-advancement, self-expression. We think of computing as being for many, many personal reasons. You could call it personal computing. And personal computing isn't the whole story of computing. Computing is still very important for scientific and managerial and administrative purposes. But the personal side of computing is not really a sideshow. And it's a very important part of the story of what we do with ourselves with technology. In fact, you might say, I would say it's sort of the main story. We started blogging and writing about this phenomenon of computing coming all the way in. And in 2008, we decided to have a meeting. We used Meetup and just gathered some people who were also interested in it. We were inspired by what we had seen in the technology world in the form of users groups. Both of us had been at the Berkeley Macintosh users group meetings in the 80s, which helped introduce computing, personal computing. And Kevin was involved with the Hackers Conference, which had many of the people who were involved in the Homebrew Computer Club, out of which personal computing emerged in Silicon Valley. So we started pulling people together, sort of users. And that spread. And by 2009, we had a Wikipedia entry, which was not our... We did not write, so it's always interesting for me to watch and see what Wikipedia has to say about us that described quantified self as a users group. What was around then? Well, Fitbit had already come out by 2009. There was Nike Plus. At that time, it was a foot pad and a running shoe. People were starting to work with galvanic skin response, which is a measure of arousal and stress. There were many, many kind of running watches, which were a core technology for introducing self-tracking onto the body. There was some avant-garde stuff. This is a body bug from Body Media, which had a bunch of sensors, multi-sensor inputs in it. There was even a wrist-based sleep tracker. There was a headband sleep tracker. And this was very interesting for us. We were thinking, okay, here's the old version of tracking your sleep. And here's the new version. Well, that's very different, and that's probably going to have some interesting effects. And we were seeing people who were diabetics, type 1 and type 2 diabetics, starting to do onboard blood glucose monitoring. And then there was lots and lots of hype beginning with stories in the tech press about smart underwear that would have circuits sewn into it, printed on it. Now let me just jump very quickly to today. Our Wikipedia entry now describes this as a movement. I think that's very interesting. I'm not sure exactly what kind of movement we are. We're certainly not a political movement, and that's something maybe I'll just open up for discussion with you later when I say something about why I'm so interested in libraries. The use of the tools has spread extremely widely. Just one category, a very big category in the space running apps on mobile phones, has more than 50 million downloads just with the top three applications. So you do have to discount that number, of course, because many things are downloaded and not used. But there are at least tens of millions of people engaged in what I would call quantified self-practices. Our users group has grown quite a bit, although we don't really call it a users group anymore, and I'll explain that in a minute. There are 117 groups with more than 22,000 members all over the world. And we even have smart underwear, although really it's in the form of a smart feature. But this is a shirt from Home Signal, and they take sensors in fabric, and you can wear them out in the world or at the gym. I'm going to try that again. So what does this all mean? I'm going to show you a little video from Nike, which is trying to explain to the world what it means to get numbers about yourself. That looks pretty good, right? That's you being measured, and you're accomplishing all your goals, and you're flying to the air like a ninja magician. But I want to give you another version that I also notice is present in our culture around the topic of keeping track of yourself with numbers that is referenced almost in passing or in a kind of anxious way, but I think is also very relevant. That's a passage from a book that you might recognize. I'll just read it to you. Smith, 6079 Smith, WSU. Ben, lower please. You can do better than that. You're not trying. And maybe I'll leave the attribution of this quote as homework for our discussion, but I think many of you will recognize it. And one of the things that I think is interesting about that quote is that it's very close to the Nike vision of what the quantified self means. It's just the negative version in the Nike vision that you're being observed as you perform fitness and athletic activities in order to inspire you and reach your goals. And in this quote, which is about being watched and being told to do better, you're being counted and observed by a malevolent force that has you pinned in a sort of terrifying way on your own numbers. So in that time that the quantified self has grown, there's been a lot of discussion about big data and what we can do with data that will change our world. When I hear the talk about big data, I hear the managerial and administrative voice, whereas the quantified self is really about the personal voice. It's not about big data or small data, but about our data. It's about the nearness of the data to us. So I said I was going to explain why we don't really call ourselves a users group anymore. The reason is that users imply sort of consumers. It implies a state of passivity. And in our program work now, we try to just really talk about us. We speak in the first person about we, about I, about me. We share information about what we're doing with these technologies and try to advance our technique so that other people can help us and we can help them. We do it using a very simple protocol at all the meetings. We have people get up and say, what did you do? How did you do it? And what did you learn? We notice that there is a huge range of technique in the community from very advanced technique, people who can do sophisticated statistical analysis on their data and then cover subtle changes that would otherwise be invisible if they weren't doing, they weren't transforming the data and plotting the data and really carefully working it to people who are simply glancing back at the data and getting a general impression of what it means to them, which is also useful. But by putting everybody at whatever level of technique they have in the same conversation, we hope to evolve new techniques and to support the work that people are doing with their own data. That's a type of learning. You might call it a type of literacy. Now, I'm inspired by a quote from Richard Feynman. Some of you may recognize this quote. There's plenty of room at the bottom. It's the title of a paper that he wrote in 1959 describing the future world of nanotechnology. It's a very interesting paper because what he points out there is not just that there's room at the bottom, that there's a world of things that are smaller and they take up less space. Well, that's obvious. But there's plenty of room at the bottom. And what he meant by that is the forces that operate at the micro scale are different forces than forces that operate at the macro scale. You need a different frame of mind, a different frame of reference to understand the world at the bottom. Now, he was talking about engineering. He was talking about how at the macro scale, you care a lot about gravity, for instance. But at the micro scale, you might care a lot about surface tension. But I think there's an analogous kind of plenty of room at the bottom in the world of the quantified self. In the macro world of big data, administrative and scientific data, you care a lot about sampling. And controls and validity in the sense of making prescriptions and descriptions that apply across a large population. At the bottom, i.e. at the very close level where the data comes into our lives, you care a lot about relevance, about personal context. And you're looking to see what you can do just for yourself with that data. When you take your own conclusions about your own data and bring them into a context where you share them with other people, where you question data with other people, you question how you can get it, how you can access it, how you can analyze it, and how you can learn from it, you're creating a new kind of public knowledge. This is different than the kind of public knowledge that you might get from, say, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, where they publish a report and you ask yourself, hey, what is the effect of toxic contamination in my community or something like this? The public knowledge that you get from sharing what you're doing with your own data is analogous to the kind of knowledge that was created 500 years ago when people began to read together and reading was a public activity. People learn to read from other people reading. In fact, there are compelling accounts from the dawn of public conversation about books and the dawn of literacy of people sitting in workshops, for instance, and having one person assigned as the reader in a context where some people knew how to read more literate and other people weren't. Now, I think you may understand why I contacted Michael because today, this slide just says, today, our meetings occur mainly in the tech community. So startups and companies who have an interest in sensors and in apps will host a quantified self-meeting and people will come together and use their office. But this holds us very close to kind of today's tech culture. It's a geek culture that I'm part of and I appreciate and I value, but I also understand that it's not everything. It's not even most things. And there is creativity and knowledge, even genius, available to us outside that culture. And so I've been asking this question, where does public knowledge live? What are the appropriate institutions to gather people together to share technique and explore a new kind of literacy? Before I just open it up, because I think that's a nice pregnant question to talk with you about, I want to thank somebody, Joshua Kaufman, and there's his Twitter ID. He wrote a paper, actually, it was his master's thesis at the Harvard Design School called Adapting to Abundance the Public Library as an Infrastructure for Knowledge as a Dynamic Process. And Joshua turned me on to this idea that if I see the quantified self as a new form of public knowledge making, I ought to get it out of the tech company context as a physical place for the meetings. And I ought to look to the guardians of today's public knowledge to give it a new cast, a new character that's more popular and more public. So thank you, and let's talk about that if you can help me. Joshua Kaufman, right? Yeah, we're finding a link or a citation to that paper as we speak here. Thanks, Gary. That's kind of a great overview and gives us an idea of where you're coming from. And I have some questions, and some questions came into my mind as you were talking, but I'll remind the audience that we will happily take any questions from you that you have about quantified self, how this may affect libraries or how libraries can get involved or how you can get involved in it, either through the questions area in the GoToWebinar interface or if you have a microphone, just say, you know, I have a mic, unmute me and Krista will unmute you and we'll happily take your question via audio. So, Gary, let me just start here. What do you do for QS? I mentioned I wear a Fitbit. What technology and or quantifying of yourself do you do? Well, I actually use a very simple tool for collecting data about my call. I just use a spreadsheet, and I actually set the spreadsheet up using Google Docs so that you can make a web form, and then you can put a link to that web form on your phone. So that allows you to make sort of a self-created app. It's very simple, but it's just, you know, a little tracker. And I keep track on my phone and I'll open it up right now and just say, okay, what's on here right now, because it allows me to change what I'm tracking and sort of keep track of whatever is relevant to me at a particular moment. Right now the fields on my tracker are, well, I kind of have some hypertension, so I keep track of my systolic and diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, I keep track of what monitor I use because you want to have a sense of whether your monitor, heart rate, I mean, your blood pressure monitor is drifting. I keep track of my exercise, my sleep, my weight, some supplements that I take, fish oil and flaxseed oil. I keep track of how rested I am at wake-up. And I also, after a long time trying to figure out what's a good way to track mood and emotion, I have my own method of doing that because it's very hard. I digress for a second. It's sort of a topic that comes up a lot in quantified self. How do you track subjective factors in your life if you're interested in that? I find tracking mood in a way that the most obvious way is just to give yourself a score for your mood. I find that sort of frustrating because I wonder if the score is the three I might give myself today, the same three as I might give myself yesterday. You don't really know if the scale is right. Of course, you then track your mood when you're in the mood to track your mood. So you have a question that is hard to figure out about that. So some years ago, I began tracking episodes of anger or irritation. I think we've all had those where you're maybe in the car, you're on the phone, and you get disconnected after waiting for 20 minutes. And you just look at the thing and you're like, oh, I'm going to smash this phone on the desk right now. That doesn't happen to me too often. And when it does, it's a very good sign that my overall mental emotional state is sort of weak. And it's also very easy to notice. So I keep track of episodes of anger and irritation on a 24-hour basis. If I have one, I just go in and press the button. I'm like, oh, I had one of those yesterday. That's interesting. I keep track of my meditation time because I'm a meditator and I've done some talks about that in our local QS Meetup. And I keep track of my concentration. OK. So I'm going to ask you one of those. It's a generally difficult question to answer because it gets personal very quickly. But I get this question when people see that I post my steps on Twitter and that. And in your case, tracking your blood pressure, you can kind of easily answer the question, why do you do that? I mean, it's a health thing. But you track lots of other things that don't necessarily have a direct immediate benefit to say, hey, my blood pressure is really high today. I need to do something or a diabetic tracking their blood sugar. So my larger question is, why? Why are you tracking this stuff? Why would anybody want to track this stuff? What are you going to do with it? Tracking is really just a subset of observing. And observing yourself is a tool of self-reflection. And I think that while there's a lot of emphasis in the commercial quantified self-space on self-optimization, you saw it in that Nike advertisement. Like if you keep track of yourself, you're going to have a better chance of becoming a superhero. I think for most of us, just having a sense of ourselves and how we're doing it in a sense who we are is really useful. Now, for many years, I've kept a journal. So some people are like that. They like to reflect. And so I'm a journal keeper. And I think there are many people who use a discursive form of self-reflection, as I do. But keeping track of yourself with some numbers is very different and offers some different vantage points and different perspectives on yourself. For instance, it's much easier to quickly look back in time and notice periods where you're doing better or you're doing worse and think about what happens during those periods. So I don't see the purpose of doing the self-tracking as being tied to some specific benefit of... I mean, it can be like if you want to manage your hypertension, which I do, but it can also be tied to just a general practice of self-reflection, which I think is very useful. Yeah, I think that's... I'll admit with my step tracking, it's health insurance. I get a discount by tracking my steps and hitting a minimum. But tracking my sleep, it is interesting just sometimes to kind of go back and look and be aware of what was going on and how well I was sleeping or not. I had another question there, and I just lost my track of time. Well, maybe Michael, I'll say something else if you want to collect your question, which is I also think that there is inherent interest in learning this new language of numerical or quantitative or analytical self-reflection and that we are building a new aspect to our culture so that as I become more confident looking at numbers about myself, I also become more confident in talking to other people about their numbers, and together, our skill, our technique that we build in using our data for purposes that satisfy our own goals gives us a handle even on our communities. So rather than data being gathered from the top down and being used as a kind of club to say, oh, you know, you don't have a right to speak at this public meeting because you don't really understand the data, which is something that happens every day in this country, we will have culture that is more confident and composed and ready to have conversations based on the data that is being generated in our daily lives and in our communities. And I think that's also a great benefit and also just very interesting to people. Okay, so yeah, great. I remembered kind of my next question slash story which leads into a question we just got from the audience so I'll kind of give my part and then I'll have Chris to read the audience's question. And that's kind of the once you have that data and in combination with making that data public, if at all, you kind of mentioned early on in your presentation that the social media aspect end of this. A lot of the times when I get the question of why do you do this, because of the fact that I share some of this data that I have out there. And in fact, the quick story with that was, I've been sick or was very sick last week and somebody who I'm friends with, both on Fitbit and outside of that, noticed that suddenly my step count like took a nosedive. And so I got this message saying, hey, are you feeling okay? Because you're doing like 3,000 steps a day, not your 10,000 steps a day, is everything okay? So I kind of got a little personal connection out of that. But the side note in the possibility of making data you're quantifying about yourself public, we have a question from the audience there that Chris is going to bring up. Okay, yeah. Brian, where's Brian at? I can't remember where Brian is. Brian is on the line with this. He's been on the show before. Hi, Brian. He wants to know how you can see this with how healthcare is turning. Specifically, let's say you aren't as active as you claim to be, could healthcare companies or insurance companies mind that data to decide on premiums? Like what just happened to you? Someone saw that yours changed, would healthcare or insurance companies do the same thing? I think that that's already going on and I think that it's frightening. The data that's being generated in our normal course of life is voluminous and we often, as individuals or family, in our families, don't even know what data is being collected about us. Never mind having the technique or the access to the data or the technique to really think about it. I think that that's already happening and I think this is, in a way, a frightening development because it gets to our agency, it gets to where the locus of control is in our own lives. More and more that control is shifted towards the institutions, administrators and technocrats that have access to our personal data and I think we would be well served to think about what data we have about ourselves and what it means to ourselves so that we can participate in making that future. Yeah, I kind of follow up on that. I do share a lot of just what I do, where I am, things like that and the people who sometimes question me on that sometimes don't realize the amount of data I don't necessarily share and so I'm pretty cognizant of what data I'm putting out there but then you just look at smart phones today and they're pretty much tracking your every move and somebody has access to that data at a minimum of your carrier if nothing else. So I think a lot of this comes down to an awareness of the issues allowing you to have what control you can have over it as opposed to just kind of blindly going in and letting this data be collected without your knowledge. I'm rambling here just a little bit. No, but I agree with that. I noticed that in the world of the quantified self kind of community there's much more awareness of the risks and also the means of control and limit that exist in the world of personal data than there is outside it. So there's a cultural lag and I think that lag is being exploited and will be exploited. Just as Facebook originally existed in a world where there were sort of no antibodies to Facebook and people found themselves with hundreds or in some cases thousands of friends that weren't really their friends and suffered all kinds of negative consequences from that time lag. I think people are starting to understand Facebook better so there are some cultural antibodies that are forming and the faster the better. So are there any... Let's swing back towards the technology for just a minute. Are there any devices, sensors coming out that you know of that either or both you're really excited about or kind of maybe back towards the smart underwear which I'm not sure we want to go there kind of creep you out. Well, maybe I'll just answer that by saying... Hang on one second. The world of sensors is pretty stunning. The progress that's being made and the sort of new avant-garde sensors that we see in our quantified self-meetings and conferences. For instance, there's a lot of focus now on blood work on being able to sense what's in your blood using very, very small samples. So just a pinprick size samples and getting really kind of molecular level detail on for instance hormones. And when you think about that you could see that our sense of ourselves as being composed of biochemical processes in part is going to change a lot. Cholesterol, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen. These are all things that we do get tested sometimes but it's more maybe once a year whereas we could end up with minute by minute data on these blood metrics. Yeah, I think I saw a headline just earlier this morning that somebody has come up with a... Being able to run 30 different tests on a single drop of blood or something like this for identifying some of the things you were talking about. Oh yeah, the woman scientist who figured out how to do it. Yes. I couldn't last few days as well. I hadn't had a chance to read the articles yet but I did see that headline come across this morning. Pretty amazing. And then another one just at our recent conference we had a woman, Erica Porzani. She is testing breath and air so they use a micro sensor. You can do things, for instance, wear it around your neck or put it on your bicycle and get a sense of the air quality block by block which I think will change our picture of our communities a lot and you can use the sensor in a breath sensor so that you can get metabolism from the oxygen and carbon dioxide ratio in your breath. That's also pretty interesting. We just got another comment from Brian. If you had heard of... and it's something in the back of my mind is poking me on this one of a pill that you can kind of swallow and it will detect things as it's going through. There's a company called Proteus and one of the engineers at Proteus has been an all-time participant and quantified self and she did a fantastic quantified self-talk if you guys want to look it up. Her name is... well, I should get the exact spelling but if you give me a second I will but she... give me a second and I'll find it for you. Doherty, D-O-U-G-H-E-R-T-Y Nancy's talk, Nancy Doherty Nancy's talk was about using tic-tacs as placebos and the way she tracked when she was taking the placebos which were associated with certain conditions was she put her Proteus chip on top of them and the Proteus chip is very tiny so you can swallow it and it doesn't contain a battery or power source it uses a chemical process to send an electrical signal to a patch on your skin and it's pretty science fiction like and it's a great talk so just if you look at Nancy Doherty and quantified self you'll see it. I think Krista has found that and we'll definitely put it into the show notes. One of the thoughts that's kind of come across my thought process here is it sounds like a lot of this is just kind of an evolution of the ability I guess when you said things we used to get tested maybe once a year and we'd have to go to a medical office to do we now have possibly the devices processors getting faster and smaller it's not necessarily these tests are new it's just something that we can now personally do instead of somebody doing it for us. Wait say that again Michael. The ability to do some of these things that we're doing for ourselves now are not necessarily new from the perspective of you were mentioning maybe we would go to a doctor's office to get a cholesterol test but now that the technology has just gotten to a point of smaller cheaper faster that we can do it for ourselves by ourselves on a more regular basis. Yes I think that that's true but also these are technologies that are being used across a whole range of industries and you know kind of imagined futures I might say so you do have people who have for instance public health responsibilities or marketing interests looking at new technologies like let's say I can really figure out if somebody's hungry or not that's a perfect time to show them an ad or put a picture of McDonald's french fries in front of them because they're not going to be able to forget that for days it's just so vivid and delicious looking and if we're trying to drive people to eat more french fries then we're going to have a big advantage if we can understand more from people's personal data about when they're feeling very hungry or when they're feeling stressed or you know alone which is also a good time to kind of get people going on junk food. Meanwhile you may have a goal for yourself which is to eat less junk food and you may be asking well I now live in a world of where my personal data is accessible to all kinds of parties out there who may have goals for me but do they meet my own goals and how can I use these tools to help me understand how I can do what I want to do so I think yes there is a way in which the tools are coming closer to us but there also is a way in which these are new tools that are being used across a big range of interests and so there is also a benefit in bringing them closer to us. Sure yeah I didn't mean to imply that they were all coming for you know just down and closer to us and closer to us is a great way to put it but maybe a certain proportion of them and yeah there's always going to be kind of the new technologies and new ways of looking at things. So we got another audience question? Yeah we have a question related to what you guys have been talking about and also consider it related to our show last week. Jesse Murray who is from our Omaha Public Library here in Nebraska wants to know what kind of data can Google Glass provide to quantify this self? Our show last week was about Google Glass the demonstration of it. Not a lot of things I remember seeing it could gather but there are questions that were asked about if it could help for people with seeing visual issues, reading and helping with that but that would be more of a... Yes I mean I think the answer is yes and I think one way to think about that that's useful is just look at Google Glass as being a scaffolding like a little frame, a little wire frame which in fact it basically is on which you can hang any sensors that is interesting and so for instance Google Glass has a camera and there are also other people who have very small cameras that you can wear and we've seen some great talks in our QS conferences from people who have taken photos from a wearable camera that they've had for years and taken photos for instance every minute and have done some really neat sort of computer science on that image collection asking you know how many of them are interpretable by the human eye how many of them are interpretable but only by a machine how many of them are indoors, how many are outdoors et cetera, et cetera, et cetera so the Google Glass is one of the things that is just a little scaffolding but a camera but also there's a microphone and microphones tell you a lot about what's going on in the world any sensor that is available to us and that is small enough can go on Google Glass or any other part of your body so that's I think the direction that that whole world of quote-unquote wearables is going you know Krista and Michael since we only have 10 minutes if I could ask you all something very straightforward which is as people who are interested in libraries and some of you are librarians and have responsibility for public programs in libraries do you think that our mission at QS which is to share knowledge and give people access to technique kind of numeracy in a way has enough is close enough to the mission of your libraries that we could do something together not I'm not trying to do a practical like let's do something on next Wednesday but just conceptually could you imagine quantified self-users groups in libraries or as part of a library mission to see data in some way as parallel to words yeah and thank you for bringing that up because it's exactly where I was going to go next was to bring this back to libraries ever since you contacted me I've kind of had that question in the back of my mind and I do want to open this up definitely to anybody in the audience who has opinions because this is just my opinion off the top of my head and I mean the simple answer being at a minimum yes if nothing else because libraries in general have always been kind of a fourth place meeting space and for anybody and everybody in any sort of topic and then more specifically to QS kind of being a helping people to learn about how to use and interpret and process data whether that be from books or from databases or from data that you've gathered for yourself so I think there is kind of an inherent underlying connection between what you guys are doing and what libraries do in general another way that's this kind of come to me is a lot of libraries and getting back to our Google Glass presentation last week with Hastings Public Library the library has a pair of glass and it's not that the library is trying to figure out what the library can do with glass but it's to act as a platform so other people so the public can come into the library and learn about Google Glass and because not everybody especially with that particular example not everybody's got $1,500 even if they get on the invite list so I mean I would love to see QS meetups in libraries for nothing else then we're a great space to host those sorts of things excuse me and I think you're early mentioned that a lot of the folks that seem to be attending your meetings are very tech oriented and tech focused and so I don't know what sort of institutions or places you're using to host those meetings but if it's at kind of a maker space you're going to get a certain type of person to show up if it's at a tech company you're going to get a certain type of person to show up whereas hosting in a library kind of just implies that anybody and everybody who could possibly be interested is invited and welcome exactly so say you know one of the things people are using QS tools in their family context for is caregiving and it's really nice when you have caregiving responsibilities to have a sense that you are in touch with the physical and emotional state of the person you're caregiving for even if there are a lot of other responsibilities you have so you can't necessarily be with them all the time and that's such an interesting area of exploration and I've had this idea that you know if I were to do something to try to help caregivers understand what's available to them from the soft tracking tools it would be great to do it at a library instead of for instance a tech design company because you're just going to have a different feeling about an event like that it is more accessible the library is in a sense a public place in the way that a tech company even if they open their doors for a couple of hours it's not a public place and that's what I would love to try that if there is somebody out there in your community who wants to try some QS events in the library maybe connect with some of the tool makers get some tools on their shelves if they want some tools connect with the local stats or computer science or data visualization community to provide some help with technique I'm you know I've been really eager to help yeah is there a where would somebody go to find out where meetups are already being held so if you go to our website you'll see a list of all the meetups and one of the great things that right on the front page one of the great things about meetup is that it's really easy to know what's going on so you can just look down that list or you can search on meetup itself but it's best to do it from the website probably because we track we vet those a little bit more and you can see if there's a local meetup I believe there are some in your area but I should I should have checked but I didn't check before this and that also be the place to go to if you wanted to create a meetup there isn't already one like in Lincoln go there connect with you guys at Quantified Self Website and then organize and coordinate one yes exactly exactly and we are super happy to help there's all kinds of stuff we can do to help I'm just going to change my my thing and just look and see if I see a Quantified Self meetup near you here oh try try Omaha or broaden out to like a hundred miles because Omaha is just a little further than 50 miles from us a little bigger I think meetups not giving me the right info though actually because sometimes it doesn't really like let's just look here see if we have I guess what one of the other things I was thinking of that libraries thinking we all there is one in Lincoln the Quantified Self sometimes search is not good but there we go so just they had six meetups wow so there's only seven of them it always starts small it always starts small exactly I'm definitely going to check this out what one of the other kind of ways a library could potentially get involved and now I'm really thinking big and I'm really thinking you know you're going to need some definite like coders or whatever involved is maybe starting to collect data from the local population and make it presentable back kind of in a larger aggregated format and I keep going back to steps because that's just the simplest thing I keep track of but you know collecting everybody's who's doing step counting in town and then analyzing that data and presenting it back or presenting the raw data and kind of the library being the hub of the information and the collector of the information and the provider of the information in a larger aggregate sense I love that and I think that we should do it we're trying to organize right now a quantified self festival for the Bay Area where we get all of our kind of network involved in proposing self tracking projects that we do collectively and then we share what we learn and I think that our key role is helping people build a context where they can ask their own questions of the data so my sense of what would make it a really quantified self event is not where somebody you know in the mayor's office or whatever just said let's all answer this question but instead there was an actual process by which we in our communities whether it be you know in a seventh grade science class or whether it be in a patient group at a hospital or whether it be in a fitness club where we said let's what's our question that we have that we can ask as part of this you know period of time or project and I I think libraries would be a tremendously great place to experiment with that idea of can we ask our own questions individually and in communities about our own data I think with the right libraries involved and the right leaders in a library system it's very fundable there are institutions national and even international as well as probably local that would say yeah you know this is something that's going to take some coders it's going to take some staffing some organizers but it has a real public purpose there's real public interest in it and we will fund it and what we're really missing is we're missing the leadership in the library community and that's in a sense gives me back to the beginning which is why I contacted you in the first place I thought to myself here is a librarian who tracks and you know whenever your community is ready or wants to try something we're ready to help because I doing quantified self organizing in the context of libraries makes it something different and really important really public in a way that doing quantified self organizing in the context of the tech industry keeps it almost you know in a more commercial space and I'm very interested in that yeah well like I said you got me thinking when you approached me and I really appreciate that I love it when somebody just it's also dangerous when somebody just plants an idea in the back of my brain that just has to stew for a while and I'm glad we could use we have this platform to kind of get this conversation started with a larger audience and not just a couple of us through some email and I've definitely subscribed to the QS feed and we'll be paying attention to that I think we had one other comment coming from the audience yeah we're just talking in general about all this sharing of the personal data one of our mission staff people listening in another room but they said for perspective on how our society might evolve in the area of sharing personal data you should could read the circle by Dave Eggers yes yes that's a very frightening account it's on my radio yes I heard a lot about it yeah and before we wrap up I had one other question for you and I'm going to maybe put you on the spot here just a little bit we have a an online learning program that we do here called Nebraskalers 2.0 and we have them learn a new thing each month usually some online tool or service we also pick a book each month that we try to get people to read and they get continuing education credit for it you know on the QS website you do or someone post on a regular basis say what we are reading if I was to ask you to name kind of a book that if somebody was interested in QS would be a good place to get them started is that something you name off the top of your head or would you need to get back to me on that? I think I have to get back to you I mean a book is a hard one because a book I mean are you guys reading like big substantive academic books or are you reading not usually two to three hundred pages long tail data points new book is going to come up soon I mean not too too heavy but enough to get started so let me think about that then I will get back to you I should have emailed you that one in advance that's a good one but I have to think about it okay all right fair enough so we are pretty much at our hour Chris has been busy tapping away getting URLs and everything that we'll get into our show notes I think I've caught everything we've been talking about and Michael I have just one more thing I want to say which is that everybody who's been listening I really invite you if you're interested in the intersection of libraries and public knowledge and quantified self to be in touch either with Michael or with me or both I hope that this goes somewhere I'm not impatient if it takes a year if it takes two years or more that's you know okay but I just want to make it clear that I think that the library is so important for for building a culture of of kind of individual and community efficacy in relation to our personal data and I'm ready to help as soon as we find the right allies in the library community and if somebody wanted to get a hold of you what would be the best way to do that Gary at quantifiedself.com alright well Gary I really appreciate this this was wonderful it kind of filled in some of the gaps that I had in my knowledge and yep and so thanks once again and we've been recording this so we'll get that out we'll share the links back with you once that's all processed and we'll get that out as we do every week so we're gonna switch back here real quick whoop go sec here okay and so I don't have any particular extra news this month sometimes I have some things I want to share oh I will share one thing excuse me those of you running office 2013 service pack one for that came out yesterday should start showing up automatically in your updates or if you're impatient you can go download that directly for you but that's about the only real news item of the last week or so that I wanted to share so I'm gonna thank Gary once again for participating and I hand it back to Krista okay great thank you thank you very much Gary and Michael that will wrap it up for this morning as Michael said we've been recording so we all set with recording and all the links that I grabbed throughout the show and I hope to join us next week when our topic is migrating to new ILS Andrew Sherman shirm to us here in Nebraska from some more alive rip and Pavilion will be joining us to tell us how they went through migrating their whole system to a new sounds like oodles of fun it's a thing lots of libraries are going through oh yeah so he's gonna be on the line with us to share how they did it so hopefully you'll join us for that and any of our future shows that you can see the topics here also if you are a Facebook user and Compass Live is on Facebook please do like us there you'll see notifications of when new things are coming up when recordings are available always the reminder each week doing it with the current topic is fun and join us on the fly so if you are on Facebook and use it like us there that will wrap it up for us this morning thank you very much and we'll see you next week bye bye