I got up this morning at 6:10 a.m.
after going to sleep at 12:45 a.m.
I was awakened once during the night.
My heart rate was 61 beats per minute -- my blood pressure, 127 over 74.
I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated.
I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol.
And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31.
We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search.
I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember and want to improve.
A few years ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day.
People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone.
They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments.
Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle -- the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors.
This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer.
It tracks your movement through space.
It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap.
They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices.
But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this.
This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device -- among early adopters at the moment -- the Fitbit.
This tracks your activity and also your sleep.
It has just that sensor in it.
You're probably familiar with the Nike+ system.
I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor.
It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell.
And Nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor.
This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike+ system.
This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep -- deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep.
The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there.
The rest of it is the bedside console; just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago -- I mean, really until now.
And this is the sleep tracking system of today.
This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C.
Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors.
Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world -- these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute.
But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors.
So that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge.
Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds.
Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds.
What is this for?
What should it be for?
Some people will say it's for biometric security.
Some people will say it's for public health research.
Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research.
I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge.
And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things.
The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass.
So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.
Thank you.
Imagine we want to build a new space port at one of four recently settled Martian bases, and are holding a vote to determine its location.
Of the hundred colonists on Mars, 42 live on West Base, 26 on North Base, 15 on South Base, and 17 on East Base.
For our purposes, let’s assume that everyone prefers the space port to be as close to their base as possible, and will vote accordingly.
What is the fairest way to conduct that vote?
The most straightforward solution would be to just let each individual cast a single ballot, and choose the location with the most votes.
This is known as plurality voting, or "first past the post."
In this case, West Base wins easily, since it has more residents than any other.
And yet, most colonists would consider this the worst result, given how far it is from everyone else.
So is plurality vote really the fairest method?
What if we tried a system like instant runoff voting, which accounts for the full range of people’s preferences rather than just their top choices?
Here’s how it would work.
First, voters rank each of the options from 1 to 4, and we compare their top picks.
South receives the fewest votes for first place, so it’s eliminated.
Its 15 votes get allocated to those voters’ second choice— East Base— giving it a total of 32.
We then compare top preferences and cut the last place option again.
This time North Base is eliminated.
Its residents’ second choice would’ve been South Base, but since that’s already gone, the votes go to their third choice.
That gives East 58 votes over West’s 42, making it the winner.
But this doesn’t seem fair either.
Not only did East start out in second-to-last place, but a majority ranked it among their two least preferred options.
Instead of using rankings, we could try voting in multiple rounds, with the top two winners proceeding to a separate runoff.
Normally, this would mean West and North winning the first round, and North winning the second.
But the residents of East Base realize that while they don’t have the votes to win, they can still skew the results in their favor.
In the first round, they vote for South Base instead of their own, successfully keeping North from advancing.
Thanks to this "tactical voting" by East Base residents, South wins the second round easily, despite being the least populated.
Can a system be called fair and good if it incentivizes lying about your preferences?
Maybe what we need to do is let voters express a preference in every possible head-to-head matchup.
This is known as the Condorcet method.
Consider one matchup: West versus North.
All 100 colonists vote on their preference between the two.
So that's West's 42 versus the 58 from North, South, and East, who would all prefer North.
Now do the same for the other five matchups.
The victor will be whichever base wins the most times.
Here, North wins three and South wins two.
These are indeed the two most central locations, and North has the advantage of not being anyone’s least preferred choice.
So does that make the Condorcet method an ideal voting system in general?
Not necessarily.
Consider an election with three candidates.
If voters prefer A over B, and B over C, but prefer C over A, this method fails to select a winner.
Over the decades, researchers and statisticians have come up with dozens of intricate ways of conducting and counting votes, and some have even been put into practice.
But whichever one you choose, it's possible to imagine it delivering an unfair result.
It turns out that our intuitive concept of fairness actually contains a number of assumptions that may contradict each other.
It doesn’t seem fair for some voters to have more influence than others.
But nor does it seem fair to simply ignore minority preferences, or encourage people to game the system.
In fact, mathematical proofs have shown that for any election with more than two options, it’s impossible to design a voting system that doesn’t violate at least some theoretically desirable criteria.
So while we often think of democracy as a simple matter of counting votes, it’s also worth considering who benefits from the different ways of counting them.
I am a PhD student.
And that means I have a question: How can we make digital content graspable?
Because you see, on the one hand, there is the digital world and no question, many things are happening there right now.
And for us humans, it's not quite material, it's not really there -- it's virtual.
On the other hand, we're humans, we live in a physical world.
It's rich, it tastes good, it feels good, it smells good.
So the question is: How do we get the stuff over from the digital into the physical?
That's my question.
If you look at the iPhone with its touch and the Wii with its bodily activity, you can see the tendency; it's getting physical.
The question is: What's next?
Now, I have three options that I would like to show you.
The first one is mass.
As humans, we are sensitive to where an object in our hand is heavy.
So could we use that in mobile phones?
Let me show you the weight-shifting mobile.
It is a mobile phone-shaped box that has an iron weight inside, which we can move around, and you can feel where it's heavy.
We shift the gravitational center of it.
For example, we can augment digital content with physical mass.
So you move around the content on the display, but you can also feel where it is just from the weight of the device.
Another thing it's good for is navigation.
It can guide you around in a city.
It can tell you by its weight, "OK, move right.
Walk ahead.
Make a left here."
And the good thing about that is, you don't have to look at the device all the time; you have your eyes free to see the city.
Now, mass is the first thing -- the second thing, that's shape.
We're also sensitive to the shape of objects we have in our hands.
So if I download an e-book and it has 20 pages -- well, they could be thin, right?
But if it has 500 pages, I want to feel that "Harry Potter" -- it's thick.
(Laughter) So let me show you the shape-changing mobile.
Again, it's a mobile phone-shaped box, and this one can change its shape.
We can play with the shape itself.
For example, it can be thin in your pocket, which we of course want it to be.
But then if you hold it in your hand, it can lean towards you, be thick.
It's like tapered to the downside.
If you change the grasp, it can adjust to that.
It's also useful if you want to put it down on your nightstand to watch a movie or use as an alarm clock.
It stands.
It's fairly simple.
Another thing is, sometimes we watch things on a mobile phone that are bigger than the phone itself.
In that case -- like here, there's an app that's bigger than the phone's screen -- the shape of the phone could tell you, "OK, off the screen, right here, there is more content.
You can't see it, but it's there."
And you can feel it, because it's thicker at that edge.
The shape is the second thing.
The third thing operates on a different level.
As humans, we are social, we are empathic, and that's great.
Wouldn't that be a way to make mobile phones more intuitive?
Think of a hamster in the pocket.
Well, I can feel it, it's doing all right.
I don't have to check it.
(Laughter) Let me show you the living mobile phone.
So, once again, a mobile phone-shaped box.
But this one, it has a breath and a heartbeat, and it feels very organic.
(Laughter) And you can tell, it's relaxed right now.
Oh, now -- missed call, a new call, new girlfriend, maybe -- very exciting.
(Laughter) How do we calm it down?
You give it a pat behind the ears, and everything is all right again.
That's very intuitive, and that's what we want.
So what we have seen are three ways to make the digital graspable for us.
And I think making it physical is a good way to do that.
What's behind that is a postulation, namely, not that humans should get much more technical in the future; rather than that, technology, a bit more human.
(Applause)