Nike hints that the FuelBand is something special, with lots of different ways to evaluate your activity, but it’s mainly a wrist-based pedometer. As a consequence, it can’t always capture your steps and records “steps” for rhythmic arm motions. (I have worn it overnight a few times and “learned” that I took a couple of dozen steps in my sleep, which I definitely didn’t, although I do move around a bit.)

Nonwalking activities are represented as “steps,” generally yielding low activity estimates. Rowing on a machine or riding a bicycle shows strokes as steps, and it acknowledges stroke rate – the bike is more ‘caloriffic’ than the rowing machine – but can’t understand resistance. (Nike claims its logic is more than just pedometry, but I have kept wearing a pedometer, too, and it looks like pedometry to me.) Of course, those activities are better measured with other devices, but it puts the active user in the position of having having irrelevant information when thinking about their overall activity for the day.

The display is simple and narrow, with a few measures (steps, calories, and “Nike Fuel” – a weighted calculation that seeks to provide a common measurement unit across individuals and activities). It also serves as a watch. The display includes a line of tiny dots that light up as you progress toward your goal for the day, with the first dots in red, the middle dots in yellow, and the final dots in green. The device itself is simple and attractive, and sits unobtrusively on the wrist. I placed it on my ankle for bike rides. It is too small to clasp over my ankle but the shape is sufficient to hold it there as a cuff-style bracelet.

FuelBand offers no way to designate a start and stop for a specific activity, has no stopwatch, and displays only a few built-in measures. The web interface and iPhone app show an hour-by-hour breakout of your activity level on a graph, but they don’t show start and stop times or splits. In general, though, the app and web interface are pleasant to use, with stylish visualizations and cute reward sequences for meeting goals. You can also sync to your iOS device anytime throughout the day, which makes the device more engaging and interactive than a simple pedometer.

On setup, FuelBand invites you to set a daily goal, but changing it only takes effect the following day. I first selected 3000 points as a goal (defined by the system as an active day). I swamped that on a normal work day and selected 5000 points the next day, exceeding that as well, but when I decided to have a slow day, I was out of luck; I’m now wearing a device that is chiding me with little red dots for being lazy all day just because I didn’t plan my laziness last night. This merely annoyed me as a motivated, athletic person, but I wonder if it would make a less combative person take the FuelBand off and put it in a drawer.* Battery life is rated at about 4 days, but I find the battery is down to around 20% at the end of single day. In short, I’m getting lots of cues that this device was definitely not designed with me in mind.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to test the FuelBand. Nike has promoted it heavily with its Nike aesthetic, which is much higher energy than the apparent target audience, and the promotion definitely activated my covet drive. FuelBand is a good choice for someone who is already using iOS (the only OS the app supports for now), wants a set-it-and-forget-it tracking device, and just wants some reinforcement for moving around more during the day. It’s particularly bad news for the Jawbone UP, which suffers from much less name recognition combined with a recent episode of major manufacturing trouble. If you’re an active athlete, you’re better off sticking with your sport-specific devices. But it’s a nice gateway device for people looking to get more movement into their daily lives, just as walking is a good gateway activity.

*There are lot of good reasons to decide on the fly to have a slow day – illness, injury, or a dramatic change in plan, for example. The user can add a brief note and choose a mood icon in the web interface, but the purpose of the red dots on the progress display is to remind you to shake a leg. If the developers are already counting on the user to be susceptible to being nudged, they can expect the user to feel criticized, too – and not best pleased if it feels unfair.

Some people find this approach fussy and overly complex, but I think it’s attempting to be mindful of the reality that there is a very wide range of starting points. For most people it’s not enough to say, “Try it out, and if it doesn’t work for you, don’t do it.” This is a hard problem. You have a few minutes – how do you account for different strides, levels of experience, levels of confidence, medical history, terrain interests?

Bonus: It does a nice job of saying “this is a long-valued approach” by showing some vintage flats, designed for the Olympics, from before the ascendancy of today’s heavy-soled, built-up-heel “traditional” running shoe.

I feel that way about Steve Jobs. Maybe not the sunspot part, but wouldn’t it be nice if he’s someplace warm, maybe looking at turtlenecks with Carl Sagan? (Surely that little legal dust-up is water under the bridge by now—and Steve wasn’t even there at the time, right?)

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Hilary Mantel remains my favourite literary stoic, however. Despite her producing A Place of Greater Safety and other magnificent novels, prize juries overlooked her. After she finally won the Booker in 2009, she had every right to be triumphalist. Instead, she wrote in the Economist of how ‘once, when I was trudging home from my second failure to win the £20,000 Sunday Express award, a small boy I knew bobbed out on to the balcony of his flat. “Did you win?” I shook my head. “Never mind,” he said, just like everyone else. And then, quite unlike everyone else: “If you like, you can come up and play with my guinea pig.”’ I suspect that Mantel knew for years that she was the real thing, and just needed to wait for the rest of us to catch up.

From July 9 Diary, by Nick Cohen, which is mainly about something else entirely.

More about the remarkable launch of the sifaka.

The campaign is for a treatment for Alzheimer’s.

More. [He also has a portfolio site under his own name-as-domain-name, but it's dominated by a super-pokey Adobe Flash interface that makes it grim to navigate.]

I wanted to not like this, but then I watched the video, and I liked it.

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Infrastructure from Doyle Partners.

[E]very Sunday, we would drive over and I’d play around either at the farm proper or the home they had with a couple of acres. And they owned a Pomeranian dog.

First, this is a weird thing for a couple of farmers to own. I later learned that there is a link between old Eastern European folks and Pomeranians. They are very heavily owned by young Asian women and 70-year-old Eastern European dudes. I was in Ireland once and I was told a theory by a farmer there about farming with animals. If you have pigs or chickens or cows, you have to not get too attached to animals because they might get sick and you have to kill them, or if you’re raising a pig for slaughter, you have to kill it and feed it to people. So one of the things that farmers do is buy one spectacularly useless little dog. It’s like a Chomskyan release valve on a farm. That’s why these Irish farmers have little Jack Russell Terriers. They can pet them and love them and not have to worry about having to kill them. —Clive Thompson

The Whole Thing

They looked as if they were posing, like when a dad picks up a camera and says: OK, I’m going to make a picture. The lamb and the pig were especially brushed up, like perfect little models of what a lamb and a piglet might be, with their own almost self-conscious sense of being alert to the fact they were being photographed. The scratchy, dark bits of hedge in the foreground added a slightly bleak frame to it all. So I just leaned over the wall and took three shots. This is the third.

More about this photo at Jem Southam’s best shot.

Lovely exhibit of origami on clear sheets, to reveal skeletons, by Takayuki Hori. More, and explanation.

Also, it’s UK Pole-Dance Day, organized by the Equity Pole Dancers’ Working Party! Be careful out there.

Klaus Flugge: ‘I am immensely proud to be the recipient and owner of almost 100 envelopes from talented artists such as David McKee, Satoshi Kitamura, Tony Ross and others.

‘David McKee came across a book of illustrated envelopes entitled Letters to Georgio by the well known French artist Jean-Michel Folon which inspired him to start the collection. His first few envelopes were displayed in my office, and influenced other artists working for Andersen Press to do the same.’ —A publisher’s postbag – in pictures

“The reports surrounding my resignation as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons lead readers to conclude that I represent an old-guard generation that represses women in surgery,” Lazar Greenfield, MD, wrote in an email to MedPage Today and several other news organizations. “Since nothing could be further from the truth, I can no longer remain silent in an attempt to protect the organization.” —Surgeon Rejects Sexism Charge

This is a man who wrote a ha-ha-only-serious editorial that boils down to “gals think they like chocolate, but here’s something that’ll really cheer ‘em up!”

I don’t actually care how he feels about women in the depths of his thoughts, but as titillating as it must have been to him to pen the piece de resistance at the end of that editorial, it junks [yes, I went there] any claim he might make of great sensitivity to women’s lives and experiences, no matter how many women he’s mentored and trained and treated respectfully in the hospital.

How tired are actual live women of being told there’s nothin’ wrong with them that gettin’ laid can’t cure? It’s classic, common or garden sexism. It’s a textbook example. Out for a drink with friends, it can easily be said ironically—or, in the hands of people with exceptional social aptitude and an excellent sense of humor, surrounded by sympathetic listeners, even unironically—and cause mirth to all. The editorial page of a publication by and for a society whose female members have struggled for respect and recognition is not the place.

Too long? Didn’t read? Memo to men in leadership positions—especially in traditionally male-dominated fields in which women have been treated with hostility and open lack of respect: Do not try this at work.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.

Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way

“It’s absurd,” says Matthew Cooper, director of kidney transplantation at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. Transplant centers put potential donors through a comprehensive battery of medical tests before permitting them to give up an organ. “These patients are handpicked. They’re some of the healthiest people around.” —Organ donors may be denied health insurance

They are also heroic, supremely generous people who should be celebrated for their service to others. How about instead of punishing these people, we explicitly acknowledge the contribution they are making by guaranteeing them, oh, the same level of healthcare coverage provided to a member of the US Congress?

Kids who can’t tolerate milk but can pass the “muffin test” without symptoms may outgrow their allergy faster if they raid the cookie jar on a regular basis to keep baked dairy in their diet, researchers found.

I’ve been waiting for this news for a long time. Read the rest of the article.

Before the study began, researchers explained to the parents and the kids, aged 6 to 12, that the dose extender contained no active ingredient. After eight weeks, the symptoms of ADHD had grown more severe in kids who took only a half dose, but they remained stable in the groups that received either the full dose or the half dose plus placebo.

It’s very interesting to see this done with ADHD and stimulants, I guess partly because “stimulants” retain their association with recreational and addictive drug use, and “dose extenders” recall some of the ritual replacement people can use when they are trying to break a dependency. Obviously it’s only suitable with drugs with certain kinds of modes of action—it would spur the development of antibiotic resistance to use this method to “stretch” antibiotic supplies in a stressed environment, for example.

Kids in the ADHD study were told that, “the mind and body work together in interesting ways and placebos are known to work sometimes but no one knows why,” while researchers told patients in [another trial, in irritable bowel syndrome] that placebos “have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes.”

I like this approach, because it explicitly brings a broader inclusion of factors in the patient’s well-being into the doctor’s office. I think it has the potential to improve medical care in a number of ways, from reducing harm (potential side effects) to helping patients feel less buffeted about by what’s brought them into the doctor’s office in the first place. It would be interesting to see some of this work combined with what we’re learning about the better outcomes in people who simply comply diligently with medication instructions—no matter what they’re taking.

Read the whole article, It May Be Fake, but Trust Me—It’ll Work, which also talks about the variety of placebo effects and some of the limitations to consider before putting them to use.

And then there’s this:

ABC in Australia took aerial photos from before and after the tsunami, and arranged them so you can move your mouse across the before image to reveal the damage—and, heartbreakingly, move it back again, an option available only online.

I have seen this picture a few times and always enjoyed it, but I finally got to Frank Chimero’s article musing on what this scene represents. Recommended.