How do your friends affect you? #friendtracking for TEDxLA experiment!

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Imagine if your friends were as critical to your well-being as diet and exercise? This is a personal experiment, conducted quietly by lots of people in the coming weeks. Take note of how the people you know or randomly encounter have their effect on you, are they toxic or a vitamin?

Keep track on one of the back-pages of your notebook, a spare scrap of paper, or use a note taking app on your phone. Be as simple or elaborate as you like. Keep a running total (like counting cards) plus, plus, minus, plus, minus… for how you feel after you see, talk or message with someone. Or add up all the positives and negatives for how people influence your mood.  Focus on a few friends or expand to everyone you meet during a week.

Notice how you feel, write it down. How do your friends affect you?

 Ask others to track and show us the results (visualizations welcome!)

Keep a running count plus or minus for everyone you encounter for a week. Mention it to others. Draw a picture, or just post the +++—++–++++++++ …visualizations welcome! Use the hashtag #friendtracking and #TEDxLA will accumulate and repost.

Why measure

There is a tru-ism that you measure what you want to understand. Tons of new research has uncovered that a happy life is based on the relationships we keep. Measuring causes you to pay attention, be mindful, and notice how interactions have an effect on you. Positive or negative? Toxic or a vitamin?

Human chemistry feels complicated, but the intricacies of relationships are clearly becoming measured and understood in ways that will soon feel like science-fiction. Jump in, use a little personal tracking data to notice how people affect you.

More on this topic here.

Prediction: who you hang out with will become like diet and exercise

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I want to make a prediction, and time-stamp it with my squarespace blog right here. The amount of data gathered about each one of us is going to be staggering, it kindof already is. But....rather than creepy surveillance to simply present more desirable products to us or conveniently anticipate our up-to-the moment need "OK google!", "Alexa buy me more batteries!". It's going to be surprisingly good. It's going to be I-cannot-imagine-living-without-it good. And this will come soon, within 5 years soon.

I'm not discounting the NSA and global surveillance of individuals under the guise of tracking terrorist activity, and then hanging onto all that metadata for future dissection. That is a problem.

I'm talking about all the micro-activities that make up our day. Who did you talk to, meet with, where did you go, what did you spend, eat, do, sleep, speak, breathe....and oh, how's your microbiome doing? Recording facial micro-expressions from your web or device camera picks up like a little bit of stress, how's your cortisol level? Is your immune system getting hammered? Brain fog, what's slowing you down? Yeah, yeah...you've got your entire genome sequenced, but we know the expression of those genes (epigenetics) and the affect of your day-to-day environment and lifestyle (the stuff you do to yourself) means as much as the DNA you started with. 

The surprise is that it will be easy. It will start with how people affect us. Are they toxic or a vitamin?

I predict we will casually use the data we know about us and the people around us to manipulate our body chemistry. The surprise is that it will be easy. It will start with how people affect us. The people we know and our connections will become like diet and exercise, we'll understand them in the way we know what makes up a balanced meal. 

Human chemistry feels complicated, but the intricacies of relationships are ripe for machine learning. How do you feel about this person, how do they feel about you. How does their personality map to yours, what is the nature of the relationship, a lover, friend, family, co-worker ....everyone you deal with, worry about or have ever encountered. A great deal of human interaction can be patterned and captured in a very large AI system. It's coming.

You can tell it's beginning cause academic studies are verifying chunks of this idea. Your digital footprint is more accurate predicting your Big 5 personality assessment than your friends (sample size 86,000+), unsupervised machine learning using fictional relationships from literature and much of the work from Sandy Pentland and his graduate students at MIT.... here is just one characterizing reciprocity of friendship.

....as humans will we prefer the randomness and human intuition of assessing relationships?

If you're convinced we are ontrack to know a ton about relationships, and we will surely characterize it with models, network mathematics and even prediction algorithms. So much is known today, it's just not known by us as regular people. How might we consume perfect information about all the people we encounter. As humans will we prefer the randomness and human intuition of assessing relationships or will the machines do it for us?

We are social creatures, since pre-historic time we have been assessing who is a friend and who is an enemy, the champions of this have genetically survived better than humans who were bad at reading people. Our brain's default activity is mulling over our relationships. Rehashing our social lives is the brain's favorite downtime activity. Maybe we don't need any help, we got this one. But....

We are beginning to see many, many apps that are chipping away at the potential to know a whole lot more about the people who shape us, who we can rely on, what is their bias, their priority, will they reciprocate? Not just what you can find when you google or track someone down on Linkedin. CrystalKnows will help you craft better communication, Shapr will introduce me to people Tinder fashion who share my ideas, and emotion recognition like Affectiva is getting embedded in the apps and games we love.

We already use social networks like a life-long rolodex, the obsessive of us 'curate' our feed by specifying who is a close friend, who we keep an eye on and who we hide or unfollow. What we will come to know is how people shape us, right down to the methalaytion of our DNA and direct effect on our mood and stress. We don't need everyone we meet to be super-sweet, I bet the right formula is a mix of slightly acidic questioning people who make us think and others who act like a vitamin boost. Every now and then you need to meet one of those "I-learned-a-lesson" people. Maybe after a few generations, we'll document mathematical patterns for the right relationship-mix during adolescence and another type to shape us as early adults. 

But know that proper dosage of our friends will get served up to us in easy-to-consume social networks. Who we encounter may not be so random. Remember when facebook let you remove all traces of your ex? I bet we'll be able to grab the mix of people we hang out with like a shopping cart of kale and grilled salmon. 

I'm kindof excited about this, everytime I'm completely flummoxed by mis-reading someone or not understanding why I didn't get an email returned, I think....in the future I'll understand it all.

What if art made itself... the art version of a self-driving car.

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I make work about data. Personal data gathered about you. The stuff we hardly notice, where we go, what we eat, how much we sleep, who we talk to, click on, write, what causes us stress and how we feel. Imagine a time when everything about our behavior and body is tracked, measured and known. EVERYTHING. Lately, I’ve shifted to how all this data will drive predictions and anticipate much about us. In the same way an artist follows mental rules and decisions for producing work, machine learning software will eventually produce algorithms that make art.

daily stress inventory predicts future chronic health conditions


We know AI robots are writing blog posts and impersonating humans as chat bots. Futurists predict the end of many white-collar jobs. Should we worry? PhD students write art algorithms that recreate paintings, computers learn to create new photographs of faces or scenes with no camera or image knitting involved. 

What if art made itself? The art version of a self-driving car. Imagine art in the future, will there be ‘real’ art and robot art? What happens when we move beyond pixels on glass and automate tangible data in the physical world? Mural walls that grow and recycle? Will people be less fearful if extreme insights from personal data are produced as textured pattern that look organic and colorful? Can we try out the future with a little experimentation today?

Grow your own art... as wall texture from data collected about you.

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“Why couldn’t everyone have abstract patterns of their personal data fill their walls”  Perhaps seeing the abstract patterns and rhythms of your self-tracking data is a short-cut to mindfulness. A quick and dirty way to boost your immune system, the benefits of meditation and self-reflection without much effort. Originally I imagined laser and 3D printing technology delivering physical tangible hand-made patterns directly to walls without the cost or intervention of an art gallery or even the artist. But I'm now captivated by bio-fabrication.

I think I found what might turn out to be an easier way....to fill the textured walls of your future 'tiny' apartment. GROW IT! Microbial cellulose that can form shapes and pattern, with little bits of color....and then when it gets wet, it RECYCLES. It's the perfect minimalist art-making material that is both physical and ephemeral. In 6 minutes Suzanne Lee shows what is possible. Very simply, we will grow our own art!

Made you curious??? Here are a whole bunch of projects in the bio-fabricate world, updated and pulled together by Biofabricate.co....just click!

I rebuilt my website ....completely

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I knew I had to move on from my wordpress site when I read a few months back that google downgraded search results if your site was not 'mobile-responsive'. Ugh. After buying a couple of new wordpress themes and trying to pull off a simple upgrade, I bit the bullet and opened a trial account at Squarespace. I used them to build my FRICKbits site, so I knew what I had in store, yeah, yeah, yeah...it's easy, but not really. You have to change your mindset and work within narrow parameters. First I spent hours combing thru the templates. If anyone wants to have a drink and talk endlessly about the different options and tradeoffs...I'm game. There is a wonderful comparison chart from a woman who is up there with Mother Theresa in my view.

Then you begin the task of locating ALL your images in the original format to resize them, cause screens got larger and bandwidth faster. Now you really need to be 1500 px wide. Husband Mark said I kept tapping my feet about every 15 seconds as I worked on this for hours (and hours), anxiety ...ya think? Looking at images of your work, color correcting, photoshopping out electric plugs and cleaning up everysingle one is like working on photographs of your face. All you see are the problems. 

The big turning point came when I exported well over 5 years of blog posts and I think it all moved over flawlessly, but in reality I only looked at a couple pages. No tags, ah well. 

Work looks better if you edit it down, so I decided to toss a bunch of images. Seriously a bunch. Was like cleaning out my clothes closet, I got rid of lots, noone will ever miss them. I used to think I had to put lots of work up....like a shotgun blast, maybe it will hit a wider mark. Again, worked on this for a couple more days, it even made my stomach hurt a little. And if you go look, I doubt you'll notice what's gone. Then I decided not to worry about individual descriptions of materials and size....pswhew, who really cares? 

Yesterday I moved all the DNS servers over to squarespace and it's slowly propagating across the net. And jeez, that system is still in the original arcane language of the web, CNAME-whaaat? Now I'll fiddle for a week or so, and start to push it out in the world, if you stumble upon this...you'll know what I've been up to.