Sleep apps and their usefulness.

I was using a sleep app to track and monitor my sleep pattern for over 6 months when iOS 7 launched with health kit. The first few days or rather a few weeks were fun and interesting. I got insights into how my body had rested and I was able understand how my body would react to a stress or a workout(cycling, running, etc) the following day. All that data was interesting to analyse and understand. Sometimes there were odd days, where one would notice that the day goes really well, despite the fact that sleep was hardly 4 hours or so. As weeks and months passed, the initial enthusiasm died and I wasn’t analysing the data anymore. I still tracked my sleep, but didn’t just look into the data in the morning. I did this for over two months, one fine day I realised that the sleep tracking didn’t change anything about how I lived my life for the past two months. That got me thinking and I came up with some questions. Some questions I should have asked before I set out to start tracking my sleep. The questions were

What is the point of this tracking?
How accurate is this sleep tracking?
If I could spend $2 to know everything about my sleep, then what are those expensive equipments in an actual sleep lab?
Is this sleep tracking really worth the effort?

I started digging around articles and forums on the internet. Its no surprise that the apps are some what beneficial (yes they track the time you spent in bed 😀, the movements yes, but sleep not really 😡) but they aren’t completely reliable and they aren’t accurate at all. Here is what I learned.

Any sleep tracking app does two things well, they tell the duration of the time spent in the bed, and they can record the movements in the bed. Both these aspects deal with the quantitative aspect of sleep. If only these quantitative aspects can give us insights into how our brain works and recovers, we all can be geniuses soon.

Sleep quality defines how the body works and not the time you spent in your bed rolling around, and these apps/motion trackers can hardly measure that.I would say it is just marketing speech for these apps and devices.

Here is an excerpt from a researched, guardian article

“Anything that allows you to wake up feeling refreshed in the morning is what you should be aiming for, which is generally between six and nine hours,” explained Dr Irshaad Ebrahim from the London Sleep Centre. “But it’s not all about time, it’s about the quality of the sleep, whether you complete sleep cycles.”
As to using motion trackers to measure sleep, he said: “They’re not measuring sleep, simply motion – not muscle tone, brain waves, heart rate or eye movement. You cannot infer quality of sleep from motion and tell what is crucial REM [rapid eye movement] sleep and what is not. People can become obsessed about their sleep through these gadgets doing them a disservice, worrying about it and in turn getting less decent sleep and having a negative impact.”

Here is more from a Ph.d candidate in neuroscience. Don’t forget to read the full article.

About every 90 minutes, we slip into REM, which is characterized by EEG waves that resemble wake, whole-body muscle paralysis, and—yes—rapid movement of the eyes. In the end, a pretty little roadmap of one’s night’s sleep, called a hypnogram, can be generated. It looks a little something like the image
…which is exactly what apps like Sleep Cycle and Sleep Time attempt to create for you.
Except that, without precise electrophysiological measures, the apps’ premise is fundamentally flawed.

So I stopped my sleep tracking. What a blissful feeling to not take your phone to your bed every night and not worry about iCloud backups in the morning. Yeah, iCloud doesn’t back up data when the sleep tracking app is running at night and you have to manually start the iCloud backup every morning if you care about iCloud backup like me.

We all had good life even before the onset of activity trackers and sleep apps. Lets not forget that. Humans are predictable and are a creature of habits. Just create a routine of an hour of workout and a regular habit of getting into bed at the same time everyday. In just a couple of weeks you will start feeling the improvements of a good sleep and your body and mind will thank you for the good habits 😀.

The Billionaire’s typewriter

It is an elaborate and a very substantial critiquing on Medium and how Medium works by Butterick. It is important to read through this and understand on how Medium works and what the implications are to using Medium.

People are often short sighted especially when barrier to entry into anything is literally none and more so when things are free. But are there any free lunches anywhere? Yeah I know open source is still a big deal and it still works if you want etc.. etc.. The problem is, Medium is not open source, nor do I care if it will be one. The problem I have with Medium is that, they own the content. That is something that I am not comfortable with at all. I am self hosted for a reason and this is the primary reason besides a few other minor ones. I OWN my content and I control everything about it. Now that is some thing every blogger/author needs to worry about. I would prefer WordPress.com to Medium any day.

LinkedIn's Direction

Ben Evans on LinkedIn

Now, I entirely understand that the LinkedIn business model is to sell my CV to recruiters, not give me useful tools to manage my network. I also understand that all the mediocre me-too news-aggregation is a way to try to get me to spend more time on the site, rather than visiting every month or two. But really, it needs to get the basics right. It needs to give me useful tools. Right now it’s a not-very-good CV database with an interface that would be second-rate a decade ago, that I have no reason to stick with if something remotely, you know, useful came along.
So, Reid Hoffman is a genius, with a great vision. I just wish he’d join LinkedIn, and implement some of it.

Looks like Ben and I have a very similar stand on linkedin. I do share his annoyances as well.But i have another point to add. Interesting thing here to notice is that I am a recruiter and he is not. But none the less we both have a very similar thought at where linkedin is heading. Simply put they are loosing focus in terms of what they intented to do and where they are headed.

When I joined, Linkedin was a professional netowrking site, now it seems more of a job portal targeted towards recruiters, As a premium user (yeah my company pays for it), I defninetely get benefits out of the way Linkedin is heading, but i doubt whether on the long run i would get much benefit at all. Professionals signed up on linkedin for the want/need of newtorking with similar like minded people and have conversations and discussions with industry experts in their industry of choice, not looking for a job or a career move. Jobs and career opportunities were not the core reason why they joined.

Linkedin is slowly pushing for more of Job Opportunities and less of networking on their site because recruiters are willing to pay to get connections/one to one interactions with professionals. That is where the money lies for them. Very valid, but what happens to professionals who are not seeking opportunities? The constant emails and connection requests are going to annoy other industry professionals. Soon either they will disable their accounts or delete them and move else where. Over the past couple of years i see a lot more recruiters joining LinkedIn than other industry professionals, which in my opinion isn’t good for recruiters in the long term.

↬ Marcelo Somers

Google Admits WebM infringes h.264 Patents

This might seem a harsh from Marco about google, but trust me it is just the truth.

Open” has very little to do with anything they do. What they’re really doing most of the time is trying to gain control of the web for themselves and their products. If they really cared about being so “open”, they’d open up a nontrivial part of their business that hasn’t already been commoditized, like their searching or advertising algorithms.
As usual, “open” is just lip service. And it works. It works damn well.

One can’t agree more with that statement.. They want to have the web under the control. Google created chromium (opensource), but how many of us get to use chromium as it is.The chromium site gives a download link to chrome and not the chromium, atleast for windows users its google chrome that they can get their hands on instantly and not chromium. So why is chromium so hard to download from the chromium site? Is there any stable build of chromium available? No.The reason is very simple, they want us to use the google branded version, so that they can keep tabs on the web and most importantly US. Why is Gmail still free? Why chrome OS, when there is open source linux? Why do they need to create Google+ rather than partner with Facebook for social search.

I can go on on ranting, but you get the point. Its very simple they want to own as much of the web as possible, keep everything under their control and they don’t care how they do it. They will do it by hook or crook. Well that stinks.

Its all consumerism

Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living (or at least our rate of spending) every time we get a raise.
I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, pretending to be a deaf-mute, as Holden Caulfield often fantasized. But we could certainly do well to understand what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.

The entire article is a good read, please read the complete story here. The article is one such peice which makes you stop and think about consumerism. Probably take a step back and realize what the whole point of life is, where we are headed, to take a look at the bigger picture of life, to realize where the limits are, to understand where fruitful life is and to get the essence of life. Hope the article inspires you to ponder and realize where you are headed, how deep in the consumerism soup you are and what you actually seek.

Last updated by Saravanan Sivaraman at June 26, 2016.