Laptop + shopping cart = mobile
This guy can roll up with laptop and webcam to record robots (photo CC from violetblue):
But in Silicon Valley, combining laptops and shopping carts is just a way to get chores done. When at Whole Foods in Los Altos, I saw a man pushing a shopping cart with a laptop in the part where you can sit your toddler. I suppose he was reading a recipe or something. (I, and I’m sure other Valley folks, do that on a phone.)
A bit odd, but then again, I used to be (I’ve fallen off a bit) judicious about capturing the contents of my shopping cart with ZoneTag.
Texting 4 Health conference in review
As I blogged already, I attended and spoke at the first Texting 4 Health conference at Stanford University last week. You can see my presentation slides at SlideShare here, and the program, with links to the slides for most speakers is here.
The conference was very interesting, and there was quite the mix of participants — both speakers and others. There were medical school faculty, business people, people from NGOs and foundations, technologists, representatives of government agencies and centers, futurists, and social scientists. Everyone had something to learn — I know I did. This also made it somewhat difficult as a speaker because it is hard to know how best to reach, inform, and hold the interest of such a diverse audience: what is common ground with some is entirely new territory with others.
I think my favorite session was “Changing Health Behavior via SMS”. The methods used by the panelists to evaluate their interventions were both interesting to reflect on and good tools for persuading me of the importance and effectiveness of their work. One of my reflections was about what factors to vary in doing experiments on health interventions: there is (reasonable) focus on having a no-SMS control condition, and there are very few studies with manipulations of dimensions more fine-grained. Of course, the field is young and I understand how important true controls are in medical domains, but I think that real progress in understanding mobile messaging and designing effective interventions will require looking at more subtle and theoretically valuable manipulations.
You can see other posts about the conference here and here. And the conference Web site is also starting a blog to watch in the future.