A more affordable, convenient way to measure V02 Max?

The iriverON Heart Rate Monitoring Bluetooth Headset makes a unique claim for a heart rate monitor, at least that I've seen: it can measure V02 Max.

V02 Max is a measurement of the maximum oxygen your body can deliver to its muscles and consume during exertion. Usually, to test this figure, you have to go a lab where they put a mask over your face and have you run on a treadmill. Aerobic exercise can improve your V02 Max.

Endurance athletes bandy V02 Max figures about like bodybuilders discuss body fat percentages or basketball players discuss vertical leaps. The average person has a V02 Max in the 30 to 40 range (ml/kg/min). As a point of comparison, some of the great aerobic athletes of all time have had tested V02 Max of 80 and higher. Miguel Indurain, the great cyclist, was said to have confirmed V02 Max of 88.

There is more to being world class at a sport than just a high V02 Max, one's lactate threshold matters, too, but to date only professional or very serious athletes have had access to regular V02 Max testing during training. I've always been curious to see where I stack up and how my figure shifts from working out, but traveling to a testing facility and paying hundreds of dollars for each test has always been prohibitive.

I have no idea how accurate the iriverON measure of V02 Max is, but I'm going to give it a try and will report back here. The methodology is one I've never heard of; CEO Steven LeBoeuf (no relation to Shia, I hope), explains in this post: 

Valencell has designed a highly miniaturized sensor module that is capable of fitting inside virtually any earbud or audio headset. The sensor module shines light into the ear region and measures how this light interacts with blood flow.  

This information is then processed by novel signal extraction algorithms to pull out blood flow information (which is actually very faint) from what amounts to be an incredible amount of noise.  For example, the signal from blood flow is more than 100-1,000 times weaker than the signal coming from motion noise and environmental noise (like sunlight).    

Next, Valencell’s novel algorithms process this information into important vital signs metrics, such as heart rate, respiration rate, energy expenditure, and more. These vital signs metrics are then sent wirelessly to select smartphone applications (Android and iOS devices) that generate real-time fitness assessments such as  resting heart rate, training load, VO2max, personalized heart rate zones, and recovery time. 

 

I have yet to hear of a more convenient way to measure one's lactate threshold that doesn't involve running on a treadmill and continually pricking your fingertip to draw blood.

More lessons in human-computer team-ups

"I don't know if you know anything about Six Sigma," Coombs asked rhetorically. "a human being is at best a 2-sigma machine. Which means that humans get things right 92 to 93 percent of the time."

 

From Alexis Madrigal's piece on telemarketing “robots.” It turns out the robotic Samantha West who telephoned a Time reporter was a telemarketer choosing pre-recorded audio clips from a sound board using call assist software that is increasingly popular in the industry.

Madrigal raises two other great points in his investigation of this industry that Samantha West brought into the limelight.

"The impact on the people was really dramatic. It was one of the things we didn't expect," Bills told me. "In outbound sales, it knocked our turnover from 400 percent a year to 135 to 140 percent. And it dramatically changed the characteristics of employing people."

To be clear, 140 percent turnover is about on par with the fast-food industry. The paragons of employee retention keep their numbers in the single digits. These are still hard jobs. 

But maybe this technology makes it a little bit easier. 

"It creates detachment," Bills said. "What we see is that our employees, when they have a successful outcome of the call, they take pride in operating the system effectively. When it doesn't work, they say, 'Ahhh that wasn't me.' It doesn't beat people up in the same way."

The machine absorbs some of the "emotional wear and tear" that comes with the job. CallAssistant can even employ people full time because the "shift fatigue" that hits other outbound telemarketing firms doesn't set in in quite the same way. 

* * *

Though no one quite puts it this way, the number-one selling point for the soundboard technology is obvious to Filipino telemarketers: Americans' xenophobia. We want to hear from people who sound just like us. 

 

Anyone who's ever worked in telemarketing (I've made fundraising calls in college and for the Obama campaign) knows you already work off a script, so it's entirely shocking that the industry would transition to using pre-recorded audio clips.

One thing I thought when watching the Spike Jonze movie Her is how humans have a finite amount of love and attention to give and how computers can increase the supply in the world by a near infinite degree. For humans to accept it, though, we have to shift our conception of the definition of love. How much do you value someone's love because you know it's finite and they've chosen to give that precious resource to you? It sounds selfish but it may be wired in our DNA. [SPOILER ALERT for those of who haven't seen Her, skip the rest of this paragraph]. When Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore finds out his operating system Samantha is carrying on love affairs with hundreds of others, he doesn't rejoice at the amazing leverage and increased supply of love in the world, he reacts like a jealous lover, to no human's surprise. An economist might be disheartened, though.

I'm reminded of Joe Pantoliano in The Matrix: “You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss.”

Gompertz law of mortality

A British actuary, Benjamin Gompertz, noticed this pattern back in 1825, and ever since it's been called the Gompertz law of human mortality — yes, death creeps closer, but it creeps closer in orderly steps (for humans about every eight years).

 

Roughly every eight years, the odds that a human will die doubles. This is Gompertz law of mortality.

This led physicist Brian Skinner to try to figure out why, and he made a surprising discovery.

OK, so this happens. The pattern, says Brian, "holds across a large number of countries, time periods and even different species. While actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that 'your probability of dying doubles every X years' holds true."

But here's the dangling question: Why the regular interval? Why eight years for humans?

Why eight years?

Brian's answer: "It's an amazing fact, and no one understands why it's true."

Why Do Intellectuals Favor Government Solutions?

That's the title of an interesting post by Julian Sanchez.

Before answering the question, he first provides some context.

One thing to bear in mind is that even informed and intelligent people do not typically arrive at their political views by an in-depth review of the evidence in each particular policy area. Most of us can only be really expert in one or two spheres, and in others must rely heavily on those who possess greater expertise and seem to share our basic values. In practice, most people select a “basket” of policy views in the form of an overarching political ideology—which often amounts to choosing a political community whose members seem like decent people who know what they’re talking about. So we needn’t assume the majority view of the intellectual class represents the outcome of a series of fully independent judgments: A relatively mild bias in one direction or another within the relevant community could easily result in an information cascade that generates much more disproportionate social adoption of the favored views. So any potential biasing factors we consider need not be as dramatic as the ultimate distribution of opinion: Whatever initial net bias may exist is likely to be magnified by bandwagon effects.

 

It's a worthwhile point. Most people just can't be experts in so many areas, but one thing the Internet has done is made it easier and easier to choose from a wide selection of baskets of viewpoints or opinions. In other words, it's easier now than ever to sound smart on a wide range of topics. That may sound more condescending than I mean it to: often a gateway to forming one's own opinions is trying others on for size, and as with innovation in other fields often it's easier to build off of or react to another person's ideas than to birth one from scratch.

Back to the question posed in the title of Sanchez's post.

Here, then, is an alternative (though perhaps related) source of potential bias. If the best solutions to social problems are generally governmental or political, then in a democratic society, doing the work of a wordsmith intellectual is a way of making an essential contribution to addressing those problems. If the best solutions are generally private, then this is true to a far lesser extent: The most important ways of doing one’s civic duty, in this case, are more likely to encompass more direct forms of participation, like donating money, volunteering, working on technological or medical innovations that improve quality of life, and various kinds of socially conscious entrepreneurial activity.

You might, therefore, expect a natural selection effect: Those who feel strongly morally motivated to contribute to the amelioration of social ills will naturally gravitate toward careers that reflect their view about how this is best achieved. The choice of a career as a wordsmith intellectual may, in itself, be the result of a prior belief that social problems are best addressed via mechanisms that are most dependent on public advocacy, argument and persuasion—which is to say, political mechanisms.

 

It's worth contrasting the situation with the technology industry where a great deal of quarterback coaching and navel-gazing occurs online. It's not all just people signaling how smart they are: if you have a legitimate issue with something, the densely interconnected network of folks online will likely hear you if you express your opinion cogently.