Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is a researcher with a background in biology and citizen science and an open science activist. He works as a senior researcher at The Alan Turing Institute. In 2011, he founded openSNP. He was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2018. In 2017 he joined the Open Humans Foundation as the Director of Research.

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras

Last week, I attended

 “AI” UK

– which was organised by

 The Alan Turing Institute

and where I served in a minor role on the program advisory committee – and a workshop on

 Responsible “AI”

, co-organised by some fellow fellows of the Software Sustainability Institute.

‘AI’ from below

Get a copy of the first zine of the project


 As if the sand were made of stone

is an ongoing documentary photography project that we (that is Eugenia and I) are working on. The project covers how small villages &amp; hamlets across rural Argentina – in particular the Argentinean Pampa – are changing and adapting in response to transport shifting from rail to road.

as if the sand were stone

The

 Wassail

or

 orchard-visiting wassail

is an English tradition in which people bless their fruit trees to ensure a good harvest come autumn. Typically, these celebrations and blessings are accompanied by song and dance – including Morris dancing – and bring the local community together.

East Greenwich Wassail

Happening just a week after the

 London Pride

event/parade, the

 London Trans Pride

gathered more than 25,000 people for a march from Trafalgar Square to Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner – despite a rainy start. The more mainstream crowds attending the

 London Pride

have turned the event into a party-like spectacle. In contrast, the

 London Trans Pride

consciously sticks to being a political protest march.

London Trans Pride

In October 2022, Eugenia and I spent a few weeks in Laos both in Vientiane and Luang Prabang. A big reason for going was that Eugenia gave some workshops in Vientiane, but we also gave some school lectures through Lecturers Without Borders while there.

Laos

If you have spent any time on Mastodon and are intested in data visualisations, geography, RStats, or any of the intersections thereof, you are likely to have seen the stunningly beautiful 3D map visualisations that @terence has been creating with the rayshader package. I have been itching to get an excuse to play around more with this myself,   and finally found a lovely one within the context of another little project.

Rayshading Argentina in R

Eugenia and I made our first zine,

 available here

, for our ongoing documentary photography project

 as if the sand were stone

. The project focuses on how small villages &amp; hamlets across the Argentinean Pampa are adapting in response to a shift in urbanism and transport – from rail to road. For our first zine, we selected 24 images, all made on black &amp;

As if the sand… – volume 1

I have recently started to move my personal code repositories away from GitHub, in favor of hosting them with a smaller, independent and collectively managed alternative - including for this static website. In the same spirit, I was also interested in whether I could be doing my small part to diversify my overall web hosting approach.

Self-deploying more of my own small web

La Grande-Motte is a comparatively new commune in the Hérault département in Occitanie in southern France that was built in the 60s and 70s in what used to be a marsh. The city was planned by a single architect – Jean Balladur – who was inspired by the works of Oscar Niemeyer and pre-Columbian, Aztec pyramids.

La Grande-Motte

Photo: VOICES festival

Last week I attended the

 The European Festival of Journalism and Media Literacy

, to join a panel on

 Artificial intelligence – Which skills do I need?

. Moderated by Lee Hibbard, the panel consisted of writer Maria Farrell, computational linguist &amp;

‘AI’ at The European Festival of Journalism and Media Literacy

Flickr

as one of the old school photo sharing communities celebrated it 20th birthday on February 10th, 2024. To celebrate, there were photo walks in many different places around the globe, including in London. Beyond lots of

 Flickr

themed swag, our photo walk also took us into the

 British Museum

. The

 London

Flickr group has a thread where you can find links and images of a lot of the other attendees.

Flickr Turns 20

In April 2023, I went to Argentina with the main reason being attending the 7th CSVconf in Buenos Aires. But of course we also went to visit Eugenia’s family over Easter. And we also managed to squeeze in some Lecturers Without Borders while there, even one in German for myself! Between all of these things we also found some time off for sightseeing.

Santa Fe &amp; Corrientes

Having recently moved from Paris to London, it was time to get a new nametag for our dog Ohana – as the old one still displayed Eugenia’s old, French phone number. This wasn’t great as many folks don’t have phone contracts that allow calling abroad (thanks Brexit?).  Ohana’s old name tag was custom-made with a laser cutter – for both cutting the shape and adding her name and the phone number.

On the internet, everyone knows you’re a dog

Socrates I’m a huge fan of the

 Quantified Self

and

 Personal Science

movement in which one uses empirical methods to answer personal questions. Related to that, I try to collect and mine as many personal data sources as possible. And visualizing the data to learn from this is the part I really enjoy.

Quantified Self

On the weekend of September 17/18, 2022 the annual European Heritage Days took place again. During this weekend many monuments which typically aren’t openly accessible open their doors for the general public. Amongst the buildings that are open to the public during these days is the

 Palais du Luxembourg

, which was built in the 17th century and has been housing parts of the French legislature since the 19th century.

Journées européennes du patrimoine

tl;dr: Differences in my heart rate depending on the applications I use are small

With France being back in a second lockdown (though the rules are a bit less strict this time around), I thought it would be interesting to look at the impact of different habits a bit more.

Measuring app-related stress

tl;dr: You can turn your Puck.js into a
 
 one-button tracker
 
 with this open source website I made


 Open Humans

community member James Littlejohn highlighted the

 Espruino

family of open source hardware boards and devices during one of our community calls some weeks ago.

Turning a Puck.js into an open source one-button tracker

The COVID-19 confinement in Paris and France at large lasted from March 17th to May 11th, with comparatively strict measures on when you could leave your house, where you could go and for how long &amp; when you could be outside. As a result a lot of folks, including me were forced to drastically change their daily routines, shifting to a home office approach.

The effects the COVID-19 lockdown had on me

Download PDF of the slides directly. Yesterday I presented what I learned from all of my passive data collection as a

 Show &amp; Tell

at the first European

 online

Quantified Self meet-up. I already showed some of my insights here on the blog, but I added some more data analyses for the presentation, including my movement patterns from the GPS data and details on phone usage.

Quantified Self Show &amp; Tell: Lockdown Life

A video of Panoramax in action. Starting out with a map view which has small orange lines for where images are available. Then going into the actual 360 degree images and moving around. Above: a video showcasing the panoramax viewer, with a map to see where (most

 [1]

) images are, and the 360º views.

Openly licensed streetview with Panoramax

US Senator Kamala Harris held the launch rally of her campaign for US Presidential election in Oakland on Sunday, January 27th in Downtown Oakland. A crowd of around 20,000 people showed up, filling the streets around city hall at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. People (and animals) of all ages spent hours in line, waiting to gain entrance to the plaza itself, blocking off a whole city block in a snaking queue.

Kamala Harris Presidential Campaign Kickoff

Santa Con: What started out as anti-capitalist performance art in San Francisco (hanging Santa included), has turned into a ‘reviled bar crawl’, across the US.  So also in San Francisco in 2018 where hordes of Santas took over Union Square on Saturday, 2018-12-08. And it wouldn’t be San Francisco if a group of naked Santa was missing.

SantaCon

On November 8, 2018 the Camp Fire in Butte County started and wasn’t contained until November 25, 2018. With at least 88 dead, 62,053 ha covered by the fire and over 18,000 destroyed structures it was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California so far. Over 52,000 people had to evacuate their homes. Soon, the smoke of the fires reached down to the Bay Area, leading to an increase in air pollution.

Wildfire Season

What the output of a personal API can look like.

 Open Humans

has been expanding thanks to lots of new data sources that have gone live in the last couple of months. Thanks to our Outreachy interns we already have added support for sharing your Google Location History and your Spotify Listening History.

A personal API

Participating in the

 Mozilla Global Sprint

is somewhat of an annual ritual for me. This year’s installment took place on May 10/11. As

 Open Humans

hadn’t ever participated in a Sprint before, I spent some time in getting up a clean list of ways to contribute on a small micro-site.

The 2018 #mozsprint

How can we make it easy to add data to

 Open Humans

?

 Open Humans

lives through its community of members and the projects they design.

Get your own Open Humans project up in 5-10 minutes

“

 Algorithm

” is a word that has become more and more meaningless in our day and age – given how it is thrown around everywhere. If you bring it up with people who didn’t undergo some form of tech initiation – be that formal education or self-learning - it’s easy for them to conjure a picture like the one above: A colourful mess of things, too complex to understand if you don’t have some advanced degree in computer science.

Demystifying Algorithms by Doing

President Bartlet of

 The West Wing

is calling his famous “What’s next” to his secretary after managing a task. I just defended my PhD last week, and one question from virtually every person who attended and stayed for the after-party:

 What’s Next?

Which initially felt a bit weird. After all, I already took my next step three months ago when I joined

 Open Humans

as the Director of Research.

Open Humans, what’s next?

The first month in Berkeley – and with that also with

 Open Humans

– is slowly coming to an end. And while much of this time was spent wrangling various forms of organisational and bureaucratic ordeals (finding an apartment; making sure all visa stuff is in order; getting a Social Security Number;

Getting started at Open Humans

Exactly 5 years ago

 Twitter

started offering the option for users to download their full archive of personal tweets. The archive gives you a change to quickly browse through your personal history and find those funny cat pictures you once posted. But there is additional value in the archive, transcending the trips down to memory lane.

Meet the TwArχiv

After having had some time to reflect on my writing process I’d like to share some of the things that I found useful during the writing of my PhD thesis. There’s probably already a million of these articles out there, but this also means that one more shouldn’t make much of a difference, so here we go. In principle this should all be applicable for other thesis writings as well.

A PhD writing survival guide

I am more than delighted to announce that I will join

 Open Humans

. Supported by a fellowship I will assume the role of

 Director of Research

in November.

 Open Humans

as a platform connects individuals who want to participate in research with research studies and projects that can be run by academic and “

 citizen

” scientists alike.

Joining Open Humans

Today I finally submitted my PhD thesis (🎉) and what better way to celebrate that day than doing some data analysis and visualization, right? So, let’s get some idea on how much time the actual write-up took after all and how I spent my time during these weeks. Luckily, I’m running

 RescueTime

on my machines. The service allows you to monitor how, when and how long you’re using your computer.

Writing up a PhD: some numbers

Philipp and I again participated in the

 Mozilla Global Sprint

, which took place on 1st and 2nd of July.

openSNP at the #mozsprint

In the process of doing research for a snarky tweet I was looking for the yearly subscription costs of

 Nature

. In itself not an easy task, as the corresponding page one finds via Google is devoid of content.

When Nature pushes Malvertising

Last week the

 The Royal Society

issued a joint statement about the importance of the international nature of research along with national academies across the UK and Europe. At the same time they started the hashtag

 #ScienceIsGlobal

on

 Twitter

, where individuals reported what nationalities are collaborating in their labs. I, and many others, reported their lab’s composition using the emoji flags.

#ScienceIsGlobal

This website has included a little

 personal API

in the footer for quite a while. But in recent-(ish) months I’ve expanded a bit on it, as you can see in the screenshot above. It now also makes an informed guess on whether I’m likely doing okay on a given day or whether I might be under the weather – for example because of falling sick, having slept poorly or other factors.

A heuristic for feeling fine

In August 2022 I went to visit Wetzlar and the Leitz-Park together with Vinh. Beyond checking out the old city, we were particular interested in going to the Leitz-Park as it is the birth place of Leica cameras and 35mm photography more broadly.

Wetzlar &amp; Leitz-Park

Paris came out on 2020-06-06 for local #blacklivesmatter protests today. A part of it took place in front of the US embassy at Place de la Concorde, with the police fencing off the area widely. Another group gathered at the Champs de Mars facing the Eiffel Tower.      The full image set can be found on Flickr.

#BLM 2020 in Paris

Geotagging photos in

 Adobe Lightroom

. After semi-accidentally ending up at SantaCon in San Francisco last weekend, I was wondering how I could geo-tag my photos more easily. If you’re only taking pictures with your smartphone, that’s not much of an issue as the internal GPS applies the metadata automatically. But lots of modern cameras still don’t come with an internal GPS or require some ridiculous add-ons.

Using Overland to Geotag Photos with Lightroom

Mozfest is

 Mozilla

’s annual festival that brings together technologists, activists, scientists, artists and many more for a weekend in London’s Ravensbourne College. Unlike schedules of many other events, time for passive consumption of talks can barely be found. Instead, workshops make up the bulk of the schedule. And even the science fair &amp; demo parts consist largely of lively discussions between participants.

Mozfest 2018

Being more of a dog-person (or to stay in

 OkCupid

lingo

 likes dogs, has cats

) I was sad when I saw that the

 CatterPlots

made their rounds on Twitter again this week, as there’s still no dog-centric alternative if you’re an

 R

-faring data visualizer. In order to dry my tears I went over to dog_rates for some binge dog-watching. And then I wondered, aren’t these puppers all getting cuter and cuter?

They are Good Dogs, Indeed

The pews of the

 Internet Archive

back in 2018.

 tl;dr: Posts on this blog are now automatically archived, indexed and full-text searchable through
 
 The Rogue Scholar
 

. The jury might still be out on whether the

 small

or

 indie

web will make a comeback, but I’ve personally enjoyed posting more on my blog here in recent months.

Archiving scholarly blogs with Rogue Scholar

tl;dr
 
 : metrics-obsessed capitalism is the reason why we can’t have nice things – and watch @tante’s talk

Back in Paris, I was semi-joking with friends about how the rate of technological innovations seem to have slowed down or come to a halt. The last “big” innovation that we could think about were smartphones, as carrying the internet permanently in our pockets was quite a change.

Emptying Innovation - one metric at a time

Or: Why 2024 is my personal

 year of Linux on the desktop

According to Doctorow,

 enshittification

might be coming

 for absolutely everything

. I’ve more and more felt this was for my own digital devices and means of digital production: Be that Apple’s just increasing love for walled gardens - especially since having the opaque app review processes (c.f. cpython’s --with-app-store-compliance), Microsoft’s (successful?)

Seizing my means of computation

Image: Apple As is custom,

 Apple

gave a sneak peek into the new features that will come with the new versions of their operating systems later this year at the WWDC.

Interpreting the quantified self

The dynamic footer of my website has been powered by a little aggregation of some of my personal data for about 5 1/2 years by now. Until recently, all the data related to my activity and physiology (steps, heart rate, sleep, body) came from an Oura Ring.

Automating data exports from Apple Health

Enoch’s Hammer

of Luddite fame, at the Tolson Memorial Museum.

 I gave a talk at the

Pint of Science Festival

 – an international science festival that takes places at local pubs and cafes across the world – this evening.

Imagined Future: Data democracy at Pint of Science 2074

In the last blog post, I had mentioned that I was looking to move away some of my personal code hosting away from GitHub (GH), to avoid being locked in into yet another tech giant. Instead, I wanted to move to a proper free alternative. On Mastodon, lots of folks recommended checking out Codeberg as a potential alternative that is based on forgejo and provides static page hosting.

Code from some mountaintop

![](/assets/images/overland-lightroom.png) [Geotagging photos in *Adobe
Lightroom*.]{.small}

After [semi-accidentally ending up at SantaCon in San
Francisco](/santaconsf) last weekend, I was wondering how I could
geo-tag my photos more easily. If you're only taking pictures with your
smartphone, that's not much of an issue as the internal GPS applies the
metadata automatically. But lots of modern cameras still don't come with
an internal GPS or require some [ridiculous
add-ons](https://www.leicacamerausa.com/evf-visoflex-typ-020-black-x-typ-113-tl-m10.html).

So what to do when you end up with photos that don't have location
metadata written yet? *Adobe Lightroom* allows you to drag & drop photos
onto a map. Besides this being tedious work, it requires you to have a
nearly photographic memory to remember where took all those photos (In
which case you might not be much into actual photography 😉). The second
option given is to load a `GPX`{.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge}
track file in which you recorded your movement. The location timestamps
can then be aligned with the metadata of your photos to automate the
writing of the location metadata.

Sounds great, but always having to remember to start recording a GPS
track through some additional software is just as annoying as having to
put an additional GPS dongle on your camera. Luckily, I'm already
passively recording my location by [running Overland on my iOS
phone](https://overland.p3k.app/) and [store the collected GPS
coordinates in Open Humans](https://overland.openhumans.org/). Which
means I have a huge backlog of my personal location data that's recorded
more or less 24/7, making it an ideal data source to geo-tag all of my
photos.

There's only one single catch: Overland delivers all its data as
`GeoJSON`{.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge} data points by
default. So to make use of the location history it needs to be converted
into the `GPX`{.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge} format.
Fortunately it turns out that it's rather easy to write those
`GPX`{.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge}-formatted tracks,
especially if all one is interested in are the latitude, longitude and
timestamps. In fact it's so easy that it [can easily be run in a short
Personal Data Notebook right on Open
Humans](https://exploratory.openhumans.org/notebook/22/).

After running this notebook one can easily download the newly created
`GPX`{.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge} files and import them into
*Adobe Lightroom* and start the automated geo-tagging process. The
`GPX`{.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge} file itself will contain a
track for each day of the month, but *Lightroom* automatically gives you
the option to use data of given days or all found tracks (as long as
your tracks have less than 50,000 points in total).

If you want to setup the same workflow from scratch, these are the
steps:

- [Install the Overland app on your iPhone](https://overland.p3k.app/)
- [Setup the Overland data retrieval on Open
  Humans](https://overland.openhumans.org/)
- [Convert your data to GPX and download
  it](https://exploratory.openhumans.org/notebook/22/)
- [Load the GPS track from your downloaded `GPX`{.language-plaintext
  .highlighter-rouge} file](/assets/images/overland-lightroom1.png)
- [Select Photos and tag them](/assets/images/overland-lightroom2.png)

And that's it. Or at least that's it if you remembered to set the time
zone on your camera correctly - which is necessary so that the time of
your GPS tracks and the metadata in your photos are aligned. But all
hope is lost otherwise, as you can set a time zone offset through
*Lightroom* to shift the time zones of your GPS track so that they align
with the photo timestamps.

With the GPS data now written to your photos e.g.
[Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/gedankenstuecke/) will now
automatically display a map of where the photos were taken [right next
to the
images](https://www.flickr.com/photos/gedankenstuecke/32383449808).

### Bonus uses & Google Location History!

If you're not running Overland to collect your GPS data you might be
able to use your [Google Location History
instead](https://google-location.openhumans.org/). A [notebook to
convert the Google Location History data to `GPX`{.language-plaintext
.highlighter-rouge} is available as
well](https://exploratory.openhumans.org/notebook/23/).

And having the data as GPX has another big benefit: You can import those
tracks right into *Google Earth* and start exploring it there!

![](/assets/images/overland-googleearth.png)

[Some of my GPS tracks around my office.]{.small}


![](/assets/images/personal-api.png){style="border: solid gray 2px; border-radius:5px;"}
[What the [output of a personal
API](https://my-personal-api.herokuapp.com/) can look like.]{.small}

*Open Humans* has been expanding thanks to lots of new data sources that
have gone live in the last couple of months. Thanks to our Outreachy
interns we already have added support for sharing your [Google Location
History](https://google-location.openhumans.org/) and your [Spotify
Listening History](https://spotify.openhumans.org/). Additionally you
can now collect your GPS movement patterns [from the Overland iOS
application](https://overland.openhumans.org/) and [activity, heart rate
and body temperature from the Oura Ring](https://oura.openhumans.org/).

Collecting all of these data in one place is great, especially if you
want to dig the data: The growing collection of [Personal Data Notebooks
on the Personal Data Exploratory](https://exploratory.openhumans.org/)
makes this super easy. But what else one do with all of the data? [Aaron
Parecki's](https://aaronparecki.com/now/) website gave me an idea: Aaron
lists his current location, time zone and weather conditions along with
his phone battery level and the amount of tabs he has in browser right
on his website. I was wondering: Could I use all of my data that's
already stored in *Open Humans* to re-create such a thing right on my
own blog? The short answer is yes, as you can see in the screenshot
above as well as in the footer of this page.

So how does it work? The *Open Humans* API can offer much of the data
needed for this! The [Overland
integration](https://overland.openhumans.org/) provides the latest GPS
coordinates (they are updated \~ every 5 minutes), along with the
battery status of my phone. From the longitude & latitude one can easily
get to the local time (using [timezonedb](https://timezonedb.com/)) as
well as the current weather conditions from the [Yahoo
APIs](https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/). And the [Spotify API
integration](http://spotify.openhumans.org/) into *Open Humans* grabs
your last played songs every couple of minutes.

The only tricky bit is getting live step-counts and heart rates. Right
now the general [Fitbit integration](https://fitbit.openhumans.org/)
only gives access to the daily aggregate data due to API limits of
*Fitbit*. This makes it impossible to get live heart rate data. Luckily
there is a way to set up a personal API endpoint through Fitbit. This
allows you to subscribe to the intra-day data, including the current
heart rate. While this is not yet part of the *Open Humans* data
collection, [it will be
soon](https://github.com/openhumans/oh-fitbit-intraday).

So how can we transform all of this data from the files stored in *Open
Humans* into something that can easily be displayed in another website?
By turning all of it into a nice little `JSON`{.language-plaintext
.highlighter-rouge} that [only contains the information we want to
display](https://my-personal-api.herokuapp.com/data/15713726/)! Which
can then in turn be read through some `JavaScript`{.language-plaintext
.highlighter-rouge} to fill in the blanks in the e.g. this website's
footer or wherever you might want to display it.

![](/assets/images/personal-api-2.png)

And the best part: As all the data is stored on *Open Humans* and shared
through its API, it's already generalized, so you can do the same thing
right now. The small [MyPersonalAPI
application](https://my-personal-api.herokuapp.com) allows you to log in
with your own *Open Humans* account and in return it will give you a URL
that contains your own URL that will always contain the latest
`JSON`{.language-plaintext .highlighter-rouge} with your personal data
tidbits. Have fun displaying your own data wherever you want!

Your personal data source from *Open Humans* and data summary is missing
and you'd like to see it added? Good news, [the code for this is open
source](https://github.com/gedankenstuecke/personal-api/), so you can
either easily do it yourself or be in touch to see what we can do about
it!


> Quickly looked into
> [\#mozsprint](https://twitter.com/hashtag/mozsprint?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
> numbers that
> [@abbycabs](https://twitter.com/abbycabs?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
> released. There's a long tail w/ ⅓ of all 4,930 contributions coming
> from people who made ≤10 contributions. Many small contributions can
> make a big difference. 😍
> [pic.twitter.com/xk70AK8BIl](https://t.co/xk70AK8BIl)
>
> --- Bastian Greshake Tzovaras (@gedankenstuecke) [May 14,
> 2018](https://twitter.com/gedankenstuecke/status/995908771976114177?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Participating in the *Mozilla Global Sprint* is somewhat of an annual
ritual for me. This year's installment took place on May 10/11. As *Open
Humans* hadn't ever participated in a Sprint before, I spent some time
in [getting up a clean list of ways to contribute on a small
micro-site](http://openhumansfoundation.org/globalsprint-2018/). Given
that we [recently started our *Personal Data
Notebooks*](https://blog.openhumans.org/2018/05/14/personal-data-notebooks-explore-and-analyze-your-data-right-in-your-browser/),
a lot of the ways to contribute focused on writing some basic data
analyses notebooks.

Having a good collection of example notebooks makes for a great showcase
and a fun way to teach how *Jupyter Notebooks* can be used to learn
about yourself. Prior to the sprint we already had some basic example
notebooks that performed simple analyses of data from *Fitbit*, *Apple
Health* and *Twitter*.

![](http://openhumansfoundation.org/ohjh-example-notebooks/header-image.gif)

During the sprint we could expand on that and get some notebooks that
use data from *Moves*, *23andMe* and (soon) also *uBiome*:

- Based on a reference panel - [generated from openSNP
  genotype/phenotype
  data](https://github.com/OpenHumans/ohjh-example-notebooks/blob/master/eye-color-and-23andme-data.ipynb) -
  you can use your *23andMe* data to see whether your genetic data can
  predict your eye color.
- The GPS data of *Moves* can be used to find out [whether the weather
  around you influences your physical
  activity](https://github.com/OpenHumans/ohjh-example-notebooks/blob/master/moves-analysis.ipynb).
- Your own microbiome as analyzed by *uBiome* can soon be [compared to
  all public microbiome data
  sets](https://github.com/OpenHumans/ohjh-example-notebooks/pull/10).

But things often only get really interesting when you cross data
streams. Two further notebooks that were contributed during the
*\#mozsprint* demonstrate this:

- One notebook correlates your *Moves* data with your *Twitter* data to
  see [whether the weather has an impact on your mood as recorded by
  your
  tweets](https://github.com/OpenHumans/ohjh-example-notebooks/blob/master/twitter-under-the-weather.ipynb).
- Another notebook correlates your *Twitter* posting frequency with your
  step counts as measured by *Fitbit* [to see whether social media makes
  you walk
  less](https://github.com/OpenHumans/ohjh-example-notebooks/blob/master/twitter-and-fitbit-activity.ipynb).

![](/assets/images/2018-mozsprint-image.png)

These example notebooks [are already preloaded when you start your own
*Personal Data
Notebooks*](http://openhumansfoundation.org/ohjh-example-notebooks) and
they should work right away on your own data. They hopefully inspire you
to write your own data analyses that you want to share. As a further
small incentive: [*Open Humans* is running a Notebook competition until
the 27th of
May](https://blog.openhumans.org/2018/05/14/personal-data-notebooks-explore-and-analyze-your-data-right-in-your-browser/).
The best notebooks will not only be included in our example demo
notebook collection, but also highlighted on
[*QuantifiedSelf.com*](http://quantifiedself.com/).

Happy data analysis everyone! 🎉 📊


![](/assets/images/sage-talk.gif)

"*Algorithm*" is a word that has become more and more meaningless in our
day and age -- given how it is thrown around everywhere. If you bring it
up with people who didn't undergo some form of tech initiation -- be
that formal education or self-learning - it's easy for them to conjure a
picture like the one above: A colourful mess of things, too complex to
understand if you don't have some advanced degree in computer science.
And so it's no wonder what we all - myself included - tend to *mystify
algorithms*.

Depending on which side of the algorithm issue you are coming down,
algorithms will either use *AI* and *big data* to save us and cure all
diseases before the end of the century, not least thanks to the mighty
*block chain*. Or they will be used against us, leading to total
surveillance, predicting our behaviour, with large corporations like
*Facebook* shaping our world thanks to superior algorithmic firepower.

I think **both** - the *utopian* and *dystopian* - vision give
algorithms too much credit compared to what they actually can achieve.
After all, the term '*algorithm*' is little more than a fancy word for
'*recipe*'. If you've ever adjusted a recipe you found in a cookbook or
on a website: Congratulations, you've participated in optimizing an
algorithm.

And to stay with the image of the recipe for a little while longer:
There are recipes that are easy to get right, with little effort but to
little effect. And then there are those recipes that are a bit harder to
pull off but that will impress your dinner guests without a fail. But to
borrow a German idiom here: At the end of the day, *both are only cooked
with water*.

So why are we having a better understanding of the limitations of
cooking recipes compared to the algorithms that shape our world and use
our personal data? I'd argue that for large parts it comes down to
familiarity. Many of us will have happy memories of cooking with friends
and families, learning from each other, interacting. In that sense our
cooking algorithms are a social enterprise with shared experiences and
ideas. Which is in stark contrast to how we perceive our non-food
algorithms: We never get to experience them interactively, we can never
tinker with them and most often there's little social component. **It's
like only going to a restaurant where our meals are prepared behind
closed doors**.

It's time to open them. The open source movement has been cooking with
the kitchen doors wide open for years. Everyone can see the recipes,
make copies of them and tinker with them until they are to the
individual's liking. But open source isn't designed for playing around
with algorithms & personal data. And if we're honest, getting started
with Open Source is still a huge barrier. That's why I'm happy to work
on changing this - along with a great team at *Open Humans*. And that's
the reason why we [integrated *Jupyter Notebooks* right into our
platform](http://openhumansfoundation.org/ohjh-example-notebooks).

Interactive notebooks allow people to explore their personal data that's
stored in *Open Humans* -- right in their web browser. There, **people
can write and modify these recipes**. And the best part: They can be
easily shared between people - without having to share any personal
data. So if I write a recipe to perform a sentiment analysis on my
social media data, anyone of you can re-use that recipe with your
personal data as ingredients and adjust parts of the recipe's
instructions. That way **we can come together again, to explore and
learn about algorithms, their promises and limitations**. Let's
demystify algorithms by cooking and playing together.

If you want to give it a try yourself: [This link contains a how-to
along with some example
recipes/notebooks](http://openhumansfoundation.org/ohjh-example-notebooks)
for you to get started. And with that: Bon Appetit!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[*The text above was a lightning talk I gave at this year's **[Sage
Assembly](http://sageassembly.org/)** in Seattle (yes, that GIF was my
one and only slide).*]{.small}

[*I didn't even notice it while writing the talk, but it was heavily
inspired by many of the conversations with awesome participants at and
around the 2016* FORCE11 The Future of Scholarly Commons *workshop in
Madrid*.]{.small}
