Two Minds Blog

I live in a musical household: my wife holds a PhD is in musicology, plays several instruments, and directs two different ensembles; my older daughter is concertmaster in the high school orchestra; and my younger daughter in middle school plays violin and flute. Because of those interests, discussion around the dinner table sometimes turns to the topic of conducting. Conducting is an interesting practice -- there's no manual for it, no one specific way to wave the baton that elicits a specific response from the orchestra. Some conductors don't even use a baton! Conductors don't produce any sounds on their own, yet they have a central role in the sound that the orchestra generates as a whole. Even when there is no separate person designated as conductor, one of the musicians in a group will generally take this role and give direction to the others.  Musicians also don't usually receive any instruction in how to interpret the conductor's movements. Yet the ensemble ca...

In a new paper , my colleagues and I used Fitbit fitness trackers to look at patterns of exercise among people with HIV. It might come as no surprise that the people in our study exercised more on some days than on others. We measured exercise in two different ways, total number of steps taken and number of active minutes (defined based on Fitbit's algorithm as burning at least 3x the individual's normal number of calories). The day-to-day variability was greater on the total-steps measure than on the active-minutes measure, because some people never had much of the higher level of activity at all. Fitbits aren't research-grade devices or ones that you would use for training if you were a professional athlete, but they are pretty good at picking up this type of difference between sedentary behavior and at least some level of activity.  The higher level of physical activity is particularly important for people with a chronic disease like HIV, as I have written about previo...