Kibotzer: A kibitzing robot
"Follow the Yellow Brick Road!"
Kibotzer tracks your progress toward your goals. Anything you can put a periodic number on works -- weight, pushups, number of cigarettes, net worth, or how long it takes you to bike to work. Just answer with your number when kibotzer asks and it will show you your progress and a "yellow brick road" to follow to stay on track.A big selling point for kibotzer is the data smoothing. With weight loss, for example, it's discouraging and/or nerve-wracking to see the numbers bounce around day-to-day which is why weight-loss programs typically only ask for weekly weigh-ins. But if you have a random up day on a weekly weigh-in day, that's really discouraging. Better to get more data and let kibotzer show you the true trend. And you get daily instead of weekly feedback. That's key. And that's where the different parts of the graph come in...
BLACK DOTS
Your actual reported data.PINK (AKA, "ROSE-COLORED") DOTS
An optimistic view of progress. It shows your inexorable march towards your goal. If you're bouncing around it just shows you flat. When you go down (or whichever direction your goal is), it shows you that right away. It never shows you going up (or whatever the wrong direction is) unless it's sure you've screwed up. Especially if you find the random fluctuation unnerving, the pink dots are what you should focus on day to day. There's even a setting to turn off the black dots if you want.PURPLE LINE
This is a simple moving average. It was pretty much the state-of-the-art before kibotzer and it sucks.TURQUOISE SWATH
Think of this as a very thick line charting your progress or an aura around your actual data. Your true numbers are almost surely somewhere within the swath, at least once there's a week or so of data. It gives you a good sense of your true trend.This person's graph illustrates this nicely:
They bounce around a lot but it's clear that their true trend is twice as steep as their road!
