It was one of those moments that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. What should have been a simple checkup resulted in a baffled doctor and a trip to phlebotomy to get my bloods done. I’m not one for worrying about these things, but I suppose it played on my mind a little. A few days later, the results were in. “I’m afraid you’re pre-diabetic.” What?
I knew that if I was going to get this under control, then I needed to sort my diet out, and I was sure there would be an app to help me out. My research has always led me to believe that those who set goals are more likely to achieve what they want in life. With that going around in my mind, I set off in search of an app that had goals at the heart of its functionality. After looking at a few, I settled on myfitnesspal.
Homescreen heroes
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
From the get-go, I was able to set specific goals related to nutrients, and I was particularly interested in setting them for carbohydrates. As these are our main sources of energy, I needed to closely track them and better manage my blood glucose levels. Once I upgraded to the Premium version, I could set precise gram-specific goals for carbs, fat, and protein, which was all very helpful.
After working out what I wanted to achieve, it was then a case of taking the time each day to record the data of what I was eating and what exercise I was doing. This will always involve some hard work, manual entry, and commitment, no matter which health-tracking app you’re using. Myfitnesspal is one of the easiest to use, though, with the ability to scan food barcodes and even photograph food on a plate.
(Image credit: Future)
The latter is called Meal Scan and uses machine learning and computer vision to detect and recognize foods. Having been trained on millions of images of food, the app can compare images to its vast database and then decide exactly what is on the plate.
It does a remarkably good job of this and is a far quicker way than individually entering food items, although that is also possible. Even though the latter is likely to be more accurate, I preferred the automatic scanning option to make the process more manageable.
(Image credit: Future)
As the day goes on and the meals are added, the app gives a detailed breakdown of what you’ve eaten based on calories and nutrients. Seeing the number of carbs I’ve eaten after lunchtime was particularly helpful because I could tailor my evening meal to make sure I didn’t go above my target. The breakdown also helped educate me on what was high in carbs. For example, did you know that apples are quite high in carbs? I didn’t!
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Myfitnesspal also provides specific meal plans for people who want to take all the guesswork out of adjusting their diet. I preferred to make my own decisions, but I could have easily started a low-carbohydrate meal plan, which would have specifically tailored my eating to keep me within my goals.
(Image credit: Future)
I was obviously super motivated to do everything I could to drop my pre-diabetes status, but I also recognized that having different, less rigid, goals on the weekend was also going to be important to sticking with the routine over weeks and months. I was therefore glad to find, on the premium version, that I could set day-specific goals. As a result, I could factor in a sweet treat or a special meal, so it wasn’t dull drudgery every single day of the week.
Myfitnesspal has been exactly that—a friend who has come alongside me in my hour of need and guided me through the process of getting me back on track with my eating. Having detailed nutrient breakdowns at my fingertips has empowered me to make decisions that will hopefully help me leave the world of pre-diabetes behind me.
You can get an annual premium plan of myfitnesspal with meal scanning, custom macro tracking, and an ad-free experience for $79.99/ year (£64.99 / year).
Searching for jobs can be a daunting endeavour.Credit: PA Images/Alamy
About a year ago, a colleague and I were lamenting the hardships of the academic job market. She had landed a tenure-track position at a prestigious research university the previous year. Now it was my turn. To help smooth the process, she sent me the link to a shared spreadsheet. Little did I know that it would become one of the most precious assets in my job-search toolkit — and academic life in general.
Open to anyone with the link, the spreadsheet — this year entitled ‘2023 – 2024 Management PhD job doc’ — has been passed from generation to generation among graduate students for more than a decade. Its main purpose is to provide an anonymous forum and listings board for job seekers in my field, management. Around May each year, candidates create a new spreadsheet to kick off the job-market season, but links to old spreadsheets are retained so their precious content isn’t lost to future generations.
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The spreadsheet uses a tab-based structure. Some tabs provide a question-and-answer forum on a particular area of management; a tab called Catharsis is where academics can share unsettling experiences from their work life and discuss job-market frustrations. Others list open job postings and provide status updates on contributors’ job-hunt processes. And then there’s WWW — the who went where tab, where job seekers’ names are revealed at the end of the academic year to share where they landed after their search. There are also links to useful web resources and, naturally, memes.
If that sounds similar to Slack and other messaging tools, it is. But the spreadsheet is completely anonymous. It is also incredibly flexible, quick to load and easy to search. Plus, researchers are already well versed in spreadsheets — and appreciate the ability to trawl job-search boards while looking as if they’re working.
Resource and sounding board
On a typical day, the spreadsheet has some 30–45 concurrent users, including graduate students and early-career researchers but also hiring-committee members, journal editors and members of editorial boards. This breadth and variety makes the question-and-answer process incredibly effective: users can ask a question and get multiple responses in minutes.
Users are based all over the world, and often discuss how various aspects of academic life compare between geographical locations or according to an institution’s focus — for instance, comparing research-oriented institutions with teaching-oriented or ‘balanced’ ones. Threads might include comparisons of tenure requirements, teaching loads and co-authorship etiquette.
Shared spreadsheets can provide a lightweight group chat and knowledge base for job seekers.Credit: Silvia Sanasi
For job candidates, the spreadsheet is an important source of kinship. But it serves a similar role for more senior faculty members. Users discuss everything from how to handle journal reviews to overcoming methodological or technical issues and the economics of job offers. In this way, the spreadsheet also promotes transparency, providing information about hiring conditions, expectations and compensation. It also helps to reduce ethnic and gender imbalances — because salary guidelines are made public (albeit anonymously) — and to foster awareness of standards in the marketplace.
Community outlet
The spreadsheet helped me to navigate the job market while also learning about the nuts and bolts of my field and of academic life more broadly. Among other things, I learnt how to structure my application package and answer common interview questions, and found out about salary expectations, negotiation tips and the etiquette of interacting with hiring-committee members. Those lessons helped me to land my dream job at my postdoctoral institution, which I accepted last month.
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I also routinely consult the spreadsheet to get tips on the review process for specific journals, seek advice on how to handle difficult reviewers and simply rant about rejections. In this way, the spreadsheet makes me feel like part of a community and helps me to find resources on how to become a better researcher, (co-)author, reviewer and colleague. Whatever your field, such a forum can provide important benefits to mental health, which is often strained in academic life. It can also be invaluable for reducing the differences caused by geographical location and resource availability.
The management spreadsheet is not unique. Similar forms of collaboration exist in other domains and should be easy enough to establish in fields where they do not. The biggest challenge is critical mass: this spreadsheet grew out of one of the field’s most-attended conferences and has been promoted year after year, through doctoral consortia and word of mouth. Today, it is self-sustaining.
I hope this article can inspire scholars in other disciplines to adopt similar solutions to help researchers at all levels — from graduate students to senior faculty members — to navigate the difficult life of an academic.
This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.
So far, I’ve been impressed with the Oceanic+ app on my Apple Watch Ultra to the point that I’m now using it as my secondary dive computer, alongside a Suunto D5.
While I’m happy with my computer setup, my search for a suitable camera has been less fruitful. I’ve been through a small handful and have so far been disappointed with them all, for various reasons, including low quality and poor battery performance.
When Huish Outdoors – the same firm that designed the Oceanic+ watch app – announced that they would be building a phone housing designed to take care of my iPhone down to 60 meters (far beyond where most recreational divers would ever find themselves), I couldn’t have been more pleased. After all, I’ve stopped using my DSLR on terra firma because my best cameraphone now fits into my pocket.
Fortunately for me, the Oceanic+ Dive Housing arrived just days before my iPhone 15 Pro, just as the diving season here in the UK is coming to a close.
What can the Oceanic+ Dive Housing do that my camera cannot?
(Image credit: Huish Outdoors/Oceanic+)
After quite a lengthy setup process (more on my experience with that below), you’ll be met with a full-screen camera view where you can switch between taking photos and videos, or enter a smart mode that takes a photo periodically (you can define this) while filming.
You can also fiddle around with things like contrast, white balance, quality, video stabilization, focus mode, which of the lenses you wish to use (including ultrawide), and file type (including RAW), all of which can be changed on the go underwater via the keypad, which connects to the phone via Bluetooth.
Because the Dive Housing also has its own temperature, depth, and pressure sensors, it serves as its own independent dive computer, separate from any Apple Watch Ultra that may also be running the Oceanic+ app (or just the preinstalled Depth app). Bluetooth signals don’t travel well underwater, so it makes sense for both to be independent.
The current depth and no deco time are overlaid in the top right, but you can press the keypad to enlarge this view to give you all the same sort of information you would expect from the watch app, including dive time, ascent rate, a compass, and more.
The housing itself is fairly large and has a chunky grip, but you can also choose to attach a lanyard or use one of the three mounting threads. This is really important, because in my case, the entire setup including the titanium iPhone weighs 1,162g, and sinks to the bottom at a pretty alarming rate when dropped. This is a common flaw of most underwater phone housings, but attaching a buoyant light arm or mounting the kit on a tray can counter this.
Once you’re done, photos and videos go straight into the app alongside the dive log, and you can pinpoint exactly when you shot something, along with your depth and the temperature. They’re also saved to the phone’s Photos app.
It’s worth mentioning that it charges with a USB-C connector, which made things really simple because, with the iPhone 15 Pro’s new USB-C connection, I only have to carry one cable.
Like other dive computers, the Oceanic+ watch app and Dive Housing both use the Bühlmann ZHL-16 decompression algorithm, which means it should be just as safe as purpose-built dive watches.
In terms of accuracy, I found that the Oceanic+ app on my watch, the app on my phone, and the Suunto D5 were always within 0.1m of each other.
My dive with the Oceanic+ Dive Housing
(Image credit: Craig Hale/Mark Gosling)
With summer drawing to an end in the UK and conditions far from exotic, my nearest dive site at a disused quarry became the testing ground for the Dive Housing.
Once kitted up, my next step was to use the iPhone 15 Pro’s Action button to kick off a routine that I set up using the Shortcuts app. For me, this meant opening the Oceanic+ app, enabling Airplane Mode and Do Not Disturb as per the app’s requirements, and remotely locking my car.
The setup process takes some getting used to and involves multiple on-screen steps before the iPhone is finally placed inside the housing. This is when the device creates a vacuum and a three-minute pressure check is carried out to make sure your phone is safe before you can dive.
I made the mistake of gloving up before setting up the phone, which meant I had to remove the watches from over my gloves in order to take them off so that I could initiate the setup. It was all a bit of a faff, but with a little practice – and much like the entire gearing up process for any dive – it becomes a perfectly choreographed routine.
For the purpose of taking photos with the device, my buddies and I stuck near to the surface where visibility was reasonable and the light had not faded.
Although I was sporting 5mm gloves during the dive, I was still able to use the four-button keypad to switch camera modes and check a more detailed view of my dive. My only gripe about the physical interface is that there’s little feedback from the buttons, so while it’s easy enough to press them, it can sometimes be unclear if you actually have.
Once the photo shoot was over, we headed deeper to where the light had almost faded and visibility was a meter at best. Normally, conditions like these suck the fun out of recreational diving, and having any sense of bearing becomes a real headache.
I found that the iPhone 15 Pro’s camera was able to see more than my own eyes could as the 6.1-inch display turned into a television in front of my face. You’ll see from my photos that the stirred-up sediment from other activity in the quarry-turned-lake did nothing to aid visibility. Navigating through this extra pair of eyes was a refreshing experience, and the on-screen compass could not have been more welcome.
I’m far from a pro photographer, so I ditched the RAW format and stuck to Apple’s HEIF, which allows the software to automatically color-correct photos and videos. I was pleased to be able to use the iPhone’s full 4K 60fps functionality – the higher frame rate allows divers to take stills of anything interesting during a video with much more accuracy. The whole time, I stuck to using the 12MP 0.5x ultrawide lens, and didn’t notice a major drop in vision from the 120-degree field of view compared with my DJI Osmo Action 3’s 155-degree field of view.
I did notice that, in shallower waters and where sunlight is particularly strong, a reflection can sometimes appear mid-shot because the iPhone’s lenses sit a few millimeters away from the outer case of the Dive Housing. However, conditions were poor and even the professional camera being used to photograph me with dazzling 20,000-lumen lights was struggling. It’s also not a unique problem to the Oceanic+ kit, and many other phone housings suffer from this too. Huish Outdoors told me that adjusting the position of the iPhone can help eliminate this, particularly moving it to the left.
Having a good sense of your surroundings, conditions, and dive parameters at all times is key to a successful dive, and while staring through a screen is definitely not recommended, having that extra tool in my hands was a game-changer. A regular underwater camera or action camera would not be able to put all of this information in one place.
Will I continue to use the Oceanic+ Dive Housing?
(Image credit: Huish Outdoors/Oceanic+)
Let’s get the price out of the way, because at nearly $500 it’s an incredibly expensive piece of kit. Add that to the iPhone 15 Pro’s $999 / £999 / AU$1,849 price tag, and another $799 / £799 / AU$1,399 if you’re after the latest Apple Watch Ultra 2, and it becomes expensive very quickly.
Despite this, I think the Oceanic+ Dive Housing is still good value for money. That’s because you can easily spend over $300 / £300 / AU$500 on a DJI Osmo Action 3 or GoPro Hero 12 before adding dive-specific accessories, and that’s a device that you’ll likely want to replace fairly regularly as camera technology improves.
I replace my iPhone every year – or most years – anyway, which means I can have the latest camera technology inside the same Dive Housing several years later.
If reading about my success with the Oceanic+ Dive Housing has got you wanting one, you can order the device from $490 in the US, £519 in the UK, and AU$979 in Aus.
