Author Archives: Alexandra Carmichael

Andy Leigh: Around the World on an Arduino

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Andy Leigh wanted to row around the world from his bedroom. Why? To lose weight and to do some kind of project with the open source hardware Arduino. He chose rowing because it’s a low-impact activity that he can do with his injury. But manual tracking in a spreadsheet was too cumbersome. In the video below, Andy walks through his hardware hacking in fascinating detail, and reveals his route around the world, which he is plotting on a Google map as he goes. (Filmed by the London QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

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What We Are Reading

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Here’s some good Sunday reading from your friends at QS!

Kickstarter & Double Fine: A Seismic Shift? The detailed story of a game development project raising over $500,000 through Kickstarter.

Avoid misinterpreting your emotions. A beautiful post from Less Wrong about emotional intelligence – mood is weather, not climate, and can give us important insight if approached correctly.

Zeo Sleep Experiments. A really, really thorough examination by Gwern of sleep tracking and experiments using the Zeo.

9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn. Leo Babauta’s post on Zen Habits sounds like a great recipe for raising the next generation of self-experimenters. They’re not bad skills for adults to learn, either.

The age of big data. An interesting article about the rise of data and statistics.

How Dr. Hew Len healed a ward of mentally ill criminals with Ho’oponopono. An amazing story of healing yourself in order to heal others. I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.

Thanks to Gary, Ernesto, Daniel Reda,  and Ioan Mitrea.

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Ciaran Lyons of Singapore on his self-tracking practice

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

This is the first time we’ve had video of a new meetup’s very first gathering! Ciaran Lyons started QS Singapore, and recorded his introductory remarks as well as his own self-tracking story. Great to watch for people new to QS or thinking of starting a meetup group. Thanks Ciaran!

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Announcing the Quantified Self Conference 2012

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

We’re excited to announce the third Quantified Self conference, to be held September 15-16, 2012 at Stanford University. Registration is now open, and please feel free to tweet… now!

Quantified Self 2012 is our third conference for users and tool makers interested in self-tracking systems. It will be a “working meeting” for the QS community (50 groups worldwide now), where we will gather, inspire, and learn from each other as we share and collaborate on self-tracking projects. This year we’re welcoming 600 attendees, so we are exploring the idea of specialized tracks to help the conference retain an intimate feel of like-minded people finding each other.

If you are an advanced user, designer, tech inventor, entrepreneur, journalist, scientist, or health professional, please join us for a weekend of collaboration and inspiration! Like last year, we will have some scholarship registrations available for people if registration price is a barrier. If you either need financial assistance or would like to sponsor a scholarship for a grateful self-tracker to attend the conference, write to me here. You can register here.

As always, any attendee is welcome to present their self-tracking story or lead a breakout session. Send in your proposed topic to me here. We will be announcing speakers and topics in the coming weeks, and we look forward to seeing you in Palo Alto!

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Sacha Chua on Tracking Time

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Sacha Chua started tracking time to find out where she was spending time and how she might change her patterns. In the video below, she explains what she learned, including how quickly her interests change, how she chooses to break down her time, and how the tracking helps her focus. Be sure to check out Sacha’s blog too, where she publicly posts weekly detailed lists of things she has accomplished in the past week and her plans for the next week. (Filmed by the Toronto QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

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Ian Li on Moodjam

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

In 2006, PhD student Ian Li created Moodjam to let people track their moods in color. At the QS Europe conference last November, he met artist Laurie Frick, who creates beautiful works of art from her data. She mentioned that she was using Moodjam, and this inspired Ian to make a new version of it! In the video below, he walks through the sparkling new version, including some not-yet-released features like aggregated happy vs. sad colors and sentiment analysis. (Filmed by the Pittsburgh QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

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What We Are Reading

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Here’s some weekend reading, without the eye-straining bullet points this week! Thanks to Kevin Kelly, Gary Wolf, Ernesto Ramirez, Rajiv Mehta, and Daniel Reda.

Your Body Is an API: 9 Gadgets for Tracking Health and Fitness. Includes our Basis friends and other gadgets from CES.

Lifestream blog’s summary of the CES experience, including new health and fitness gadgets.

Harnessing experience: exploring the gap between evidence-based medicine and clinical practice. This fascinating paper describes the inevitable gap between “evidence based medicine” and actual clinical practice, and proposes an interesting idea, “evidence farming,” that acknowledges the range of available evidence beyond randomized controlled trials.

Ten years after its first publication, Welcome to Cancerland by Barbara Ehrenreich still has the power to explode your brain.

The Creative Destruction of Medicine by Eric Topol. We’ve been looking forward to this one.

DIY science: should you try this at home? Somewhat alarmist but also lets the DIYers speak for themselves.

Fighting Willpower’s Catch-22: makes a good case for setting up your environment to avoid temptations.

Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources: Does Self-Control Resemble a Muscle? A great article that argues for flexing our cognitive muscle.

The Servant Leader and the Social Enterprise: “the only person to lead a people-first organization is a servant, because a servant’s natural inclination is service to others — not coercion — for the purpose of others’ growth, health, wisdom, freedom, autonomy, and benefit, and for that reason, in the future, the only truly viable institutions will be those that are predominantly servant-led.”

Does mood sharing make a difference? A very interesting set of comments from Moodscope users on sharing mood. Reading through them reveals interesting issues people have with sharing, like not wanting to burden others, feeling incentivized to fudge the data to seem better than it is, getting support they wouldn’t have found otherwise, and forming very close bonds.

 

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Videos from Quantified Self Europe Conference

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

We’re excited to announce that the videos from the Quantified Self Europe conference in Amsterdam are starting to come online! I’ll be posting them individually here on the blog, but if you can’t wait for that, you can find some of them here on Vimeo.

Also, QS Amsterdam member Kees Plattel put together this beautiful video impression of the conference, to give you a flavor of what it was like, or to remind you of your experience there. Enjoy, and see you at the next conference (to be announced soon!)

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Recap of Los Angeles QS Meetups

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

I had the great pleasure of attending a QS meetup in Los Angeles this past weekend, hosted by Eric Blue. There was a great group there, 30 or so folks. One great comment in the introductions was from someone near the end of the circle saying, “This is totally blowing my mind!”

Eric has put together a compilation of slides and links from all five LA meetups so far. Here it is:

Show & Tells

  1. Ernesto Ramirez gave a presentation (My Bits of Fit) on his Fitbit data and activity patterns, including some great visualizations (Thanks to @chloester)!
  2. Marina gave a presentation on InsideTracker (bloodwork analysis & recommendation) and her own project for tracking Happiness – the Ultimate Answer
  3. Brian Dorsey gave a presentation on his product Work Food Out
  4. Eric’s presentation on location tracking and personal travel journal
  5. Eric’s personal device collection, along with other QS devices in the market, and future devices
  6. Eric’s personal project (TRAQS.me) for consolidating his Quantifed Self device data into a central dashboard

Other Links

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Ewart de Visser on Tracking Trading Performance of A Friend

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Ewart de Visser had a friend who “didn’t like the whole work thing” and started speculating on foreign currencies. When Ewart asked him how much he was losing in his first few months, his friend wasn’t sure, so they set up a spreadsheet to start tracking his trading performance. In the video below, Ewart describes how he used data to modify his friend’s trading strategy to prevent big losses, as well as the interesting benefits of being tracked by someone other than yourself. (Filmed by the Washington DC QS Show&Tell meetup.)

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