Today we are excited and honored to announce that Steven Jonas has joined QS Labs as our Senior Editor/Information Architect. As has been the case with previous additions to QS Labs, we welcome Steven as a friend and fellow community member. Steven serves as a co-organizer of the Portland QS meetup group, and has participated as our speaker coordinator for our past two conferences.
In addition to his work supporting our global QS community, Steven is an active self-tracker, having engaged in many different projects. We’ve been delighted to highlight a few of those here on the QS website. We invite you to welcome Steven and get to know him a bit by exploring the posts linked below.
Memorizing my Daybook
Tracking Stress
Stress Out Loud
Photo by Mark Krynsky
We’ve showcased a few great talks from Steven Jonas, from his exploration on learning to how he became interested in tracking stress. In this insightful talk Steven walk us through his process for tracking and responding to his stress in realtime while at work.
Low-level, seemingly mild stress still drains my energy, and many of my behaviors and things that I avoid are related to this stress. I developed a new ‘stress sense’, separate from the tool, that helped me see where my life was being affected by stress.
This talk was filmed at our 2013 Quantified Self European Conference. We hope that you’ll join us this year for our 2013 Global Conference where we’ll have great talks, sessions, and discussions that cover the wide range of Quantified Self topics. Registration is now open so make sure to get your ticket today!
We are only four short weeks away from hosting our second Quantified Self European Conference and our excitement is building as we receive more previews of the talks and presentations we’ll be hosting. As you can probably guess, putting on a conference can be a stressful endeavor. Luckily stress tracking and management has been the focus of many different Quantified Self tools and experiments. There are no shortage of interesting methods for tracking both the physiological and psychological manifestations of stress and many more are probably on the horizon. More interesting, and of great interest to us within the QS community, is what is possible once stress becomes trackable and understandable.
Steven Jonas, a data analyst and organizer for the QS Portland meetup, will be giving a Show & Tell talk about his experiences with tracking stress at our upcoming conference. Having started with tracking his sleep in 2005, Steven has gone on to engage with multiple tracking projects including his experience with knowledge tracking and spaced repetition.
He’s been tracking his stress levels using the Emwave2, a neat tool for tracking and visualizing heart rate variability, for quite a while. Steven has taken his stress/HRV tracking beyond just intermittent testing and has experimented with hooking up his EmWave2 to his computer while working and installed software to alert him when it detect periods of stress. You can watch his previous talk about this process here.
This may seem like overkill to some. You might be saying, “Of course work is related to stress! What possibly could he hope to find out?” The beauty here lies in the unexpected and interesting findings that creep to the surface when multiple data streams are integrated. In this Show & Tell talk Steven will be explaining how this constant monitoring helped him understand how particular behaviors acted as triggers and how he could manage those triggers in order to reduce and defuse stress.
Low-level, seemingly mild stress still drains my energy, and many of my behaviors and things that I avoid are related to this stress. I developed a new ‘stress sense’, separate from the tool, that helped me see where my life was being affected by stress.
I hope you’ll join us at the conference to learn from Steven’s experience and take part in what is sure to be a great discussion!
The Quantified Self European Conference will be held in Amsterdam on May 11th & 12th. Registration is now open. As with all our conferences our speakers are members of the community. If you’re attending the conference and want to present your self-tracking project please let us know.
This guest post comes to us from one of our wonderful QS Meetup organizers, Steven Jonas. If you’re a Meetup Organizer and want to post a recap of your meetup just let us know!
Quantified Self Portland Show & Tell Meetup Recap – October 30, 2012
Puppet Labs opened up their space and generously hosted our October Meetup. We had some amazing talks and discussion. Read on for more about each of the talks and our post show&tell discussion session.
VIDEO | SLIDES | TWITTERBrief: After getting dumped, David needed an excuse to read his old text messages. Exporting all of his SMS’s out of Google Voice, he used a variety of tools to get them in a form that would allow for linguistic analysis and visualization. Doing so, he reconfirmed his belief that most of his communication was either to girls or about girls. As his project moves forward, he wants to improve the linguistic analysis by looking at significant phrases, rather than words, and tweak his D3 visualization so that it better represents clustering.
Tools and other things mentioned:
-His GitHub page for his project – http://github.com/dhgwilliam/google-voice-stats -Twitter page – http://twitter.com/dhgwilliam -Google Voice – google.com/voice -Google Takeout – google.com/takeout -Data Liberation Front – www.dataliberation.org/takeout-products -Markdown – http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ -Redis – http://redis.io -Ohm ORM – http://ohm.keyvalue.org -Sinatra – http://www.sinatrarb.com -Statistically Improbable Phrases – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistically_Improbable_Phrases -Rack Cache – http://github.com/rtomayko/rack-cache -Resque – http://github.com/defunkt/resque -Rake – http://rake.rubyforge.org -GCharts – http://mootools.net/forge/p/gcharts -Pandoc – http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ -D3 – http://d3js.org -jQuery -http://jquery.com -Linguistic analysis equation – http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~paul/publications/rg_acl2000.pdf
Brief: Rob was interested in passively recording his life, so he rigged his phone to hang around his neck and take a picture nearly every minute. He dumped the photos into Picasa and with tagging and face recognition used them to start answering questions such as “When did I last have sushi?” and “What was the name of that guy I met at the QS Data Co-op?” Rob found that knowing that the phone was recording events, it allowed him to be more present in the moment, since he didn’t have to worry about retrieving a camera to capture events. Going forward, he would like to have ways to add more metadata (like geotagging) to add context to the images that he captures, a wider lens, and be able to integrate it with other streams of data.
Tools and other things mentioned:
-Gordon Bell’s SenseCam – http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/sensecam/ -Autographer – http://www.autographer.com/ -Memoto – http://memoto.com -Project Glass – http://plus.google.com/+projectglass/posts -Google Goggles – http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/ -TagTime – http://messymatters.com/tagtime/ -Picasa -http://picasa.google.com -Vicon Revue – http://viconrevue.com/product.html
Brief: Steven discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. He found that keeping his stress levels in check allowed him to focus better and left him with more energy at the end of the day. Going forward, he would like to find a tool that allows him to annotate the data, and be able to track stress when he’s not at his desk.
Tools and other things mentioned:
-emWave2 – http://www.heartmathstore.com/item/6310/emwave2 -equanimity – http://www.meditate.mx/iphone
Brief: Daniel gave us an update on Beeminder, highlighting new functionality for connecting the great project management tool, Trello, as well as using Beeminder to keep track of your progress during NaNoWriMo. He also talked about a Pomodoro Poker, a hack night where participants bet on how close they can complete a task to a time limit (without going over).
Tools and other things mentioned:
-Beeminder – http://www.beeminder.com -Trello – http://blog.beeminder.com/trello/ -NaNoWriMo – http://blog.beeminder.com/nanowrimo/ -Pomodoro Poker – http://blog.beeminder.com/tv/#comment-691153967
Prompt: One of the interesting things about self-tracking is the heightened awareness that you’ll gain. Noticing things that you could never perceive before. This could take different forms, sometimes like a sixth sense. For example, this is a device I built from a kit made by Sensebridge that attaches to your ankle and points in the direction of north. Over time, the wearers develop of sense of where North is that lasts even after they remove the device. Are these extra senses always good? Can they be negative?
Tools and other things mentioned:
-Sensebridge’s North Paw – http://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/ -Contour @USB – http://bayercontourusb.us -Zeo – http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/shop/zeo-sleep-manager-mobile.htmlThe night ended with a lively discussion where the main topic was productivity systems where everybody shared what they use, what failed for them and why.
All in all, it was a fantastic, invigorating evening. We hope to see you at the Data Co-op on November 27. What is a Data Co-op? It’s a regular part of our QS PDX meetup series for people with data that they’re working on, or people who want to see what data other people are working on, or people who want/have tips for working their QS-related data. If you track some kind of data about your life and are trying to make sense of it, join us during this open time and bring your data and a computer with you.
Topics that arose last time:
D3 and data visualization (http://d3js.org/)Wolfram Alpha and analysis of meditation data
Scraping Nike FuelBand data with Firefox
And, of course, people brought dozens of projects with them to work on, and many ideas were shared in small groups. We plan on hosting the next Show & Tell in January and hope to see you soon!
Pictures courtesy of Ryan Casey. See more here.
We recently started a program to invite QS Toolmakers to contribute directly to funding our events. We call this program Friends of QS. If you would like to participate we invite you email us to learn more.