With all the disparate data streams coming out of Quantified Self tools, Stephanie Gerson saw a need to create a tool to bring them all together. In the video below, she presents her project Trackify, a new way for people to find correlations and trends in their data streams. Stephanie also puts out a call for…
In 1981, Allen Neuringer wrote a paper in the journal Behaviorism, calling for self-experimentation. Consider it your weekend reading assignment, should you choose to accept it. Neuringer presents a fascinating history and philosophy of self-science, as well as his perspective on the importance of self-experimentation. There are even some early experimental graphs on needing less sleep…
What if you had a movie of your life that was made from a stream of pictures taken one every thirty seconds? Glenn Wolters and Jeroen Bos have built an iPhone app called Lifelapse to do this. They developed it as a school project. I noticed Joost Plattel using it at the recent QS conference…
I recently came across three contests relevant to the QS community, and wanted to pass them along. 1. data in sight: making the transparent visual This is a hands-on data visualization competition held June 25th and 26th, 2011, at the Adobe Systems, Inc. offices in San Francisco’s SoMa District. Open to coders, programmers, developers, designers, scientists,…
This is the intimate story of the last 6 months of my life, and how it changed for the better by sharing my mood. For some reason, writing publicly about mood feels much more vulnerable than other kinds of data. Maybe it’s because emotions get more to the core of our beings than weight or…
A self-described “nerd,” Jamal has been dating for the past two years, and started trying to use data to answer the question, “how do you know if someone is right for you?” He built a model, quantified how well women that he dated matched up to his checklist of ideal characteristics, and decided to limit…
As far as I know, Adam Butterfield is the first person doing his Master’s thesis on the subject of the Quantified Self. He wrote in with this request: Calling all self-trackers! My name is Adam Butterfield, and I am a graduate student in the department of Anthropology at San Jose State University conducting research on…
We are placing a bulk order of our new T-shirts that some of us were sporting at the conference, so if you’d like one, please order yours here! They are $18 including shipping, and were designed by Brian Scott of Boon Design.
What an amazing group of people that came together for the first ever QS conference. Words can’t fully express the energy of the weekend, so here is a slideshow of photos, taken by our volunteer photographers Matthew Trentacoste, Alex Bangs, and Richard Sachs. People are also posting their notes from all the sessions to the…
Yes, it’s finally here. After months of preparation, and with an amazing list of people stepping up to give talks and lead sessions, the QS conference is ready to go. Join and follow the excitement here on the blog and on Twitter with the hashtag #qs2011. Let the fun begin!
In this video, Laurie Frick presents her amazing work on daily activity charts and sleep charts translated to art at the NY Quantified Self Show&Tell #11 at Parsons The New School for Design.
Here’s a quick note from Xaq Rothman for all of you who live in DC: HacDC, DC’s hackerspace, will be hosting a QS Show & Tell this coming Sunday at 6pm. If you’re in the area, come see self-tracking presentations on topics including quitting cigarettes, GPS logging, and songwriting. For more about the presentations: http://www.hacdc.org/content/meet-quantified-self-presenters…
Here’s your chance to demonstrate your knowledge of self-tracking hardware and win a free ticket to the QS conference in 2 weeks. Kevin Kelly’s site Cool Tools is running a contest: — In particular, we are looking for the best self-tracking hardware (we will still accept reviews of software but you are going to have…
Bruno Aziza from Microsoft recently caught up with Gary in San Francisco to talk about Quantified Self and our upcoming conference. Listen to Gary’s keen insights on the variety of things people are tracking, what they are learning from the process, and where this is all going.
T minus 25 days until the Quantified Self Conference, and we have another exciting announcement. Seth Roberts will be giving a keynote on “Why Personal Science Really Matters.” Seth Roberts’ pioneering work in self-tracking and self-experimentation has led to discoveries about diet, cognition, mood, and sleep. His use of daily measurements of basic activities as a…
A guest post from Ted Vickey comparing the data collected from FitBit versus Body Media.
In the talk below, Ben Blench shares his experience tracking his infant, including a discussion of the different tools he has used. He makes an interesting comparison between digital and analog, noticing that digital tools often have too many features and lack flexibility. (Filmed at the Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup in Amsterdam at Mediamatic) Ben…
This is a guest post by Chloe Fan: — Hi! I’m a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon in Human-Computer Interaction, and I’m interested in learning about the barriers that you may encounter while collecting or reflecting on your personal information (e.g., too tedious to collect, information not useful, forgetting to collect). I’m also interested in learning…
In this video, Rajiv Mehta talks about the importance of remembering for good experimentation — carrying out the experiment as planned and capturing the results properly — and the difficulty of doing this well. He described a new app, Tonic, that helps people remember and keep track of their health activities, and shared examples of people…
With the first QS conference 32 days away, we’re excited to announce that Eric Boyd will give a keynote on “New Sensors and the Frontiers of Self Tracking.” Eric is an inspiring hacker who constantly pushes the boundaries of what is possible using the latest sensors and tools. A long time member of the Bay…
