James Norris asks the Singapore QS audience, “Do you remember your first kiss?” In the 16 years since his first kiss at age 13, James calculated that he has had 1,500 “firsts.” For the past three years, he has been tracking his goals, according to how happy, fulfilled, and productive he feels every day. In…
Bill Schuller started tracking his exercise and weight in 2010, and got into the habit of talking about his numbers each night at the dinner table. Before long, his kids got interested in tracking too. In the video below, Bill talks about what he learned and tells some fun stories, including one about a tracking…
Randy Sargent has an hypothesis that eating certain foods, like tomatoes, makes him irritable and anxious. He asked himself, “How can I structure an experiment on myself so that I don’t know whether I’m eating tomatoes or not?” and “How would I go about quantifying my irritability?” In the video below, he explores ways to…
Last Thursday, twenty people gathered in Beirut, Lebanon for the first QS meetup there. It was organized by the wonderful Hind Hobeika, and had presentations by a biomedical engineer studying human motion and a competitive outdoor sports enthusiast, as well as talks about a data analysis project on cortisone and tracking blood coagulation rate. Some pictures…
Ulrich Atz was curious about measuring his stress levels. He chose three methods to do this: experience sampling, day reconstruction method, and heart rate. In the video below, he helpfully describes how he went about designing his experiment, how the different methods work and the challenges of each one, and what he learned. He was…
We’re excited to announce a new batch of talks and sessions at the upcoming QS conference. Thanks to everyone who is stepping up to speak! Check out these awesome topics: Show&Tell Talks My 28-Hour Day Experiments (Joe Betts-LaCroix) Quantified Awesome: Tracking Time, Clothes, Stuff, and Other Little Things (Sacha Chua) World class performance through sleep quantification…
Alex Grey is developing a better kind of muscle sensor, to help people see their muscle activity patterns and change behaviors like typing or running to be more effective and less painful. The sensors are wireless, stick to your skin, and can measure different kinds of muscle activity including arm/leg (EMG) and heart muscles (ECG)….
SJSU grad student Adam Butterfield did some analysis of the QS meetup groups around the world, and he recently passed this sheet around at one of our QS Discussion Group meetings. I think it’s an amazing way to see the growth in the number of QS meetup groups! The timeline runs from June 2008 to March 2012 (click…
Ben Ahrens got his start in self-tracking as a personal trainer for six years. He was then diagnosed with Lyme disease and spent two years in bed. In the video below, he talks about his tracking failures, the importance of intuition and simplicity, and what he learned about controlling his symptoms by tweaking his mental state. A…
George Lawton was kind enough to take notes at our most recent QS Discussion Group meetup. Here is his summary, below. The QS Meetup on March 13th in Mountain View was great fun, and covered a variety of topics ranging from nutrient tracking, classifying large archives of footage, quantifed-mind.com, and pH tracking, and newly disclosed…
I have finally figured out my mood! After 16 months and 300,000 words of mood tracking data, which I shared with a friend, I have a painstakingly compiled list of hacks that balance my extreme mood swings and make life much smoother for me. So, like a good QS’er, I’m sharing what I learned. Maybe…
This is a “mark your calendars” post to let you know about some fun QS-related stuff coming up that’s not sold out yet! March 20 – The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking — MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) event, Stanford GSB Cemex Auditorium 6:00 – 7:00 pm Demos, Networking and Refreshments; 7:00 – 8:30 pm…
Kiel Gilleade researches physiological computing. He streams his heart rate data to Twitter, live, 24 hours a day. Over the course of a year, he learned how his heart rate responded to different events, dietary intake, and changes in routine. He was also surprised to learn that he didn’t get up until 8 am! His friends and…
Robby MacDonell from RescueTime tried many different tools to form habits, and didn’t find that any of them worked. After a good deal of frustration, he started to investigate the idea of having goals at all. In this great talk, Robby honestly shows data that isn’t pretty – hooray! He also shares some really interesting insights…
We’re excited to announce the first batch of talks and sessions at the upcoming QS conference. Thanks to everyone who is stepping up to speak! Check out these awesome topics: Show&Tell Talks Data Doesn’t Lie: Orgasm vs. Performance (Dave Asprey) Stress relief with a biofeedback game (Olivier Janin) QS+1 Lessons learned from assisting in trading…
David Philips is a professor at the University of Toronto who studies surveillance. He’s interested in democratizing infrastructures of surveillance and using surveillance data for things other than population control, such as creating senses of self and community. In the video below, he gives an interesting talk about what he has learned about the why…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Mar 4, 2012
Nick Winter was inspired by Seth Roberts to track his productivity. He uses the method of percentile feedback, which compares his current productivity to past productivity as he goes about the hours of his days. Nick uses it to help prioritize his work projects, and he gives a short talk about his experience below. (Filmed by…
Matt Velderman wanted to figure out his acne problem. He dove into researching acne treatments, tracking himself and modifying his diet and behavior. His approach was to try every possible thing that could help at once to solve the problem quickly, and then remove one thing at a time to figure out a minimal set…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 26, 2012
