An excited, sold-out crowd is gathered in Amsterdam today for our first Quantified Self Europe conference. You can follow along on Twitter with the hashtags #qs2011 and #qseurope. To give a bit of background for our Dutch readers, here is a video of Martijn Aslander, one of the QS Europe organizers, at a recent talk…
Roger Craig had a dream of being on Jeopardy, and he took a QS approach to making it happen. He downloaded all historical Jeopardy questions and answers into a database, clustering the questions by topic and keyword, and built a web tool around it to quiz himself. He visualized his answers to see where his…
Quantified Selfers really love to gather face to face, sharing stories and experiments and tips. I’ve even had the humbling experience of people telling me that coming to a QS event changed their life. So how do we put together our events, to encourage this deep, collaborative learning? With our first European QS…
Boston QS organizer Michael Nagle gathers a panel of people in the social health space, and asks them: if not all behaviors can be incentivized, who are the users that succeed with your platform, and who are the users that fail? Dr. Joseph Kvedar of the Center for Connected Health, Rick Lee of Healthrageous, Jackie Thong…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Nov 6, 2011
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 30, 2011
This is another post in our Lab Notes series to give you a sneak peek at how we work behind the scenes at Quantified Self Labs. “What’s your vision for Quantified Self?” and “Where will QS be in 10 years?” These are probably the two most common questions reporters ask us. I never know how…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 23, 2011
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 16, 2011
This is the first of a series of posts to give you a sneak peek behind the scenes at Quantified Self Labs, for a bit of flavor on how we work. In case you’re thinking about it, it’s best not to try to reach us by phone or ask us to schedule a call. It’s…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 9, 2011
John Sumser had a 7-year period of disasters after he quit smoking. He faced cancer twice, diabetes, asthma, divorce, family death, and more. Throughout this period, he was measuring himself. As he went back through his data, he found one central thing underlying all of his problems – stress. John tells his colorful story and…
Seth Roberts offers an interesting perspective on how he has been able to accelerate his own self-discovery. He suggests combining the QS rigor of self-experimentation with the Paleo ideas on diet, exercise, and lifestyle. Seth believes both QS and Paleo communities can benefit by learning from each other. In the video below, he also compares…
This is a guest post from Jerry Jariyasunant: Hi! I’m a graduate student at UC Berkeley in Systems Engineering and I’m part of a team interested in learning about travel behavior. We’re interested in how people get around and seeing how aware people are about their travel habits compared with their peers, and their impact on the environment. We’ve designed…
Joe Betts-LaCroix reports below on his recent experiment with a 28-hour day. He describes in engaging detail how he set up a tent in a crawlspace under his house, how his family reacted to the experiment, and what he learned from it. Definitely worth watching if you’re doing any sleep experiments! (Filmed at the 20th Bay Area…
Robin Barooah gives an insightful talk below on embodied learning. He used a binary self-tracking system, without keeping any of the data, to train his body to know what foods made him feel energized or lethargic. This awareness helped him to lose 45 pounds over the course of several months, but more importantly, it serves…
The power of the Quantified Self community is in the individual stories of self-tracking and self-experimentation that QS’ers around the world are sharing with each other. With this post, I want to invite you, if you haven’t already, to share your story – what did you do? How did you do it? What did you…
Here’s a quick video from Andrew Schaaf. He built an open source app for the Mac that logs attention and usage data, including your mouse position and which app is at the front of the stack on your screen. The data is private and stored on your computer. If you’re interested in raw data on,…
A recent meeting of the Amsterdam Quantified Self group saw a talk about health insights gleaned through accidental lifelogging. The speaker (who asked not to be named) has bipolar disorder, and has been using last.fm over the past 7 years to track his music listening and compare it with his friends’ music patterns. He talks about…
Ernesto Ramirez strikes again! His recent talk at QS San Diego called Quantified Self on a Budget is one of our most viewed videos. We were lucky enough to have Ernesto come up to San Francisco to share his thoughts on how self-tracking can enhance your memories and help you reflect on your life. He…
