Over the last year, we’ve been working on the launch of a new nonprofit organization called Article 27, whose mission is to advance the human right to participate in science. Inspired by the achievements of the Quantified Self community, we want to do what we can to help everybody trying to learn about themselves using empirical methods.
We’re thrilled to share the news that, along with our normal wide range of show&tell talks, breakout discussions, and toolmaker demos, this year’s QS conference is going to have a special focus on self-collected data in formal and informal learning. Over the coming months we’ll be developing the program in close collaboration with a wide range of self-trackers and toolmakers. If you’re a student, an educator, or both, we’re especially eager to find out what you’ve been working on.
Azure Grant introduces the QS Blood Testers project, showing data that suggests a single point measure may be inadequate for understanding cardiovascular risk. Every participant crossed a CVD risk category by time of day in at least one lipid output, and 80% of participants crossed a risk category based on time of day when only fasting measurements were considered.
We are organizing a QS symposium on cardiovascular health for scholars and researchers and participants in the QS Community. The goal of our meeting is to support new discoveries about cardiovascular health grounded in accurate self-observation and community collaboration. This one-day symposium will be held on Thursday, April 19, 2018 at the University of California, San Diego.
We’ve just returned from the latest Quantified Self Conference in Amsterdam and we’re working on the slides and videos of talks to share with everybody. It always takes a few weeks of work to get them ready for posting, so be patient. If you are already nostalgic (or wishing you’d been there) you can check…
Today we’re publishing the program for QS17: The Quantified Self Conference, which will be held this year at Casa 400 in Amsterdam on June 17 and 18. Looking over the 60+ sessions, I’m struck again by how different our meetings are. We do some things that are contrary to common sense, and we keep doing…
A review of Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth — A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen,” a biography of one of the greatest early biometricians written by Jane Lancaster.
An announcement for Quantified Self Conference 2017 hosted June 17-18 in Amsterdam.
We recently announced that we’re collaborating several other editors to edit a special “focus theme” on N-of-1 experiments for the established informatics journal, Methods of Information in Medicine. N-of-1 Call For Papers (PDF) Here’s an extract from our justification for the call: Scientific progress in medicine and public health during the last century has been…
An interview with physicist Larry Smarr about his idea for a large scale, non-commercial, broadly accessible infrastructure for improving access to self-collected data for both personal and public benefit.
#Wearenotwaiting activist Dana Lewis talks data access at the White House.
Today the New York Times published a fantastic story by Peter Andrey Smith about the Nightscout and OpenAPS projects: A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care. People with diabetes and parents of kids with diabetes are self-tracking by necessity, and we’ve learned a lot from their talks about their projects at QS meetings and conferences. Their impact is…
In this fascinating talk Rocio Chongtay shares her novel and thoughtfully designed experiments in using music to adjust her concentration and relaxation depending on what she’s doing. Using a consumer EEG device from Neurosky, Rocio tried different types of music while tracking the relaxation and concentration dimensions identified by the Neurosky algorithm. She had experience…
As an English teacher Kyrill Potapov spends a lot of time working with 12 year old kids who are trying to improve their reading, writing, comprehension, and analytical skills. In this talk, he explores a remarkable method of speed reading, called Spritz, that promises to let you “read Harry Potter in three hours” with full…
Kouris Kalligas, a long time participant and contributor at Quantified Self meetings, is the creator of the very easy to use data aggregation service AddApp. AddApp is an iPhone app that makes it simple to gain insights from data gathered on dozens of different devices. While running his startup, Kouris has also been doing ongoing self-tracking experiments….
It’s been an honor to have Beeminder founders Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule participating in Quantified Self meetings, giving us a chance to watch the evolution of their very useful tool for setting and achieving personal goals. These days they are working on the forefront of device and service integration. In this talk Daniel gives…
Let’s start 2016 with a very interesting talk by Randy Sargent about how to visualize the very large data sets produced by some kinds of self-tracking. Randy’s idea about using spectrograms, normally used for audio signals, to create a portrait of your own time series data, is completely novel as far as I know. If…
In this fascinating short talk by geneticist Jim McCarter, we see detailed data about the effects of a ketogenic diet: lower blood pressure, better cholesterol numbers,and vastly improved daily well being. Jim also describes the mid-course adjustments he made to reduce side effects such as including muscle cramps and increased sensitivity to cold. Jim begins:…
I talked with Vinod Khosla over the summer about machine learning and the Quantified Self. Khosla was a founder of Sun Microsystems and is one of Silicon Valley’s most experienced investors in Quantified Self companies. His portfolio includes AliveCor, Ginger.io, Jawbone, Misfit, Narrative, and many other toolmakers that people doing QS projects will recognize. In our…
We haven’t gotten the full report yet, but this looks like a wonderful meeting!
