At the last QS Show&Tell, long time QS participant Paul Sas made an important critical comment about self-tracking. He said that he noticed a lot of “write once/read never” projects. Data collection: is it an end in itself? Or do you want to do something useful and interesting with your data? This is the theme…
Thoughts on treating access to personal data in the same way as network permissions – as a system that permits a customizable range of options from full, real-time access to complete denial.
I’ve been meaning to write something about Track Your Happiness, a project of Matt Killingsworth at Harvard University. A couple of weeks ago Buster McLeod, an interesting self-tracker whose writing I enjoy, reviewed his experience with Track Your Happiness. He was pleased. Track Your Happiness Is Awesome Track Your Happiness is a project begun as…
Mans Shapshak has been watching a lot of tennis lately and it inspired him to get out on the court again after not playing much since college. He found his serve had deteriorated, especially his toss. So he searched the internet for tips and found advice like this: “A high, confident toss made 1 to…
In this inspiring talk from the recent New York City QS Show&Tell Hulda Emilsdottir and Josh Klein talk about the system Hulda developed to analyze their relationship to their possessions, and then about another system Hulda made for buying clothes based on seasonal usefulness, care-requirements, and compatibility with her other clothes. [For info about the…
In this video from the recent QS Show&Tell David Reeves of Limeade describes the challenges of providing a universal self-tracking system in the context of an employee wellness program. The Q&A covers a lot of great territory, including how to make self-tracking rewarding, how to encourage participation, analysis techniques, and privacy issues.
Thanks to Chris Finlay, the Quantified Self now has a nascent social network on Ning. You can find us here: The Quantified Self on Ning Chris and I were talking about the ideal design and features for this social network, and as I was staring at the blank google doc we created for our outline…
Tonight’s Bay Area QS Show&Tell will be fun and interesting. There are a number of people who have told me in advance that they have something to show, and as always you are welcome to present your self-tracking projects spontaneously as well. Our host is Orange Labs, the research and development group of France Telecom;…
Please join New York QS readers at the first NYC QS Show&Tell tonight. There is a great lineup, a great location, and a high probability of an interesting, fun evening. For location and time details, follow the link above to the NYC Quantified Self Meetup page. The Show&Tell format will be the same as the…
What do we see in the mirror of our data? A couple of recent stories bring this question to mind. The first comes from Adam Bryant’s profile in the New York Times of Jim Collins, author of business advice books that have sold millions of copies. Collins is tremendously successful; a few hours of his…
We’re happy to announce that we’ve got a date and location for the next QS Show&Tell. The SF group will meet on June 9 at Orange Labs in South San Francisco. The program has been so much fun that we’re just going to keep doing it the same way. There will be a series of…
Politicians have always been self-trackers. In the flow of political action, you need a notebook just to keep track of people’s names. But when a recent political controversy was resolved by the notebooks of the most conscientious self-tracker in the history of the United States Senate, the reputation of people interested in personal data got…
Deep mysteries of human nature will be exposed by self-tracking, aspects of our behavior so disconcerting and bizarre that they will lead us to question whether we understand ourselves at all. I know this is true because such disconcerting results are already being produced at a rapid pace by experimental psychologists, and self-tracking brings the…
I’ve been meaning to link to this post for a couple of weeks. Nathan Yau over at Flowing Data has been writing personal data collection projects quite a bit. In this post, A Perfect Personal Data Collection Application, he talks about what is missing from current tools and about his dream system for personal data…
Self Quantifiers in New York now have their own QS Show&Tell Meetup, courtesy of Steve Dean, who has been following QS almost since its inception. Steve was out here in the Bay Area for the second Show&Tell we had last year, and he has arranged to have the first meeting at Parsons, The New School…
In this inspiring talk from the recent QS Show&Tell, author, scientist, and self-experimentalist Seth Roberts explains why worries about experimental design are overblown. You will learn what’s wrong with your experiments by starting to do them.
As John Herrman writes: Man Builds Chair that Tweets His Farts, Single-Handedly Justifies Twitter’s Existence. Today’s New York Times has a story about twitter that, in passing, points out that SMS offers a pretty convenient format for automatic monitoring human behavior. But I think the automatic flatulence detecting office chair tells the same story, more…
Self-tracking is about self knowledge. But what if the knowledge you want is contained in the minds of others? In these videos, Joe and Lisa Betts-LaCroix discuss self-tracking in a relationship, and Paul Sas shares his proposal for a “dynamical dinner party.”
Sprint’s commercial tries to sell its 3G network by quantifying “now.” Does this mean it’s the beginning of a trend, or the end of one?
Mark Bernstein, the developer of Tinderbox, sent along this post about a QS-flavored cycling dashboard one of his users made.
