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David Duncan – Experimental Man
Gary Wolf
April 3, 2009
Here is a video from the latest QS Show&Tell of David Duncan describing the research he presents in his book Experimental Man.
Author: Gary Wolf
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QS SHOW&TELL #5 – Short report
Gary Wolf
April 1, 2009
There will be video of last night’s great QS Show&Tell coming soon. A big thanks to David Duncan for hosting us at the San Francisco writer’s grotto, where more than fifty attendees packed into the social area, sitting on chairs, couches, and standing in back. These notes were made in passing – I may have…
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QS SHOW&TELL #5 – Tonight!
Gary Wolf
March 31, 2009
The next QS Show&Tell is tonight. Please come and bring your enthusiasm for self-tracking and self-experiment. You and your graphs, spreadsheets, biometric devices, practical solutions and crazy notions are all welcome. We are meeting at The SF Writer’s Grotto courtesy of David Duncan. David is a QS member who has made an amazing tour of…
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How clean is your air?
Gary Wolf
March 27, 2009
I was catching up on reading Seth Roberts blog this morning and I noticed this post he made in January about seeking cleaner air in his apartment in Beijing, where he was working for several months. Seth describes a couple of different cleaning approaches, and makes the point that measuring your personal environment is not…
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A Self-Experiment in Rapid Weight Loss
Gary Wolf
March 23, 2009
Fellow QS Show&Tell member, lifestyle experimentalist, and tango king Tim Ferriss recently wrote an astounding blog post on rapid weight loss through manipulating kidney function – dehydrating and rehydrating. He did not actually lose the weight for a tango competition. Tango – in case you were wondering – does not generally classify competitors by weight….
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William Reichman: Assessing Cognitive Fitness
Gary Wolf
March 19, 2009
I recently saw Alvaro Fernandez of sharpbrains.com speak at eTech 2009, the O’Reilly emerging technology conference. Fernandez is a Stanford MBA working as a market researcher focused on the “brain fitness” industry. Not surprisingly, he posts quite a bit about commercial opportunities, and publishes a newsletter with surveys, estimates, and forecasts about the state of…
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Margaret Morris – The Mood Phone and the Circumplex Model
Gary Wolf
March 13, 2009
A few weeks ago I wrote about the dream of the mood phone. This dream has been so persistent that its appeal probably reaches beyond mere technical utility to touch other, unspoken feelings about the role of the phone in our social life. After all, it is often hard to perceive the mood of a…
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Steroids and the Lost Data of Self-Experiment
Gary Wolf
February 26, 2009
Not long ago I asked somebody I know with deep knowledge of athletes, athletic training, and performance enhancing drugs to talk to me about what I suspected was a “dark net” of self-monitoring and self-experimentation. Athletes track their performance in many ways. They measure speed, strength, weight, recovery time, and dozens of other variables. Those…
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“Self-Tracker” spied in Word Spy
Gary Wolf
February 20, 2009
“Self-tracker” appeared yesterday on Word Spy, the wonderful word-tracking site by Paul McFedries. McFedries does not track word usage quantitatively; his approach is to keep an eye out for neologisms, capturing them as they appear. It is done out of fascination. We’ve had our eye on medical and psychological aspects of self-tracking recently at QS,…
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Moodlog – measuring mood with text queries
Gary Wolf
February 17, 2009
Alex Chaffee posted the following comment to my recent piece about how to measure mood, and I am taking the liberty of reposting to the main page here. Alex has built a mood measurement app that he seeks comments on. I encourage you to take a few minutes and look at his work; this is…
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Are Self-Trackers Narcissists?
Gary Wolf
February 17, 2009
“Are self-trackers narcissists? Results from NPI-16” at the QS Show&Tell; video by Paul Lundahl. Are self-trackers narcissists? In the video above, from the recent QS Show&Tell, I report on trying to find an answer. Here I give a quick summary of that talk and a reference link. I decided to run this test because a…
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The danger of psych experiments!
Gary Wolf
February 9, 2009
In honor of Atish Mehta’s presentation of his new site, HappyFactor, at the last QS Show&Tell, I am working on a short long post about issues affecting the assessment of mood. That will post tonight or tomorrow, I hope. But in the meantime, here is a paragraph from one of the research papers I’ll be…
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Matt Cutts hacks his WiiFit for biometrics
Gary Wolf
February 4, 2009
Courtesy of the always courteous Paul Lundahl, we have some video from the recent QS Show&Tell to share. Here’s the first, with Matt Cutts talking about hacking his WiiFit into a more or less automated weight tracking system. If you like what he’s talking about, you can look on his blog for explicit instructions. Right…
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Your genome will be public
Gary Wolf
February 3, 2009
The QS blog, as is obvious to anybody who glances at it, is hosted on kk.org, the web site of my friend and QS Show&Tell co-host Kevin Kelly. Here is a link to Kevin’s recent post on the inevitable public status of all individual human genomes. It is a counterintuitive idea, persuasively argued. Kevin focuses…
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iBrain tracks sleep – to what end?
Gary Wolf
February 2, 2009
QS Show&Tell regular David Duncan, author of the upcoming Experimental Man, blogged last week about his experience with the iBrain, a single electrode brain wave monitor under development by Philip Low, a neuroscientist and founder of Neurovigil, a startup that is commercializing his single electrode device for clinical and home use. The picture at left…
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Self-Tracking and Death Switches
Gary Wolf
January 31, 2009
The other night at the QS Show&Tell a few of us got into a conversation about the potential use of self-tracking data in the development of simulations of the self. Of course all models are simulations in a sense, but the discussion reminded me of a terrific bit of speculation from Nature a few years…
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Zume Life – Beta Invitation
Gary Wolf
January 30, 2009
I have been experimenting with a self-tracking system called Zume Life, from the company founded by regular QS attendee Rajiv Mehta. I wrote about Raj’s QS Show&Tell presentation here. We don’t have the video up but the youtube video embedded below is the impressive presentation Raj made at Health2.0. Zume life is now doing a…
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What’s your experience with personal genomics?
Gary Wolf
January 29, 2009
Now that there are multiple companies selling genome scans, and urging their use as a guide in making decisions about health, the sociologists are following close behind. Marcie Lambrix, at Case Western University, contacted me recently to seek research help in putting together a report on consumer attitudes and experiences with personal genomics. The research…
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QS SHOW&TELL IV – Tracking Pain, Tracking Happiness
Gary Wolf
January 28, 2009
Last night’s QS Show&Tell was, for me, one of the most interesting so far. The setting was a beautiful, large classroom in South Hall, home of the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the oldest building on the campus. (The photo above is by Charles C. Benton, and it was taken from a kite.) Presentations…
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QS SHOW&TELL – Tonight!
Gary Wolf
January 27, 2009
All hands on deck for the QS Show&Tell tonight – it looks like it will be fun and interesting. DETAILS HERE And thanks to everybody who took the QS survey. I know it wasn’t comfortable for many to take this kind of “forced choice” survey, but hopefully it will be worth it and we will…