Two years ago Panasonic released a “mood phone” that supposedly tracked your emotional state by analyzing your voice. A year later Motorola awarded a $10,000 competition prize to a Duke University student whose idea was to create a phone that told you the mood of the person on the other end of the line, so…
Do you follow the QS blog or the QS MeetUp from outside the Bay Area? You are invited to organize your own QS Show&Tell, to replicate the very simple format or to alter and improve it. The QS Show&Tell is an informal meeting where people involved in various types of self-tracking share their tools, methods,…
Today’s story on self-tracking and self measurement in the Wall Street Journal featured Alexandra Carmichael, the co-founder of Cure Together, a platform for open source health research. (Alexandra is a regular at the QS Show&Tell.) CureTogether is a community site where members can share information about their health. Alexandra has an excellent post on the…
The dead end. The cul-de-sac. The walled garden. These are three different ways (using 2.5 different metaphors) to refer to services that allow you to communicate and display information but not to copy, transfer, or share your data with outsiders. It’s an internet dogma that dead ends, culs-de-sac, and walled gardens are bad. I subscribe…
The next Quantified Self Show&Tell is December 9, 2008, hosted by IDEO-San Francisco . As at the last two events, the program will be simple. Sign up to talk about your self-tracking/personal data/life-logging project either via email to me or Kevin or by talking to us before the meeting. Presentations are brief and informal. So…
Here is a great talk by Ryan Grant from the last QS Show&Tell. Things got especially interesting when Ryan talked started talking about how the device he is making would allow you to capture, in sound, stills, and video, moments of your life that had already passed. Below are a few excerpts from the audio…
Just a quick follow up to the last post about Tweet What You Eat, inspired again by Flowing Data and by a telling anecdote from a recent health conference, where I concluded that ubiquitous self-tracking is coming, but perhaps not from the direction expected by many health professionals. At the conference I met the CEO…
This post makes me happy! One of the most fun things about QS so far has been the sense of optimism and possibility emanating from the frontiers of self-tracking. There is something so obvious about applying basic methods of rational data gathering and analysis to daily life that each little experiment, however simple, hints at…
The idea of having one’s devices automatically upload data to a Web site is much hoped for among QS readers. Here’s one take on solving from the problem, presented at the the QS Show&Tell II by Brandon from A&D Weighing, one of the leading manufacturers of medical scales. (Brandon was a good sport in dealing…
Here is a great presentation by Tim Lundeen from the recent QS Show&Tell. Tim is running some interesting self-experiments on diet and cognition. QS_081023_03_Tim_Lundeen from Paul Lundahl on Vimeo. Diet and cognition is a topic of such obvious interest that it regularly breaks through into the popular press and the science blogs. For instance, eating…
Last Thursday’s Quantified Self Show & Tell saw some great presentations, with great questions and discussion – or rather the beginning of what could have been much longer discussions that we cut off every time out of enthusiasm for the next person’s show & tell. Average presentation time was a little under ten minutes, average…
This is a quick post to invite QS readers to contribute to the Quantified Self Wiki. The Wiki address is: http://quantifiedself.wik.is/ You must register but registration is open and you can begin contributing as soon as you create a user name – no need to wait for a confirmation email or any other bureaucracy at…
A column by Olivia Judson in today’s New York Times touches on both scientific and literary testimony about the self-blindness of human beings. In “Wanted: Intelligent Aliens, for a Research Project,” Judson points out that we are terrible self-analyzers, at least using the tools of our ordinary understanding and perception. If there is anything living…
As a break from working through some of the heavy papers on mood metrics that I asked for and received, I started playing with Daytum, the place to make pretty, web-based charts from your data. Daytum is in an invite-only beta right now, but they are issuing invitations to all who ask as their capacity…
This is a quick post to request help/references. I’ve decided to add an emotional dimension to my self-measurement experiments. I’m currently measuring mood on a 1-5 scale. There is a lot of social science research on measuring mood. I’ll post some pointers in the next few days. But if others are measuring mood I’d be…
Lately I’ve been obsessed with a hard problem that seems easy. You do things that generate data. You have a machine that measures something and produces a number. Sometimes the machine even stores the numbers, so you can look at old measurements. Maybe, if the company is very advanced, the machine will bounce the numbers…
The same ubiquitous traces that make it easier for us to track ourselves make it easier for other people to track us. So we always take an interest in stories of accidental self-exposure. Here, without too much comment, is a link to today’s notable incident. It comes from the world of GPS tracking; specifically, from…
Yesterday I wrote about the inaugural QS Show&Tell, where the very first show-and-teller, Ka-Ping Yee, stood up and explained that he had been tracking most of his activities over the last three years. (I didn’t want to use his name or link to his entry until I asked permission, which he quickly granted.) Below is…
On September 10, 2008, twenty-eight people interested in collecting all kinds of data about themselves held the first QS Show&Tell in Pacifica, California. Even before the meeting started, it attracted some good-natured ridicule in the Washington Post. People tracking their most mundane activities? Why? It’s a reasonable question. One of the most interesting things I…
Yesterday was a red letter day in the world of self-quantification, as Nathan Yau declared the winner in his summer-long personal data visualization context. The winner is Tim Graham, whose data blog is an entertaining record of personal data that shows how much narrative (courage, hope, risk, disappointment) can be packed into a single graph….
