We aren’t ready yet. But we can’t resist giving an advance look. This year’s QS conference will be in Amsterdam on June 17/18, 2017. QS17 is a “carefully curated unconference,” which means his means that all of the sessions are proposed by our attendees. We spend about six months before the conference starts getting in touch…
Copenhagen has an amazing slate of presentations lined up for their Quantified Self meetup this week. Katarzyna Wac will speak about what she’s learned from using a continuous glucose monitor (there’s an interesting discussion on this topic going on in the QS forum). Thomas Blomseth Christiansen will talk about what he tracked while training for…
There are a great set of Quantified Self meetups getting together in the upcoming weeks. There will be a discussion in Colorado Springs on designing N=1 experiments. The Bay Area meetup will feature talks on how the Apple Watch’s fitness goals made one person less active and how another used time tracking to evaluate whether his time…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from March 4, 2017
Today, we have a guest post from Justin Lawler, an organizer for the active and excellent Quantified Self group in Dublin, about a recent meetup. If you are a QS organizer, feel free to contact me about writing a recap of one of your events. -Steven Recently, the Dublin Quantified Self meetup group gathered at the…
A great group of Quantified Self meetups are occurring this week. The group in Hamburg will have their meeting in conjunction with Social Media Week. The group in Dublin will be focusing on gut health, with a talk on stool analysis and another on gut hormones. Austin will welcome Dr. Bruce Meleski to speak about…
While it is clear that exercise is beneficial, how does one decide what to do to get and stay fit? When Laila Zemrani surveyed people at the gym, she found that a majority don’t decide at all. Sixty percent didn’t know why they were doing a particular exercise. And of those, 50% admitted to merely…
Stefano Schiavon is an assistant professor and researcher interested in sustainable building design. As he told us at last month’s Quantified Self meetup in Berkeley, California, “I am Italian. I love architecture. And I think buildings are beautiful.” One goal of building design is to increase individual comfort. However, this poses a problem. Everyone is…
I think I spent more time flailing than planning in college. Though I’m not sure, because I don’t have the data. Tiffany Qi does, though. During her four years of undergrad, she meticulously tracked her time, putting it in one of several categories, “planning” being one of them. Now that she has her degree in…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from February 6, 2017
It’s 2017 and we’re looking forward to a new year of fun and informative Quantified Self meetups. This week brings the first of the bunch with Zürich and Dublin. Zürich‘s meeting will feature a presentation on the current and future impact of the Quantified Self movement on Swiss society. Dublin will feature great talks on how to…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jan 6, 2017
Ahnjili Zhuparris shares her experiment examining the menstrual cycle’s influence on her day-to-day behaviour by using browser plugins to track variations in her interactions with different websites. She discovered interesting changes across several platforms, including how she browsed Facebook, swiped in Tinder, and listened to music on YouTube.
We have three great Quantified Self Meetups occurring this week. Seattle’s talk topics include failing, music listening habits, and personal analytics. Bogotá will be discussing productivity tracking. And the Tokyo group will allow everyone to give a short 3-5 min Show&Tell on what they’ve been working on. To see when the next meetup in your…
In this talk, Randy Sargent shows how he used a spectrogram, a tool mostly used for audio, to better understand his own biometric data. A spectrogram was preferable to a line graph for its ability to visualize a large number of data points. As Randy points out, an eeg sensor can produce 100 million data…
In this talk, Richard Sprague shares his attempt to improve his sleep quality by increasing the amount of bifidobacterium in his gut through eating potato starch. You’ll learn why he took the extreme step of flushing his digestive tract and rebuilding it from scratch.
I haven’t been doing these for awhile, but that does not mean that Quantified Self meetups have not been occurring. Far from it. If you are in the Washington D.C. area, there is a meetup on Friday, September 9th with presentations on using data to personalize one’s fitness regimen and how to use heart rate…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jul 14, 2016
Ellis Bartholomeus has many of the standard self-tracking tools like pedometers, heart rate monitors, and eeg sensors. But she explored a different type of tool when a friend gave her a logbook with a place to record her daily mood by drawing a smiley or frowny face on a colored circle. Although it initially felt like…
Peter Torelli had $2000 saved when he entered college. He knew that it wouldn’t last long, so he had to be careful about his spending. He switched to using a credit card in order to have a record of his purchases and reconciled his accounts every month. It became a habit that he kept for…
