Author: Steven Jonas
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Shannon Conners: A Lifetime of Personal Data
Steven Jonas
May 24, 2016
The emergence of self-tracking tools that came with the advent of the smartphone was a boon for people like Shannon Conners, who have long been recording their personal data with pen and paper. Her lifelong collection of personal data has lead to the creation of insightful visualizations.
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Livestream of the 2016 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium
Steven Jonas
May 18, 2016
Archived livestream footage from the 2016 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium hosted in San Diego, an annual event bringing together toolmakers and public health researchers to support new discoveries about our health and the health of our communities grounded in accurate self-observation.
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Abe Gong: Changing Sleep Habits with Unforgettable Reminders
Steven Jonas
May 10, 2016
Abe had an issue with staying up too late. The early morning hours often found him on his couch, working on his laptop. The problem is that he simply lost track of time. To help make his bedtime unforgettable, Abe built a reminder he could not ignore. He wrote a simple app that uses colors to…
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What We Are Reading
Steven Jonas
April 25, 2016
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Apr 25, 2016
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Mark Leavitt: Daily HRV As a Measure of Health and Willpower
Steven Jonas
April 22, 2016
Mark Leavitt has a unique perspective in that he is both an engineer and a physician. In his retirement, he is applying his wealth of knowledge to keeping himself healthy. In this talk, Mark looks at how heart rate variability relates to his willpower.
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Akhsar Kharebov: A Smart Scale for Healthy Weight Loss
Steven Jonas
April 20, 2016
Like many, Akhsar Kharebov found healthy weight loss to be an emotionally difficult process, but the Withings smart scale led to a breakthrough for him. In this talk he discusses how data helped him gain the self control to overcome temptations.
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Shelly Jang: Can You See That I Was Falling In Love?
Steven Jonas
March 16, 2016
When someone comes into your life and takes up a special place in your heart, do they also occupy a similar place in your data? Shelly used GMvault to look through 5 years of Google Chat logs to “hunt for signals that I loved my husband and not somebody else.”
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Stephen Cartwright: 17 Years of Location Tracking
Steven Jonas
March 4, 2016
In this talk from QS15, Steven Cartwright, associate director at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shows how seventeen years of location tracking has given him a wealth of data to explore in the form of three-dimensional data visualization sculptures.
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Paul LaFontaine: Using Heart Rate Variability to Analyze Stress in Conversation
Steven Jonas
March 2, 2016
Paul LaFontaine, organizer for the Denver QS meetup, shares his experience tracking heart rate variability (HRV) to understand “vapor lock,” his term for the inability to recall information that can occur during a stressful conversation. His analysis revealed a likely cause for this “lock up,” but the unexpected results led him to change his approach to meetings and conversations at work.
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What We Are Reading
Steven Jonas
February 29, 2016
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 29, 2016
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Ilyse Magy: Know Thy Cycle, Know Thyself
Steven Jonas
February 29, 2016
“My luteal phase went from 10 days to 16, which is a frickin’ Quantified Self miracle.” In this great talk, Ilyse Magy describes how tracking her menstrual cycle with the Fertility Awareness Method and Kindara worked for more than birth control. Tracking her cycle helped her understand how it affects her emotional state, and led her to find…
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Jon Cousins: Why I Weighed My Whiskers
Steven Jonas
February 23, 2016
Jon Cousins has given wonderful show&tell talks on mood tracking. Like most methods for measuring mood, his process involves a subjective assessment of his well being. But what if there was a physical measurement related to mood that doesn’t involve blood work? Inspired by an anecdote about a man’s beard growth while working on a…
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What We Are Reading
Steven Jonas
February 19, 2016
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 19, 2016
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Mark Wilson: Three Years of Logging my Inbox
Steven Jonas
February 17, 2016
“My inbox has become a barometer of my stress level.” Email overwhelm is something that most people of first world means can relate to. Getting a handle on this digital deluge is a Sisyphean endeavor that is, perhaps, only endured by deluding ourselves into thinking that it is possible if only we found the right…
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Bethany Soule: Extreme Productivity
Steven Jonas
February 12, 2016
“That’s insane! I want to try it.” Bethany Soule is the co-found of Beeminder, a commitment tool which she characterizes as “goal-tracking with teeth.” Her and Daniel Reeves, the other founder, have spoken on how they tracked the development of the tool and integrating it with other QS tools. In this talk from QS15, Bethany tells…
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Jacek Smolicki: Self-Tracking As Artistic Practice
Steven Jonas
February 11, 2016
“I don’t have a concrete goal. I don’t have a concrete aim to advance myself. It’s a way to explore different aspects of my life through data.” Since 2009 Jacek Smolicki has experimented with using personal data as a mode for artistic exploration. In this talk, he presents some of his practices: Making a collage…
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Robby Macdonell: The Data Is in, I am a Distracted Driver
Steven Jonas
February 4, 2016
“When I see someone driving towards me with their face buried in their phone, I get gloriously indignant about it.” Robby Macdonell has given great talks on transportation logging and time-tracking. Here, he combined those two data streams, using Automatic and RescueTime, to prove that he does not use his phone while driving nearly as…
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What We Are Reading
Steven Jonas
February 2, 2016
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 2, 2016