The Winter issue of h+ Magazine is available for download now. It includes the article I wrote about self-tracking, with five Quantified Self show-and-tell projects profiled. The editors decided against my original title (Self-Tracking: The Next Generation), but I do think the Quantified Life is worth living. Don’t you?
QS folks who have been interested in and contributing to the creation of a new data commons: you may want to check out Factual. Factual is a Los Angeles startup whose goal is to host any kind of quantitative data in a convenient, open, and mashable architecture. It was created by Gil Elbaz, and launched…
Do you need help with your self-tracking data analysis? Is there a specific problem or burning question about your experiment design that you’d love some guidance on? Gary and I are proposing an idea to help – read on for details! We’ve gathered an amazing Quantified Self Scientific Advisory Board to be part of our…
We will have our 9th Quantified Self Bay Area Meet Up this week on Wednesday, October 14, 2009. It will be held in Stanford University at the Wallenberg Learning Center (below). As in the past, this is a user-generated evening of presentations by folks who are self-tracking in one form or another. Each presenter gets…
I recently came across Mikael Huss’ Follow the Data blog, which reports on data-driven trends in reality mining, self-tracking, and personalized medicine. In a recent post, Mikael talks about three bits of self-tracking news that are sure to create tingles up the spines of Quantified Self readers: 1. FitBit shipsAt long last! FitBit, the accelerometer…
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…
For us self-trackers, data can pile up faster than we know what to do with it. Deriving meaning from the numbers we collect is a challenge I hear over and over at every Quantified Self gathering. Here’s a secret: visualizing your data is a powerful tool for discovering the treasured meaning you seek. The classic…
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…
I’ve long been interested in medical self-care. The idea of patients taking responsibility of their own health and healing seems to me to be essential in the long run. Quantified Self was started in part to collect a certain kind of tool that (among other reasons) might give you data which could be used to…
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…
The US Department of Homeland Security has invented a Star Trek-like tricorder. Called the Standoff Patient Triage Tool (SPTT), it can measure pulse, body temperature, and respiration from up to 40 feet away. The obvious application is for emergency response teams, but why not have a tricorder stationed conveniently in your bedroom and office to…
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…
Nathan Yau at the FlowingData blog has compiled a list of “37 Data-ish Blogs You Should Know About.” His list includes blogs on statistics, visualizations, maps, design, and “others worth noting,” a category that includes our own Quantified Self blog. Thanks Nathan! (Adding Nathan’s blog to the list makes 38.) Happy RSS-ing!
The New Yorker has a very good article on self-experimenters — mostly college students — using cognitive enhancers, beyond the traditional caffine and NoDoz. It’s unclear how many of these folks are quantifying their experiments, but they should be. A few excerpts: The effects of piracetam on healthy volunteers have been studied even less than…
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…
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?
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…
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…
“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,…
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…
