For many of us, the answer seems obvious: why do something manually when you can automate it? But when it comes to personal data, automation involves a trade-off. As Project HealthDesign‘s principal investigator Anind K. Dey points out in this blog post, automation suffers from the drawback of “out of sight, out of mind.” (Dey…
Marco Castros loves food. He’s also interested in exploring the relationship we have with food, and how it changes depending on the company we are in. Marco spoke at the last New York QS Show&Tell meetup. In the video below, he describes how he hacked his Withings scale and designed a “Weighting Chair” that records…
Some things are easy to measure. Time, money, exercise, calories, location – all of these are relatively straightforward to repeatably determine or calculate. But how does one go about measuring happiness? What about compassion, or public influence, or creativity? These are more intangible, harder to pin down to a number that means anything. Douglas Hubbard has…
Nathan Yau over at Flowing Data started a fascinating discussion last week. He asked his readers why they collect data about themselves, what they’ve learned from it, or why they don’t collect any data at all. 23 people answered the call and shared their insights. There are many positive self-discovery comments like the stories we…
When am I most productive? Bill Jarrold asked himself this question and showed us his answer at the most recent Bay Area QS Show&Tell. He did an analysis of his command line logs and charted how many UNIX commands he issues by hour of the day. What Bill found was that 3 pm was his…
A new noise/ozone sensor watch being tested in Europe. Quantified Self enthusiast David Purdy asked me one day, “Why aren’t people measuring simple ambient things like background noise?” I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but I do now. It turns out a project in France is doing just what David suggested.
Don’t be shy – come to a QS Show&Tell meetup! Say you’ve been reading this blog for a while. You’ve watched some self-tracking Show&Tell videos, read about some of the experiments people are doing, and now you’re thinking of coming out to a physical meetup. Great, this post is for you! Here is a schedule…
If you know basic web development but haven’t got a clue how to build iPhone apps, Jonathan Stark has written a book you might want to read. It’s called Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and the full text is free (for now) at http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/
At the most recent New York City Show&Tell meetup, Taz Delaney talked about the dream journal he has kept since 1968. He digitized it in 1986 and can now search for every dream he’s had about his mother, or David Bowie, or flying on Saturn. Watch his video below to hear the interesting connections he…
Earlier this summer Alexandra Carmichael, who is the founder of CureTogether as well as our director here at the Quantified Self, was in Washington for a meeting in President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). When Alex came back she posted a report about her meeting here on the blog, and invited us…
How do I quit smoking, or start a running program? Drink tea instead of coffee, or eat more vegetables and less sugar? What about focusing on one task at a time instead of checking my RSS reader every 20 minutes? If you are facing questions like this in your life or as part of your…
For any of you who are working on projects that address unmet medical needs, here is an announcement about a new competition, with three $15,000 prizes. Dear Self Quantifiers, I would like to spread the word about an upcoming competition NSF Partnerships for Innovation program in the Sacramento area (information is posted below). It is…
Bo Adler, a regular at Quantified Self Show&Tell meetups in the Bay Area, describes a mapping mashup he built for his naturalist friends who work with Outdoor Education groups. He wanted to capture their location from the pictures they are taking along the Pacific Crest trail, from Mexico to Canada. Find out what he learned…
Calling all beta testers! Kresten Bjerg, at the Institut for Psykologi at the University of Copenhagen, is working on an open source electronic diary app that uses pictograms or “syntactic glyphs” as part of the thought-recording process. He is looking for people to help test the diary and possibly build on it. Please write directly…
Here’s your chance to learn how to live longer, and save money too. Christine Peterson is hosting the first Personalized Life Extension Conference, October 9-10 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. She is offering a $100 discount on the $275 registration price to all Quantified Self members who register with the discount code “QS”.
On of the most well known QS devices is the Withings WiFi body scale. Automatically transmitting weight to a computer or mobile phone, the scale is a good example of a solid, mainstream approach to self-tracking. But I was curious recently to see how many people are taking advantage of the ability to publicly tweet…
Last week, I wrote a post recruiting self-quantifiers who live in Pittsburgh for face-to-face interviews at Carnegie Mellon University, but not many responded. Thankfully, a QS reader informed me of Skype’s ‘Share Screen’ feature. Now, I am writing again to recruit participants, but this time the interviews will be remote using Skype’s ‘Share Screen’ feature….
Many of us are bothered by the conflict between wanting to take advantage of web services for the management of personal data and our desire to have all of this data on a local drive. Poyozo is a new service that scrapes personal data and returns it “home.”
Do you measure your body fat? Former personal trainer Dale Larson tells the San Francisco Bay Area QS Show&Tell folks about his LeanScale iPhone app to help monitor and discover trends in body fat. Dale Larson on LeanScale – Bay Area QS #13 from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.
This post is a bit scary to write, and will surprise most people who know me, but here goes. 6 months ago, I got my 23andMe genetic test results. They showed mostly what I expected: 30% chance of diabetes, 24% chance of atrial fibrillation, 40x greater risk of Celiac disease than the general population. All…
