Gary Wolf

January 28, 2009

Last night’s QS Show&Tell was, for me, one of the most interesting so far. The setting was a beautiful, large classroom in South Hall, home of the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the oldest building on the campus.  (The photo above is by Charles C. Benton, and it was taken from a kite.)   Presentations included a detailed and thought-provoking account by Stephanie Pakrul of her attempt at 24/7 visibility; a quick “how-to” by Matt Cutts for turning your Wii balance board into a automated weight tracker (as well as liberating it for other games/inventions), a demo of Happy Factor  (“how happy are you“) by Atish Mehta, a happiness tracking system that uses random text messages to sample your happiness; and a remarkable dataset collected by Faren Inglett of Cure Together that shows headaches in relation to menstrual cycles and treatment regimens, using both daily and hourly data. I also gave a short talk answering the question “are self-trackers narcissists” using data from the first QS survey, which included the questions from the NPI-16, a standard research tool. (The answer, by the way, is “no.”) Paul Lundahl filmed the proceedings and will post the presentations on Vimeo. As soon as they are up  we will link to them from here.

Many interesting questions were asked, and suggestions made. More links to follow…