What We Are Reading

Ernesto Ramirez

May 18, 2014

Enjoy these links, posts, and articles from around the web.

Health Care Apps Offer Patients an Active Role by Ann Carrns. A nice overview of different DIY health apps and connected home medical devices.

Getting the most out of RescueTime for your Quantified Self projects by Robby Macdonell. If you’re using RescueTime to track your computer use and productivity there are many options for extending the built in data analysis. This great post by Robby, who spoke about tracking his productivity at our 2013 Global Conference, showcases a few different methods. If you use one to look at your own data let us know in the comments or on the forum.

Downloading Your Email Metadata by Nathan Yau. Another nice how-to post from Nathan on FlowingData.com. Email is an area of rich information and most of time that data is left in the vaults of our email providers. This tutorial provides a great instruction set for gathering that data using Python.

20 Day Stranger by Playful Systems and the Center at MIT. An interesting project that will sync self-tracking data with a stranger for 20 days. It’s not in production yet, but you can apply to be a part of their trial. I’m really intrigued by the idea of sharing anonymously with strangers and what you might be able to learn about another person.

Spurious Correlations, Quantified Self, and the Health Care System by Martin Spindler. Do steps calculated, counted, and correlated by the smart pedometers of today actually improve lives?

Meet the Godfather of Wearables by Maria Konnikova. A really nice long read biographic piece on Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Sandy is responsible for running one of the most innovating research and design labs at MIT. Chances are that if you’re reading this then you’ve interacted with some bit of technology that originated with Sandy and his students.

Show & Tell

Fixing Sleep with Low Blue Light. This simple, but fantastic explanation of how one individual moved up his waking time by reducing his exposure to blue light.

Quantified Self: Three Months Later by Adam Sigel. This is a nice post about how different apps and tools helped Adam engage with his health and learn more about his life.

Visualizations

EdwardSnow Visualizing Zero: How to Show Something with Nothing by Andy Kirk. We’ve had some great discussions at recent Bay Area QS Meetups about the meaning of missing data. This short piece has some great examples of how the absence of data can be an important part of the story.