Stefano Schiavon is an assistant professor and researcher interested in sustainable building design. As he told us at last month’s Quantified Self meetup in Berkeley, California, “I am Italian. I love architecture. And I think buildings are beautiful.” One goal of building design is to increase individual comfort. However, this poses a problem. Everyone is…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 19, 2016
Today, we are participating in the “Data and Innovation at the Climate-Health Nexus” panel hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. When we’ve spoken to people about this meeting the reaction we tend to receive is, “What does Quantified Self have to do with climate change?” It’s a valid question, and…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Mar 21, 2015
This is a guest post by Dominikus Baur, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary. Dominikus is interested in personal visualization – how to make the large amounts of personal data available online accessible to their creators through visualization. His previous projects focused on visualizing personal music listening histories. Our busy daily lifes often make…
Recently, Technology Review invited me to do a guest post on one of their blogs as part of their feature, “The Measured Life.” I chose to engage a claim I saw on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog — that at the QS Conference, it seemed that “quantified self” = “quantified health.” He asked about mood, attention, emotions —…
Michael Doherty talks about the Open Source Real Time Mobile Sensor Platform he is developing, which flexibly connects a wide variety of sensors to online databases. He wants to make mobile tracking more accessible, and imagines people using it with their own sensors, as well as kids using it to collect environmental data on class…
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.
At the most recent New York City Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup, Esther Dyson took the microphone to talk about her recent experience at the GET (Genes, Environment, and Traits) Conference. She then answered questions from fellow QS’ers about the direct-to-consumer genome market, public perception (“why on earth would you want to sequence your genome?”), DNA…
The Cophenhagen Wheel, a project of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, transforms an everyday bike into “a hybrid e-bike that provides feedback on pollution, traffic congestion and road conditions in real-time.” And yes, that’s an iPhone mounted on the handlebars. Thanks to Nathan Yau of FlowingData for the heads-up on this. Nathan writes: The wheel stores…
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…
