“Science is really about repeatability, about process, about discipline, about characterization, about controlling noise, and there are lot of different mechanisms that we can pull together to tell a story or inform a decision.”- Ian Eslick This past April we were lucky to host a meeting of researchers, toolmakers, science funders, and government representatives for…
Emily Singer, a journalist with MIT’s Technology Review, has an extensive series of articles and interviews on “The Measured Life“. She was at the Quantified Self Conference a month ago, seems to have talked with everyone, and has since been writing up a storm. The July issue of the magazine has a cool cover, the…
As I continue trying to stretch the concept of experiment so that a wide audience understands applying a scientific method to life, I struggle with defining success. While the trite “You can always learn something” is true, I think we need more detail. At heart is the tension between the nature of experimentation’s trial-and-error process…
We experiment on ourselves and track the results to improve the way we work, our health, and our personal lives. This rational approach is essential because there are few guarantees that what works for others will work for us. Take the category of sleep, for example. Of the hundreds of tinctures and techniques available, clearly…
T minus 25 days until the Quantified Self Conference, and we have another exciting announcement. Seth Roberts will be giving a keynote on “Why Personal Science Really Matters.” Seth Roberts’ pioneering work in self-tracking and self-experimentation has led to discoveries about diet, cognition, mood, and sleep. His use of daily measurements of basic activities as a…
In the IEEE Spectrum, Paul McFedries, the author of Word Spy, writes about new words generated by new kinds of science made possible by cheap computing. Perhaps the biggest data set of all is the collection of actions, choices, and preferences that each person performs throughout the day, which is called his or her data exhaust. Using such data…
