This is a special NFTAW post on a project we think is full of insight and beauty. For those of you that were lucky enough to attend the first European Quantified Self conference this past November in Amsterdam you know how inspiring our good friend Laurie Frick can be. Laurie is a visual artist who…
This is the first time we’ve had video of a new meetup’s very first gathering! Ciaran Lyons started QS Singapore, and recorded his introductory remarks as well as his own self-tracking story. Great to watch for people new to QS or thinking of starting a meetup group. Thanks Ciaran!
On February 7th, 2012 there was an amazing “meeting of the minds” at CALIT2 down in San Diego, CA. The local San Diego Quantified Self meetup group working in collaboration with CALIT2, the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, and the West Wireless Health Institute brought together Gary Wolf (Quantified Self founder), Larry Smarr…
At a QS Meetup in San Francisco about a year ago, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in over 15 years. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that he had quietly built one of the most widely used weight loss tools: MyFitnessPal (with 170,000 ratings on the AppStore, mostly 5s!). Mike Lee explains…
We’re excited to announce the third Quantified Self conference, to be held September 15-16, 2012 at Stanford University. Registration is now open, and please feel free to tweet… now! Quantified Self 2012 is our third conference for users and tool makers interested in self-tracking systems. It will be a “working meeting” for the QS community (50 groups…
Sacha Chua started tracking time to find out where she was spending time and how she might change her patterns. In the video below, she explains what she learned, including how quickly her interests change, how she chooses to break down her time, and how the tracking helps her focus. Be sure to check out…
In 2006, PhD student Ian Li created Moodjam to let people track their moods in color. At the QS Europe conference last November, he met artist Laurie Frick, who creates beautiful works of art from her data. She mentioned that she was using Moodjam, and this inspired Ian to make a new version of it! In the video…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 11, 2012
We’re excited to announce that the videos from the Quantified Self Europe conference in Amsterdam are starting to come online! I’ll be posting them individually here on the blog, but if you can’t wait for that, you can find some of them here on Vimeo. Also, QS Amsterdam member Kees Plattel put together this beautiful…
You’ve all heard the buzzwords being thrown around these days, “social media”, “social networking” etc. With the explosion of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other social services it seems like you can’t go anywhere online these days without being bombarded with buttons yelling at us to “Share this!”, “Like This” or “Send this to a friend”. Why the…
I had the great pleasure of attending a QS meetup in Los Angeles this past weekend, hosted by Eric Blue. There was a great group there, 30 or so folks. One great comment in the introductions was from someone near the end of the circle saying, “This is totally blowing my mind!” Eric has put…
We here at Quantified Self Labs wanted everyone to know that tonight (Feb 7th, 2012) Gary Wolf will be speaking in San Diego on a panel with Dr. Eric Topol, Larry Smarr and Dr. Joseph Smith about “Quantified Self and the Future of Personal Health.” The panelist for the event include: Gary Wolf is the co-founder…
Ewart de Visser had a friend who “didn’t like the whole work thing” and started speculating on foreign currencies. When Ewart asked him how much he was losing in his first few months, his friend wasn’t sure, so they set up a spreadsheet to start tracking his trading performance. In the video below, Ewart describes…
Will Lam loves coffee. As the chief blogger over at Indie Coffee Blog he’s constantly trying new roasts, new places and letting his readers know about good coffee spots around his hometown of Toronto. In 2011 he decided to go a step further and really track his coffee habits. Let’s look at a few of…
Adam Loving wanted a very lightweight way to track what he did each day, without tweeting it to the world. He built a simple system where he can tell Siri what he did, and it gets recorded in a database. Some data gets automatically entered through if this then that. Adam found that it has…
About three years ago, Gary Wolf wrote a detailed post on Measuring Mood — some tools are complicated enough to get you grouchy! Gallup goes through a lot of trouble to gauge the US happiness level on a daily basis. Others take a simple approach, such as Eric Kennedy’s recent talk at the Seattle QS meetup on Tracking…
Alan Bachers is an expert in neurofeedback training, which he comfortingly describes as helping the brain learn how to calibrate itself. He suggests that this training accelerates the process of getting into meditative or other desirable mental states, and can possibly help a medicated brain learn to function without medication. In the video below, he…
There are two new Quantified Self meetup comming up in Germany: On takes place on the 1st February in Munich. The other on the 7th February in Hamburg. Last month there was also another European country that had its QS Meeting: The Czech Republic.
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jan 29, 2012
So here we are again with another QS101 post. I thought today I would walk you through a concept* that you may find useful for getting started on the path to self tracking. As a behavioral scientist I get a lot of people asking me about goals – how to set them and how to…
