Willempje Vrins and Leonieke Verhoog thought running was boring, and wanted to find a way to make it more beautiful and fun. They invented Figurerunning, and are building a community around it. With apps like Runkeeper, they run specific routes that make make shapes like hearts and soccer players. Then they share their drawings/runs on…
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…
I recently received an email from someone having trouble keeping up with her experiment. While there is lots of general advice about discipline and motivation, this got me thinking about how doing personal experiments might differ. Following are a few brief thoughts, but I’d love to hear ways that you keep motivated in your quantified…
Now that there are so many QS events happening around the world (July alone has eight events!), we decided to put together a global QS calendar to keep track of all of them. If you’re traveling, or have friends in other cities you’d like to tell about a meetup, you can now see all upcoming…
When I want to start tracking a metric in my life, most of the time I use an app or service that enables me to do it more easily or provide options like statistics or sharing. I’ve tracked a lot of different things, some better and more easily than others. Sometimes my data would be…
Do you have the energy to do everything but the focus to accomplish nothing? David Charron of UC Berkeley studies multi-tasking, distraction and sustainable attention. He has experimented with quantifying his own attention, and compared himself to a long-time meditator. Check out his results and the interesting audience questions in the video below. (Filmed at…
Five new Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup groups have started up since our recent conference, so we want to give them a warm welcome here! Tulsa, Oklahoma – started by Jim Meehan Portland, Oregon – started by Ioan Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – started by Theodore Wheeland Victoria, British Columbia – started by Rasool Edinburgh, Scotland – started…
For quantifying the self at the molecular level, we need nanotechnology. This weekend is Foresight@Google, a conference on the latest nanotech and what’s coming in the field. Highlights include Halycon Molecular on how they’re reading DNA base-by-base, including critical methylation patterns that other DNA reading methods miss. Rob Meagley will describe prospects for sensors that…
With all the disparate data streams coming out of Quantified Self tools, Stephanie Gerson saw a need to create a tool to bring them all together. In the video below, she presents her project Trackify, a new way for people to find correlations and trends in their data streams. Stephanie also puts out a call for…
In 1981, Allen Neuringer wrote a paper in the journal Behaviorism, calling for self-experimentation. Consider it your weekend reading assignment, should you choose to accept it. Neuringer presents a fascinating history and philosophy of self-science, as well as his perspective on the importance of self-experimentation. There are even some early experimental graphs on needing less sleep…
We see a lot of cool things here that people are experimenting with, such as health (sleep, water intake, mood) or productivity (interruptions, hours/day, attention), but we are also trying odder things. My interest is in widening the definition of what could be considered an experiment, so I thought I’d ask, what off-the-wall things have…
What if you had a movie of your life that was made from a stream of pictures taken one every thirty seconds? Glenn Wolters and Jeroen Bos have built an iPhone app called Lifelapse to do this. They developed it as a school project. I noticed Joost Plattel using it at the recent QS conference…
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…
I recently came across three contests relevant to the QS community, and wanted to pass them along. 1. data in sight: making the transparent visual This is a hands-on data visualization competition held June 25th and 26th, 2011, at the Adobe Systems, Inc. offices in San Francisco’s SoMa District. Open to coders, programmers, developers, designers, scientists,…
This is the intimate story of the last 6 months of my life, and how it changed for the better by sharing my mood. For some reason, writing publicly about mood feels much more vulnerable than other kinds of data. Maybe it’s because emotions get more to the core of our beings than weight or…
A self-described “nerd,” Jamal has been dating for the past two years, and started trying to use data to answer the question, “how do you know if someone is right for you?” He built a model, quantified how well women that he dated matched up to his checklist of ideal characteristics, and decided to limit…
As far as I know, Adam Butterfield is the first person doing his Master’s thesis on the subject of the Quantified Self. He wrote in with this request: Calling all self-trackers! My name is Adam Butterfield, and I am a graduate student in the department of Anthropology at San Jose State University conducting research on…
We are placing a bulk order of our new T-shirts that some of us were sporting at the conference, so if you’d like one, please order yours here! They are $18 including shipping, and were designed by Brian Scott of Boon Design.
Highlights from Day 2 of Quantified Self Conference 2011
What an amazing group of people that came together for the first ever QS conference. Words can’t fully express the energy of the weekend, so here is a slideshow of photos, taken by our volunteer photographers Matthew Trentacoste, Alex Bangs, and Richard Sachs. People are also posting their notes from all the sessions to the…
