I think I spent more time flailing than planning in college. Though I’m not sure, because I don’t have the data. Tiffany Qi does, though. During her four years of undergrad, she meticulously tracked her time, putting it in one of several categories, “planning” being one of them. Now that she has her degree in…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from February 6, 2017
It’s 2017 and we’re looking forward to a new year of fun and informative Quantified Self meetups. This week brings the first of the bunch with Zürich and Dublin. Zürich‘s meeting will feature a presentation on the current and future impact of the Quantified Self movement on Swiss society. Dublin will feature great talks on how to…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jan 6, 2017
On November 17th, the Bay Area and SF Meetup groups hosted QS Show&Tell talks at WeWork Mid-Market. Thank you to everybody who came and presented. We saw some brilliant talks, including one about tracking during pregnancy with data challenging common, supposedly scientific pregnancy advice, and a talk outlining a fascinating self-study of bruxism (teeth grinding)…
An announcement for Quantified Self Conference 2017 hosted June 17-18 in Amsterdam.
Ahnjili Zhuparris shares her experiment examining the menstrual cycle’s influence on her day-to-day behaviour by using browser plugins to track variations in her interactions with different websites. She discovered interesting changes across several platforms, including how she browsed Facebook, swiped in Tinder, and listened to music on YouTube.
We have three great Quantified Self Meetups occurring this week. Seattle’s talk topics include failing, music listening habits, and personal analytics. Bogotá will be discussing productivity tracking. And the Tokyo group will allow everyone to give a short 3-5 min Show&Tell on what they’ve been working on. To see when the next meetup in your…
We recently announced that we’re collaborating several other editors to edit a special “focus theme” on N-of-1 experiments for the established informatics journal, Methods of Information in Medicine. N-of-1 Call For Papers (PDF) Here’s an extract from our justification for the call: Scientific progress in medicine and public health during the last century has been…
In this talk, Randy Sargent shows how he used a spectrogram, a tool mostly used for audio, to better understand his own biometric data. A spectrogram was preferable to a line graph for its ability to visualize a large number of data points. As Randy points out, an eeg sensor can produce 100 million data…
In this talk, Richard Sprague shares his attempt to improve his sleep quality by increasing the amount of bifidobacterium in his gut through eating potato starch. You’ll learn why he took the extreme step of flushing his digestive tract and rebuilding it from scratch.
I haven’t been doing these for awhile, but that does not mean that Quantified Self meetups have not been occurring. Far from it. If you are in the Washington D.C. area, there is a meetup on Friday, September 9th with presentations on using data to personalize one’s fitness regimen and how to use heart rate…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jul 14, 2016
Ellis Bartholomeus has many of the standard self-tracking tools like pedometers, heart rate monitors, and eeg sensors. But she explored a different type of tool when a friend gave her a logbook with a place to record her daily mood by drawing a smiley or frowny face on a colored circle. Although it initially felt like…
Peter Torelli had $2000 saved when he entered college. He knew that it wouldn’t last long, so he had to be careful about his spending. He switched to using a credit card in order to have a record of his purchases and reconciled his accounts every month. It became a habit that he kept for…
The emergence of self-tracking tools that came with the advent of the smartphone was a boon for people like Shannon Conners, who have long been recording their personal data with pen and paper. Her lifelong collection of personal data has lead to the creation of insightful visualizations.
Archived livestream footage from the 2016 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium hosted in San Diego, an annual event bringing together toolmakers and public health researchers to support new discoveries about our health and the health of our communities grounded in accurate self-observation.
Abe had an issue with staying up too late. The early morning hours often found him on his couch, working on his laptop. The problem is that he simply lost track of time. To help make his bedtime unforgettable, Abe built a reminder he could not ignore. He wrote a simple app that uses colors to…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Apr 25, 2016
