Jeff Heer does it again. A Stanford professor in Human-Computer Interaction and Quantified Self advisor on data visualization, Heer and his colleagues Mike Bostock and Vadim Ogievetsky have put together a terrific guide to the various kinds of data visualization, and when and how to use each one. They call their guide A Tour through…
Brandon Hansen posts at Jalopnik.com on his year-long project to find out if he could speed his commute by analyzing the influence of his departure time, local school schedule, and other factors. Tired of the typically inefficient and contradictory workplace chatter on the subject — and feeling the pull of a mild worksheet obsession —…
Joseph Jackson has an announcement to make. He attended the last Bay Area QS Show &Tell meetup and told the group about the Open Science Summit he’s organizing in Berkeley this summer. In his words: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley opensciencesummit.com Synthetic Biology,…
A crowd formed around me at the last Bay Area Quantified Self meetup as I showed around this bandage-shaped tracker and bright green pills with microchips on them. Questions showered me: What does it track? Does it have a battery? How does it work? Unfortunately I didn’t have all the answers. This new device was…
About 40 or so self-quantifiers showed up despite the heavy rains on Broadway to witness another fascinating night of self-tracking projects with enough surprises to keep the interest high. Thanks to Dan O’Sullivan and Mustafa Bagdatli we got a chance to return to the well-wired labs of NYU ITP. Videos will be posted to the…
You’re biased. I’m biased. We’re all biased when it comes to thinking, remembering, being social, and making decisions. Understanding the different cognitive biases we have can help us design and interpret experiments, interact with each other, and make healthy, rational choices. Here’s a cool visual guide to cognitive bias that was running around Twitter recently….
Last Wednesday 100-ish QS folks gathered at Langton Labs in San Francisco for an energized meetup. Langton Labs is “an institute for future living,” where people live and work on cool projects. The meetup was sponsored by QuantHealth – thanks to Alex Jacobson and his team for being the first QS sponsor! The evening started…
Jeff Heer of Stanford and Nathan Yau of FlowingData give their insight on the easiest tools available for beginners to create jaw-dropping infographics.
My recent story about self-tracking in the New York Times magazine attracted many thoughtful comments. I found myself especially interested in the critical comments, some of which had an underlying tone of anguish. For instance, “BT” in Ohio wrote: How many of the “problems” in ourselves and our lives that these new machines will track…
If you have data, you probably want to analyze it. Visual Analytics is a hot topic these days – just look at the number of data visualization job posts on the FlowingData site. Honing your visualization skills doesn’t have to be expensive. Middlesex University in London is hosting a Visual Analytics Summer School (Camp) from…
Here the fabulous Dr. Laird displays some of his gadgets for measuring human behavior, sure to inspire Quantified Self tinkerers and historians. Thanks to Megan and Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Library for helping do some archeology on this topic. More fun references to come… (The movie, which was sponsored by General Motors, turns into…
A post commemorating the first 600 days since the kickoff Quantified Self meetup.
Zeo co-founder Ben Rubin spoke at the last Bay Area QS Show&Tell at Stanford University. Click on the video below to hear his thoughts about measuring sleep and the future of Zeo. Ben Rubin on Zeo and sleep measurement from Kevin Kelly on Vimeo.
Can your cell phone replace your therapist, or make cognitive behavior therapy more accessible to a wider audience? Margaret Morris of the Digital Health Group at Intel sent in an article that addresses this question, published today in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Mobile Therapy: Case Study Evaluations of a Cell Phone Application for…
Here are some helpful links if you are new to this blog. QS is a collaboration of users and tool makers interested in self-knowledge through self-tracking. For more on this, go to our About page. Along with posting to this group blog, we hold regular “Show&Tell” meetings where you can hear short, interesting accounts of…
Ramesh Rao, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD, discusses his findings on heart rate and meditation.
Ian Li of PersonalInformatics.org sent in this evolving collection of QS-related articles: Many of you requested a list of articles related to personal informatics (e.g., self-tracking, visualization, self-knowledge). You can find a list of articles at http://personalinformatics.org/lab/articles For a full list of articles, visit http://www.citeulike.org/group/13347 You can participate in adding to the list by joining…
Over the weekend some of the most interesting designers working in the field of personal informatics gathered in Atlanta in advance of the ACM conference on human-computer interaction. At a workshop called “Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One’s Life,” they presented research proposals and tentative conclusions about the future of personal informatics…
A poem on the unseen struggles between self-tracking and self-worth.
Walter Mischel I thought this might interest QS friends who are thinking about extremely simple systems of self-assessment. It is a paragraph about the influence of Walter Mischel that comes from the autobiographical sketch of Daniel Kahneman, on the occasion of his Nobel prize. I post this simply for inspiration, in case it is useful…
