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…
In this video, Rajiv Mehta talks about the importance of remembering for good experimentation — carrying out the experiment as planned and capturing the results properly — and the difficulty of doing this well. He described a new app, Tonic, that helps people remember and keep track of their health activities, and shared examples of people…
Long-time Quantified Self regulars Joe & Lisa Betts-LaCroix co-present their comparison of QS to the better-studied practice of journaling, and their vision for meta-QS research: finding out whether self quantification can actually bring about desired changes in the people doing it. In their engaging video below, they also suggest how a new age of personal enlightment…
This is a guest post from MIT’s Ian Eslick, including his discussion-provoking video from the most recent Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup. Thanks Ian! — Tracking my lifestyle changes and related symptoms on an ongoing basis has proved to be challenging. The severity of my symptoms have never been such that I’ve made detailed note-taking a…
George Lawton studies happiness, and how to have more of it. In the video below, he talks about emotional feedback tools, his research on how to incrementally increase happiness, and how he tried to change his mood by changing his facial expressions. George also discusses mirror meditation as a way to increase emotional well-being, engages…
Joe Betts-LaCroix had a question. Which of the two exercises he was doing – dodge ball and lindy hop – was giving him a greater intensity workout? He used Fitbit to count his steps for every 5 minutes he performed these two activities. Watch his entertaining video below to see which exercise came out on…
With so many exciting developments in the QS world, the air at Adaptive Path was full of energy for the 17th Bay Area QS Show&Tell last week. The theme this time was health and medicine. I watched on the livestream (big thanks to Robin Barooah and Justine Lam for setting this up!), so I missed all the…
Another day, another exciting announcement! Today we are announcing the first Quantified Self Conference, to be held May 28-29, 2011, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This is a hands-on, collaborative conference for users and tool makers interested in self-tracking. It will be a “working meeting” for the QS community, where we…
Here’s some good news for those of you who live outside the San Francisco Bay Area or who weren’t able to RSVP in time for tomorrow’s QS Show&Tell meetup. This will be the first time that we will be livestreaming the event. The theme for this meetup is health and medicine, and details to catch…
This is a guest post by Sastry Nanduri, co-founder of one of our annual sponsors, HealthTap. Please comment below if you’d like to be part of the “personal data hackathon” Sastry is suggesting: — HealthTap is an avid supporter and sponsor of Quantified Self. We share Quantified Self’s belief that quantification and measurement can lead to insightful…
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell group: Dirk Aguilar shows charts of his energy consumption – electricity, gas, driving, and flying. He annotated his graphs with trips and life changes, and was surprised to learn that while his gas usage dropped during periods of travel, his electricity usage remained high from all of his appliances passively…
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup group: Andrew Hessel from Singularity University talks about his 2010 flight log. He has traveled 79,922 miles this year – 57 flights, 22 airports, 16 percent of his days in the air. Andrew tracks his flights for the sake of tracking them, with no goal to minimize consumption….
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell group: Max Winter Osterhaus (tagline: “I make charts”) talks about tracking all of his purchases for the past 5 years in incredible detail. He tracks right down to the kind of fruit or bread he buys, and admits to being somewhat addicted to combing through receipts. Watch the video…
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell group: Matt Haughey from Fuelly talks about tracking, sharing, and comparing gas mileage data. He tells the story of his efforts to move from 18 to 20 mpg – it required a great amount of concentration, and only ended up saving him $6. Watch the video below to hear…
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell group: Indhira Rojas explains Indexer, a database she is building for tracking consumption and managing waste. She wants to help people answer two questions: How much do I throw away? and, How do I recycle properly? In the video below, Indhira explains her project. See what she learned from…
For those of you following our first Quantified Self group experiment, here is Eri Gentry telling the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup about the Butter Mind/Coconut Mind experiment. The question she wants to answer is, does eating 3 tbsp. of butter or coconut oil a day improve math scores? Hear more directly from Eri below….
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup: Randal Koene shows his Linux project “dil2al” (detailed item lists to activity lists). Every 20 minutes, Randal gets a prompt asking him to log his activities and recommending possible task changes according to his set priorities. He’s been using this system since 1999, as a memory assist and…
It was another electric night. On Wednesday, 124 people gathered at the futuristic Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco for the 16th Bay Area QS Show&Tell. The theme this time was location, transportation, consumption, and energy. The workshop part of the evening seemed to take off this time, with buzzing groups forming around half a dozen people…
At the last Bay Area Quantified Self Show&Tell, Seth Roberts presented new findings on his “Arithmetic and Butter” experiment. Seth does arithmetic problems every morning as a measure of his brain function. He found that eating half a stick of butter every day shaved 30 milliseconds off his time to solve the problems. Does butter…
At the last Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup, Gordon Bell gave a candid, engaging talk on his MyLifeBits project. He showed pictures from his SenseCam that takes a picture every 20 seconds while he’s wearing it and contributes to the 1 GB of data he generates every month. Watch the controversy below that emerged when Gordon speculated that if…
