T minus 25 days until the Quantified Self Conference, and we have another exciting announcement. Seth Roberts will be giving a keynote on “Why Personal Science Really Matters.” Seth Roberts’ pioneering work in self-tracking and self-experimentation has led to discoveries about diet, cognition, mood, and sleep. His use of daily measurements of basic activities as a…
In January, after talking with Matthew Cornell, I decided to measure my work habits. I typically work for a while (10-100 minutes), take a break (10-100 minutes), resume work, take another break, and so on. The breaks had many functions: lunch, dinner, walk, exercise, nap. I wanted to do experiments related to quasi-reinforcement. I wrote R programs…
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…
At the upcoming QS Conference (May 28-9, San Jose), Robin Barooah and I will run a session about self-experimentation. Alexandra Carmichael has asked me to write a post about how to do self-experimentation as a kind of encouragement to come to the session. Robin and I will be giving examples of what we have done…
Alex Chernavsky has kindly given me several years of weight data he collected by weighing himself daily. He read about the Shangri-La Diet in 2005 and several years later decided to try it. The graph above shows what happened: Starting at 222 pounds (BMI = 32), over 11 months he lost 31 pounds, reaching a…
Between 2007 and 2009 I spent a ton of time in Twitter before it finally hit me that 1) the net improvement to my life was zilch, and 2) had I thought of it going in as an experiment, I would have quit a long time ago and freed up energy for more effective efforts….
In 1996, I accidentally discovered that if I stood a lot I slept better. If I stood 9 hours or more, I woke up feeling incredibly rested. Yet to get any improvement I had to stand at least 8 hours. That wasn’t easy, and after about 9 hours of standing my feet would start to hurt….
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…
Considerations for the future of big data in self-tracking and personal informatics.
While talking recently with my QS fellows (thanks Alex, Eri, Seth, and Rajiv) I realized I’ve been using the term “citizen science” rather loosely. Expanding on my short section in Wandering minds, self-tracking, and citizen science, I’d like to use this post to explore how the expression is used, sketch a little vision of where…
Curiosity: An emotion related to natural inquisitive behavior such as exploration, investigation, and learning. Exploration: To travel for the purpose of discovery. Discovery: A productive insight. I’ve been thinking of this triumvirate as essential characteristics of scientific inquiry – get curious about something, try out some different things to dig into it, see what you…
A month ago I posted this graph, which shows how long I needed to type the answer to simple arithmetic problems (7-5, 4*1, 9+0). I tested myself with about 40 problems once or twice per day. Because I’d been doing this for a long time, I no longer improved due to practice. Then, at the…
Like you I’m an avid self-experimenter, and I’m always on the lookout for things to change that will either a) improve me, or b) help me understand myself better so I can do a). I was comparing notes recently with Seth Roberts (his QS posts are here) about what experiments we’ve done, what processes we’ve…
In November I learned about benefits of cold showers. So I tried them. I took cold showers that lasted about 5 minutes. I liked the most obvious effect (less sensitivity to cold). Maybe a bigger “dose” would produce a bigger effect. Maybe the mood improvement cold showers were said to cause would be clearer. So I…
I’m designing the data layer for my site, and it’s got me thinking about the essentials of what it is exactly that we track when self-experimenting. Putting on my ontologist‘s hat I’ve come up with two kinds of things that I think cover anything a human would want to track (I might as well be…
I’ve been wondering if there is a small set of categories encompassing the ways we interact with the world to get useful data. Following are some that came to me, which I’d love your thoughts on. Note that all these offer creative opportunities for things to measure based on the consequences of the type of…
A guest post by Matthew Cornell about his presentation given at The Boston Quantified Self Meetup Group #3 in Cambridge, MA based on his essay The Experiment-Driven Life.
I thought it might be fun to have some open discussions on the blog, where we all jump in to the comments section and share what we know. So why wait? Let’s get started with today’s discussion: What is your favorite self-experiment? It can be something you tried once, or a complex, multi-year effort. It…
Here’s your chance to learn how to live longer, and save money too. Christine Peterson is hosting the first Personalized Life Extension Conference, October 9-10 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. She is offering a $100 discount on the $275 registration price to all Quantified Self members who register with the discount code “QS”.
Jessica Charlesworth’s blog has a fantastic title: The Future of Self-Knowledge. Jessica is a designer and researcher based in London, England. She has developed several interesting tools for taking a somewhat quantified, analog peek into your future. Crowdsourcing Your Future is a postcard that you send to your friends to have them predict your preferable…
