"The Macroscope", a book on the systems approach. Sharing Happiness Project Data | Lana Yarosh. [Excel Data Spreadsheet] My daily sums (between 0 and 7) for my Happiness project dailies, as well as a 7-day trend line. Click for bigger image. I recently ran into a coworker who keeps a blog with all of his data collected over a period of one year (Chris Volinsky and his “My Year of Data” blog). This is part of a larger movement of Quantified Self – which is about gaining self-knowledge by measuring various aspects of one’s life. I wanted to share my own data from a self-tracking project that I’ve been doing for the past 5 months (ever since my defense). I’ve been doing this kind of mindlessly for awhile so I’m using this blog entry as an opportunity to reflect. I’ve been tracking myself as I do a variation of the Happiness Project, which is a book/blog that suggests for one to explicitly identify the aspects of life that are important to happiness and track them daily.
Here are the few bits of insight that I got from this exercise: The Happiness Project. Visual Storytelling with Data. Service Design Thinking. Behavior change is belief change. Every behavior change fanatic out there loves this quote. Probably has it on their bathroom mirror. The formula is so simple. You = what you do every day And therefore: if (what you do every day == excellent) Then: You = excellent And also, if you’re trying to solve for excellence… You + X = Excellence You now know that X = do excellent things every day And… You + (do excellent things every day) = Excellence I know what you’re thinking. And more importantly, just be excellent. And here, it becomes clear. The quote by Aristotle is actually not helpful at all. Last night I had a great conversation with @e_ramirez, @cwhogg, and @aarondcoleman over a few beers. Despite all of us having fairly different ideas about to build RIGHT NOW, given the current state of the market, what we know about behavior change, and what works and doesn’t work, there was a moment of clarity when we all agreed on the fact that: Behavior change is belief change.
You can’t change what you do without first changing who you are. Kudos. Reinventing Science Education in the 21st Century. Government and business leaders are worried about STEM education. There is a growing shortage in the United States of teachers and students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). Hundreds of million are invested in public-private initiatives to retrain STEM teachers and to recruit and prepare new STEM teachers.
The initiatives rightly recognize the importance of STEM professionals to our future economic wellbeing, environmental health, and national security.1 However, after six decades of enormous public and private investments in science and math educational reforms, perhaps we need to rethink our approach. Alfred North Whitehead, one of the twentieth century’s great mathematicians, turned philosopher and educational reformer, provides a useful analysis of our educational malaise. Whitehead matriculated at Cambridge University in 1880, where he studied mathematics and physics. The second stage is that of precision. The third stage is that of generalization. Notes.