Life Logging App Explores The Science Of You. Imagining The Future Of Lifelogging. Life is hard, especially the living-it part. That's why technologists are hard at work making the user experience something that anyone (with enough disposable income) can enjoy (for as long as the battery lasts). You've already seen Google Glass and the Nike FuelBand, but that's so Wearable 1.0.
Join me on a day in your far better, connected, game-ified, quantified digital life. A vibration on your finger awakens you. It is your Circadian Ring, which syncs with your pillow to monitor your health and influence your dreams. You miss your dream about dancing with a panda at a falafel cart, which you'd found in the Absurdist Lite catalog, so you fall back asleep—but are reawakened when the ring triggers a montage of wildlife mating videos on all your bedroom walls.
You put on your enhanced glasses, attach the GestureBand to your right forearm, affix the FlagpinCam to your lapel, slip on a TasteMaster tongue ring, and it's off to work! By 6 p.m., you notice a minor feeling of sadness. What is the Quantified Self Now?Quantified Self. At Quantified Self we’ve come to appreciate the interest in QS from scholars, researchers, and scientists. The essay below, which originally appeared on the Society Pages blog Cyborgology , was written by the thoughtful QS participant and scholar, Whitney Erin Boesel ( we have collaboratively made minor edits for this posting ). We learned quite a bit from it and are honored that Whitney allowed us to repost it here. Essays such as these help us think critically about QS and our growing community. We hope that posting it here will spur discussion and we invite you to add your voice in the comments or email us with essays of your own. There’s A LOT more to (self-)tracking than Quantified Self When people ask me what it is that I’m studying for my PhD research, my answer usually begins with, “Have you ever heard of the group Quantified Self?”
But this is not the Quantified Self that I have come to know. September, 2008: the very first QS meetup (Image credit: Kevin Kelly) Quantified Self | Self Knowledge Through NumbersQuantified Self | Self Knowledge Through Numbers. Guest Post: The Confidently-Quantified Self | Measured Me. The following post was written by Dr. Alan Dabney. Professor Alan Dabney received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Washington in 2006. He joined the faculty in the statistics department at Texas A&M University later that year and received tenure in 2011.
Dr. Dabney conducts research in the analysis of “big data,” particularly the kind that originate from biological applications; for a list of his research publications, please see his Google Scholar profile. In addition to his research activities, Dr. Dabney is an award-winning teacher of both undergraduate and graduate students in the statistics department at Texas A&M. I just got home from attending my very first QS event, the 2013 QS Europe conference in Amsterdam! First, self-trackers are statisticians, in the purest sense. Second, while completely relevant to the general practice of data science, statistics as a formal practice is not relevant to the average self-tracker. 1. 2. 3. Look forward to hearing from you! De la mesure de soi (1/3) : Mettre l’informatique au service du corps.
Assister à une conférence du Quantifed Self (QS), comme c’était le cas de cette première édition européenne, qui se tenait à Amsterdam, c’est faire l’expérience étrange d’être parmi des gens obnubilés par la mesure de soi et qui interrogent sans cesse ce qu’ils mesurent d’eux-mêmes. C’est être confronté à une multitude de personnes – les « quantifiés » – qui part leurs pratiques mêmes, semblent se distinguer du commun des mortels : « Nous ne sommes pas comme les autres personnes » reconnaissait Gary Wolf en introduction de ces deux jours. Bardés d’outils, d’applications, de techniques de soi et de méthodes, que bien souvent ils inventent en faisant, ces cobayes d’eux-mêmes vous font entrer dans le monde étrange d’une pratique réflexive sur soi-même, visant à faire sens d’une accumulation de données et de chiffres. Comme le faisait remarquer Gary Wolf, le QS vise à « utiliser l’informatique utilement ».
C’est un processus actif de réflexivité qui mêle informatique et données.