Author Archives: Alexandra Carmichael

In 2006, PhD student Ian Li created Moodjam to let people track their moods in color. At the QS Europe conference last November, he met artist Laurie Frick, who creates beautiful works of art from her data. She mentioned that she was using Moodjam, and this inspired Ian to make a new version of it! In the video below, he walks through the sparkling new version, including some not-yet-released features like aggregated happy vs. sad colors and sentiment analysis. (Filmed by the Pittsburgh QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

Here’s some weekend reading, without the eye-straining bullet points this week! Thanks to Kevin Kelly, Gary Wolf, Ernesto Ramirez, Rajiv Mehta, and Daniel Reda.

Your Body Is an API: 9 Gadgets for Tracking Health and Fitness. Includes our Basis friends and other gadgets from CES.

Lifestream blog’s summary of the CES experience, including new health and fitness gadgets.

Harnessing experience: exploring the gap between evidence-based medicine and clinical practice. This fascinating paper describes the inevitable gap between “evidence based medicine” and actual clinical practice, and proposes an interesting idea, “evidence farming,” that acknowledges the range of available evidence beyond randomized controlled trials.

Ten years after its first publication, Welcome to Cancerland by Barbara Ehrenreich still has the power to explode your brain.

The Creative Destruction of Medicine by Eric Topol. We’ve been looking forward to this one.

We’re excited to announce that the videos from the Quantified Self Europe conference in Amsterdam are starting to come online! I’ll be posting them individually here on the blog, but if you can’t wait for that, you can find some of them here on Vimeo.

Also, QS Amsterdam member Kees Plattel put together this beautiful video impression of the conference, to give you a flavor of what it was like, or to remind you of your experience there. Enjoy, and see you at the next conference (to be announced soon!)

I had the great pleasure of attending a QS meetup in Los Angeles this past weekend, hosted by Eric Blue. There was a great group there, 30 or so folks. One great comment in the introductions was from someone near the end of the circle saying, “This is totally blowing my mind!”

Eric has put together a compilation of slides and links from all five LA meetups so far. Here it is:

Show & Tells

1. Ernesto Ramirez gave a presentation (My Bits of Fit) on his Fitbit data and activity patterns, including some great visualizations (Thanks to @chloester)!
• Slides at www.slideshare.net/e_ramirez/my-bits-of-fit
2. Marina gave a presentation on InsideTracker (bloodwork analysis & recommendation) and her own project for tracking Happiness – the Ultimate Answer
• Slides at Inside Tracker – QS LA Presentation
• The Ultimate Answer
• Introduction to the Happiness Formula
3. Brian Dorsey gave a presentation on his product Work Food Out
• Site at workfoodout.com/
4. Eric’s presentation on location tracking and personal travel journal
• Slides at www.slideshare.net/ericblue76/la-quantified-self-meetup-1011-location-tracking
5. Eric’s personal device collection, along with other QS devices in the market, and future devices
• Slides at www.slideshare.net/ericblue76/la-quantified-self-meetup-0811-device-show-tell
6. Eric’s personal project (TRAQS.me) for consolidating his Quantifed Self device data into a central dashboard
   • Demo at traqs.me
   • Slides at www.slideshare.net/ericblue76/traqsme-presentation

Other Links

• Chloe Fan - Visualizations for My Bits of Fit
• Fitbit + Google Spreadsheets = Awesome
• Fitbit Hacks - Eric’s original unofficial API to scrape data
• Fitbit’s Official API
• Cake Health
• Healthcare.gov
• Avado
• InDinero.com
• Creating the Ultimate Personal Travel Journal
• Eric’s Personal Memex Project
• GeoLocation (GPS) and Self-Tracking
• Gordon Bell’s My Life Bits Project

Ewart de Visser had a friend who “didn’t like the whole work thing” and started speculating on foreign currencies. When Ewart asked him how much he was losing in his first few months, his friend wasn’t sure, so they set up a spreadsheet to start tracking his trading performance. In the video below, Ewart describes how he used data to modify his friend’s trading strategy to prevent big losses, as well as the interesting benefits of being tracked by someone other than yourself. (Filmed by the Washington DC QS Show&Tell meetup.)

Adam Loving wanted a very lightweight way to track what he did each day, without tweeting it to the world. He built a simple system where he can tell Siri what he did, and it gets recorded in a database. Some data gets automatically entered through if this then that. Adam found that it has motivated him to continue his pushup/situp routine, and keeping his system simple has helped him uncover some funny problems for future improvement. (Filmed by the Seattle QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

Alan Bachers is an expert in neurofeedback training, which he comfortingly describes as helping the brain learn how to calibrate itself. He suggests that this training accelerates the process of getting into meditative or other desirable mental states, and can possibly help a medicated brain learn to function without medication. In the video below, he does a fascinating live demonstration of the NeurOptimal system on an audience member, with on-screen visualizations of the volunteer’s brain activity. I’d love to see how my brain looks with this tool! (Filmed by the Boston QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

Here is this week’s QS reading list. Hope you enjoy:

• Ken Snyder’s surprising Magnesium survey results of 146 QS’ers (PDF on his site).
• A new Harvard Business Review piece on approaches to translate self quantification to business.
• Ariel Garten’s TEDx Toronto talk: Know thyself, with a brain scanner.
• iDreamSaver project on KickStarter: an interesting product using infrared technology to track sleep and wake you up intelligently.
• Embracing Personal Experience on Our Rise Through Science: an inspiring and thoughtful piece about what it means to be scientist.
• Century of the Self (BBC documentary): A journey through the history of the Self, from happiness machines to crowd manipulation to the policemen in our heads.

Thanks to Ernesto Ramirez, Ed Dench, and James Wilson. If you’re reading something interesting you want to share, submit it to us here.

QS founder Gary Wolf speaks at the Silicon Valley QS meetup group, giving a meta look at what Quantified Self is about, followed by a personal show&tell about his meditation data.

Happy weekend, everyone! Here’s a smattering of inspiring things we’ve been reading at QS Labs this week:

• Seth Roberts’ series of posts on Vitamin D3 and sleep. The lesson: what time you take your supplements could matter a lot.
• Transforming behavior change from the Social Brain Project at the RSA (UK): Some really interesting insights into behavior change and the role of neuroscience and reflexivity.
• The latest issue of Bruce Schneier’s always interesting Crypto-Gram newsletter, with fascinating accounts of data breaches and hacking attacks, personal data vulnerabilities, and – for a bonus – an intelligent call to get rid of the United States’s Department of Homeland Security.
• Schedule your creative tasks for when you’re most tired – a thought-provoking look at a circadian effect on creativity.
• An opinion piece on the Research Works Act, the piece of legislation that threatens to roll back public access to federally funded research.
• Smart Geotextiles for ground and building monitoring (from our friend David Pescovitz at BoingBoing.)
• Transistors developed to monitor molecular processes - listening to enzymes. QS is moving to the molecular level!
• Psychotropic Medications Affecting Biological Rhythms. (PDF) Looking at mood disorders and medications in the context of circadian rhythms as well as shorter and longer cycles will play an increasing role in good medical practice. This has applications to other health issues as well, and will require increasing self-awareness of empowered patients.