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QS17 Conference Program!

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Steven Jonas

We aren’t ready yet. But we can’t resist giving an advance look.

This year’s QS conference will be in Amsterdam on June 17/18, 2017. QS17 is a ”carefully curated unconference,” which means his means that all of the sessions are proposed by our attendees. We spend about six months before the conference starts getting in touch with everybody and working together to create something that we can all be inspired by and learn from.

We can’t help being a bit nervous at the start. It’s impossible to know in advance what you are all working on until we ask – and then you amaze us. An incredible amount of experimentation and knowledge making has been happening since your last meeting, and we’re seeing all kinds of novel metrics, methods and discoveries. (This year, I’m especially interested in learning more about tracking using 3d body scans, pulse wave velocity, and muscle activation.)

Typically, we don’t release the program until it’s closer to the event. But we are so thrilled by how the program is developing that we can’t resist giving a preview of what’s coming. This is not the whole picture – and there is still time to suggest a session if you have something you want to share. But here’s the latest QS17 program, as of today. Just remember, it is only a preview, and it’s going to grow and change.

And if you haven’t registered yet, please don’t delay. There are a limited number of tickets left! Register for QS17.

Posted in Conference, QS17 | Tagged qs17, qstop | Leave a comment

Meetups This Week in Washington D.C. and Copenhagen

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Steven Jonas

photo by Erica Tanamachi

Copenhagen has an amazing slate of presentations lined up for their Quantified Self meetup this week. Katarzyna Wac will speak about what she’s learned from using a continuous glucose monitor (there’s an interesting discussion on this topic going on in the QS forum). Thomas Blomseth Christiansen will talk about what he tracked while training for a half-marathon. Jakob Eg Larsen will look at sleep and resting heart rate over a long time period. And finally, Frederik Ackermann will give pointers for designing N=1 experiments.

Wednesday, March 22
Washington, D.C.

Thursday, March 23
Copenhagen, Denmark

Join us at QS17

Our next conference is June 17-18 in Amsterdam. It’s the perfect event to see the latest self-experiments, discuss the most interesting topics in personal data, and meet the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are a limited number of tickets. We can’t wait to see you there.

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Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Gary Wolf

The book discussed in this post is Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth — A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen”.

When we repurpose tools of science and management for distinctly personal ends, we’re extending a path laid down for us by many ingenious predecessors. I want to take advantage of the last hours of the day to honor one of the greatest early biometricians, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, and to revive a question posed, at least implicitly, by her work.

Gilbreth began her career in the early part of the last century as a disciple of the founder of scientific management, Frederick Taylor. Even before she got her PhD, she was doing time motions studies with her husband Frank Gilbreth with the aim of improving worker efficiency. Frank Gilbreth died in 1924. By the time Lillian died, in 1972 at age 94, she’d taken what began as Taylorist dogma and turned it into a practice of close observation and participatory learning that almost turned it on it’s head. Instead of seeing human beings as a factor of production, to be exploited like any other resource until worn and replaced, she asked about the human factor in production: what was work for, what were its conditions and benefits, and how could it be improved.

Gilbreth was very well known in her day, so she’s easy to learn about and there’s no need to crib from sources you can consult yourself. Perhaps my favorite biographical detail is that, after being denied a PhD in 1912 by the University of California, Berkeley because her family and business responsibilities prevented her from being on campus during the last year of her studies, Gilbreth published her research as a series of articles in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Digest, and then as a book, and then just went ahead and got a PhD from Brown. Although it’s quite something to become a towering figure in a new field, developing many novel research methods, and it’s of course no small honor to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering (she was the first woman elected), my academic friends will surely bow in awe before somebody who deals with a recalcitrant and small minded graduate department by marching off to a competing school and writing a second dissertation.

She was like that all her life. Jane Lancaster’s biography of Gilbreth, Making Time, gives a sympathetic but critically aware portrait of a person who embodied, challenged, compromised with, exploited, and suffered from conflicting ideals and demands of women’s work. Gilbreth made her living consulting for corporations, especially those whose employees and customers were women. She was a key link between scientific management and consumer culture, taking techniques developed for studying workers on the shop floor and applying them to home life. In 1927 she wrote a practical guide called The Home-maker and Her Job, and for many years after she continued to do close observational studies and produced a nearly endless stream of advice for coping.

From today’s vantage point we easily see that increasing the efficiency housework didn’t bring about the general emancipation it promised. For many people, time saved washing dishes is lost to doing paid work at stagnant wages; while savings from the lower cost of manufactured goods is eaten up by the price of healthcare and childcare. The cheery scientism of late Victorian elites looks naive from a century’s distance; that is, when its unhesitant racism doesn’t make it simply revolting. Gilbreth, at least at the beginning of the century, hoped that “positive eugenics” could improve the human species. Lancaster doesn’t go very deeply into this side of the rationalist ethos, except to note that Gilbreth wasn’t in favor of sterilization or murder, instead believing that people of high intelligence should have as many children as possible. She lived her faith, giving birth to twelve, one of whom wrote a memoir, Cheaper By the Dozen, in which she is reduced to a feminine caricature.

You can read Cheaper By the Dozen and watch both of the movies made from it without learning any of the most interesting things about Gilbreth’s research. For instance, in 1926 she undertook an unprecedented study on menstruation and menstrual pads, for which she canvassed, Lancaster writes, “a long list of potential informants, ranging form the Women’s Bureau through the American Federation of Labor to gynecologists, prison workers, and laundries.” In the early 1930’s she launched a project involving over 100 interviews and 20,000 questionnaires collecting data on sex and age discrimination. Before Frank died, he and Lillian Gilbreth carried out some of the very first, and certainly the most thorough, studies of how people with disabilities can benefit from kitchens designed specially for them, and after he died she continued to advocate passionately for better design to support independent living. Paid by Macy’s to improve the efficiency of their cashiers, she went to work on the sales floor herself, coming to understand in an intimate way the different meaning of “tiredness” for women of different ages working for different reasons.

Gilbreth didn’t merely link scientific management to consumer culture through her research, she also embodied – through her seemingly supernatural productivity – it’s greatest tensions. Gilbreth was a non-conforming rationalist engineer, and a bourgeois advocate of domesticity. (She argued for what she called a “50-50 marriage” of shared domestic labor but backed down in the face of ridicule, paying at least lip service the idea of a woman’s sphere.) She spent a good part of her life addressing the problems of working women, while of course working herself, and yet her greatest public fame came from the “biological wonder” of her twelve children.

Gilbreth understood efficiency, and yet her work leaves us with a question: what does efficiency cost? The promise is mastery, sufficiency, ease of accomplishment, when unnecessary friction has been eliminated. Do things the “one best way” and look what you get: Two dissertations. Twelve children. A long shelf of original and useful publications. She made it look easy. But as Lancaster makes clear, the ease is an illusion. Automation and routinization works best under controlled circumstance, but controls fail, and someone has to clean up the mess. Gilbreth mainly cleaned her own messes, though not all of them. The book’s most provocative minor character is the man who worked for decades as her main domestic servant, Tom Grieves. He’s presented as grumbly but affectionate, a practical person with a cigarette always on his lips, doing dishes and straightening rooms, chasing children around, and generally needed to maintain the conditions of predictability required for rational management to function. Grieve’s comment on his employer’s obsession with efficiency was succinct: She was, he said, trying to “make it easy for folks to work hard.”

Gilbreth exposed the realities of women’s work both inside and outside the home, but always with the promise that good technique could lift the burden. The promise is still with us; but, then again why is it still just a promise? I think it honors Gilbreth’s legacy to keep asking this question, even as it takes us outside the domain of efficiency she pioneered.

Posted in QS Books, Uncategorized | Tagged qstop | Leave a comment

Upcoming Meetups in Colorado Springs, Bay Area, New York, and London

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Steven Jonas

There are a great set of Quantified Self meetups getting together in the upcoming weeks. There will be a discussion in Colorado Springs on designing N=1 experiments. The Bay Area meetup will feature talks on how the Apple Watch’s fitness goals made one person less active and how another used time tracking to evaluate whether his time was being spent wisely. There will be a presentation by Mike Snyder, whose lab is using self-collected data make some fascinating findings, such as how heart rate data can predict sickness before symptoms appear.

New York and London will announce their speakers soon, but they are always fantastic gatherings, and as of this writing, New York only has 8 spots left, so RSVP quickly if you plan on attending.

Thursday, March 9
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Wednesday, March 15
Bay Area, California
New York City, New York

Thursday, March 16
London, England

To see when the next meetup in your area is, check the full list of the over 100 QS meetup groups in the right sidebar. Don’t see one near you? Why not start your own! If you are a QS Organizer and want some ideas for your next meetup, check out the myriad of meetup formats that other QS organizers are using here.

QS17 – June 17-18

Our next conference is June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s the perfect event to see the latest self-experiments, discuss the most interesting topics in personal data, and meet the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only a handful of discounted tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.

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What We Are Reading

Posted on March 4, 2017 by Steven Jonas

Articles

His Doctors Were Stumped. Then He Took Over by Katie Thomas. David Fajgenbaum, a medical student, discovered that he had Castleman disease, a hard-to-classify condition that sits between cancer and immune disorder which kills a third of patients within five years of diagnosis. Like most rare diseases, he found very little about it in the literature. It’s hard to fund research for a disease that affects so few (though legislation like the Orphan Drug Act helps). Fajgenbaum was tenacious in doing his own research and was willing to experiment on himself. By keeping copious records of his condition, including the T cell and VEGF levels in his weekly blood work, he may have made a breakthrough. Again, this breakthrough may help a small number of people, but here’s the thing about rare disease: there is a lot of them. According to the article, 10 percent of the population are afflicted with one of 7,000 rare diseases. With a group that large, we need alternate methods for doing research that does not rely on large sample sizes. -Steven (Thanks to Gwern)

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner. Princeton University Press has just reissued this classic essay by the founder of the Institute for Advanced Study, with a new companion essay by the physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf. I’m going to buy the book, but you don’t have to do that to read the original essay, with it’s terribly relevant opening paragraph: “Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women – old and young – detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?” -Gary

Total recall: the people who never forget by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. This article looks at a small group of people with an ability called highly superior autobiographical memory. These are people who can recall, with amazing clarity, specific details from every day of their life. It’s a fascinating read, but there are two details that I want to make special mention of. One is that this doesn’t a special talent people are born with, but, rather, it was a conscious decision they made early in life. The second is that this group has certain mental habits that I recognized from my attempt to memorize days from my daybook. Unlike most people, they actively organize their memories, tying them to the calendar. For instance, they can cycle through memories to figure out their favorite Tuesday. Memories exist in relation to one another in time. Another is that they keep the memories and their relationship between one another alive through constant repetition throughout the day. This suggests to me that with spaced repetition systems, one could train themselves to have a similar ability to remember their life. -Steven

What Happens When You Mix Java with a 1960 IBM Mainframe by David Cassel – This short, amusing piece about the improvisational talent of government fix-it artists, focused on an engineer for the US Digital Service named Marianne Bellotti, describes how they manage to connect ancient databases to modern web services, using methods that will mostly remain undocumented for the protection and safety of all concerned. As Bellotti says: ““The systems that I love are really the systems that other engineers hate,” Bellotti told the audience — “the messy, archaic, half chewing gum and duct tape systems that are sort of patched together. Fortunately, I work for the federal government, so there’s really no shortage of things like that for me to play with.” -Gary

When Things Go Missing by Kathryn Schultz. There are two types of loss that I hear described by people in the Quantified Self community. The first is the loss of existing data from, say, a corrupted hard drive, or a service that folds without notifying it’s users and allowing them to download their data. The other type of loss is the missed opportunity to track something that is now in the past. Not just the steps missed by a dead fitbit, but sleep before consumer sleep trackers existed. It’s a bit odd that the same emotion is invoked by two very different situations. In this essay, Schultz explores the concept of loss, from the trivial to the life altering. It seems to be our nature to hold on to things. Life logging could be seen as a desperate pencil rubbing of experiences before they pass. As Schultz puts it, “When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.” -Steven

Design Beyond the Numbers by Elisabeth van Dijk & Wijnand IJsselsteijn. This paper from the Eindhoven University of Technology is an astute examination of the motivations of self-trackers when they share their data over social media. Despite a reputation of oversharing, most people are careful of what, how and to whom they share their personal data. We are considerate about wasting other people’s time with low-value content and look to find “true peers” for whom the information has greater relevance and less likely to be rebuked. This is an important read for any QS toolmaker for building tools that help people get more from their data by sharing it effectively. -Steven

Show & Tell

This Is What Happens to Your Body on a Thru-Hike by Kyle Boelte. Kyle was already in good shape, but then he hiked over 486 miles on the high-altitude Colorado Trail in just under a month and compared his blood work before and after. Looking at body composition, resting heart rate, blood sugar, cortisol, and testosterone, the results moved in the expected direction, but the degree of change is still astounding. One metric that was new to me is the crossover point for heart rate where fat and carbohydrates are burned equally (As one’s heart rate increases, a greater percentage of carbs is burned). Kyle’s crossover point went from 153 beats per minute to 168. As Kyle joked to his wife, “I should start a business called 8-Hour Abs. Really, just eight hours a day is all it takes!” -Steven (Thanks to Richard Sprague)

Train for Strength or Endurance? by Laila Zemraini. Laila wanted to see if she benefited more from endurance or strength-based exercises. She alternated focusing on each category and looked at the rate of progress. In finding that she responded better to strength-based exercises, she found evidence for why that would be in her 23andMe data. -Steven

Finding out more about me, for free! by Matt Macdonald-Wallace. Matt was uncomfortable with entrusting his QS data to a “corporate organisation who could potentially profit from it”. He shows how he set up his own personal data server with a dashboard by using Connector DB, which bills itself as a “open-source platform for Quantified Self and IoT.” -Steven

College Performance by Tiffany Qi. When Tiffany started college, she assiduously tracked how she spent her time in Google Calendar. Now that she’s graduated, she looks at how the way she spent her time changed over the course of four years and the impact it had on her grades.

Data Visualizations

Gerrymandering in NC, or, A Tale of Two States by Jeb Stuart. A well-employed data visualization or metric can bring a topic into sharp relief. So it is here with an analysis of gerrymandering in North Carolina. Stuart looks at the number of wasted votes in elections for North Carolina representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. What is a wasted vote? When a candidate wins, all of the votes for that candidate above 50% are considered wasted (those votes could have been used in neighboring districts if the lines were drawn differently). The resulting graph shows how extreme this effort to sequester voters really was. -Steven

Birds of North America. This came out a couple years ago, but I just stumbled across it and spent a good ten minutes looking at all these birds. I loved looking at the variation in body and bill shapes, as well as the similarities that warranted grouping certain species together. This is a product page for a poster, but thankfully, you are able to zoom in and explore. -Steven

Seeing Me seeing by Simon Flühmann. I came across this visualization of a Swiss person’s Moves data on Tumblr. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of context, but I love this type of location data visualization. -Steven

Come to QS17

Our next conference is June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s the perfect event for seeing the latest self-experiments, debating the most interesting topics in personal data, and meeting the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only 13 discounted tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.

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Posted in What We're Reading | Tagged qstop, wwar | Leave a comment

Dispatch from QS Dublin: Results from a QS Community Survey

Posted on February 28, 2017 by Steven Jonas

Today, we have a guest post from Justin Lawler, an organizer for the active and excellent Quantified Self group in Dublin, about a recent meetup. If you are a QS organizer, feel free to contact me about writing a recap of one of your events. -Steven

Recently, the Dublin Quantified Self meetup group gathered at the Dublin Science Gallery where Jenn Ryan presented the results from a recent survey on people’s motivations for tracking. We had an engaged group of people with health and wellness backgrounds, students, and the merely curious to discuss the current state of Quantified Self and how it’s impacting health.

Quantified Survey & The Potential of Personal Data in Healthcare

Jenn carried out the survey as part of her MSc thesis at University College Galway, trying to understand the motivations of those that track. A fitness instructor, Jenn is very conscious of public health and is always looking for new tools she can use with clients.

Some key insights from the survey:

A wide range of tools being used – from fitness trackers to phone apps to pen & paper.
Motivations for self-tracking included fitness goals, to tackling chronic diseases to self-knowledge & curiosity.
People found that the process of self-tracking was very useful for motivating behaviour change.
People found that once they started tracking biometrics, they didn’t stop once it became a habit.
People are not too concerned about the confidentiality of the data.
Overall people are happy with the tools we have.

Some charts from the survey:

“It is like when you are driving a car and you see the fuel gauge. If you couldn’t see the fuel gauge you would just drive on, but because you see it, you say ‘oh I am running low on fuel’ so I suppose if you see your weight going up or down, you can take action” -Survey Participant

Since survey responders were from the QS community, it wasn’t a diverse/cross-population sample. The respondents were high socio-economic status, educated, self-driven & curious. In other words, early adopters. There is still plenty of room for deeper analysis into self-tracking in wider population groups [See this Pew Research study for a view of the general public in the U.S. -Steven]

Jenn notes that there is huge room for growth as wearable trackers move to the early majority stage, as tools become more passive, easier to use and give more useful actionable insights. The Quantified Self movement will play a big part in the future of healthcare, as well as, efforts like the Institute of Medicine’s Learning Healthcare System which help healthcare iterate to provide better care.

Here is Jenn’s full presentation from the event:

You can follow the QS Dublin on their blog. If you live near Dublin, you can find out when their next meetup will be.

QS17 Tickets

You can meet Justin and other QS Dubliners at our next conference on June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s a perfect event for seeing the latest self-experiments, debating the most interesting topics in personal data, and meeting the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only a few discounted tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.

Posted in Meeting Recaps | Tagged Dublin, meetups, qstop | Leave a comment

Meetups This Week

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Steven Jonas

A great group of Quantified Self meetups are occurring this week. The group in Hamburg will have their meeting in conjunction with Social Media Week. The group in Dublin will be focusing on gut health, with a talk on stool analysis and another on gut hormones. Austin will welcome Dr. Bruce Meleski to speak about techniques for increasing resiliency. Finally, Groningen will have talks about newborn tracking and trying to learn about happiness through self-tracking.

Tuesday, February 28
Hamburg, Germany

Wednesday, March 1
Dublin, Ireland

Thursday, March 2
Austin, Texas
Groningen, Netherlands

Get your tickets for QS17

Our next conference is June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s a perfect event for seeing the latest self-experiments, debating the most interesting topics in personal data, and meeting the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only a few discounted tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.

Posted in Meetups | Tagged meetups, qstop | Leave a comment

Laila Zemrani: Training for Strength or Endurance?

Posted on February 23, 2017 by Steven Jonas

While it is clear that exercise is beneficial, how does one decide what to do to get and stay fit? When Laila Zemrani surveyed people at the gym, she found that a majority don’t decide at all. Sixty percent didn’t know why they were doing a particular exercise. And of those, 50% admitted to merely copying whatever their neighbor was doing.

Laila spoke recently at a QS meetup in Boston about how she tried to be more intentional in her choice in exercise. In reviewing the number of available exercises, she was able to put them into two buckets: strength and endurance. She decided to track the effectiveness of each training regimen by focusing on a single metric and watching its progress. For strength, she focused on body fat ratio. For endurance, she looked out how long it took her to run the same distance. She then alternated her training every three months or so, focusing on one or the other.

Laila Zemrani speaking at QS Boston

Here’s what she found. When she focused on strength training, her body fat ratio improved. For instance, in one three month period it went from 29% to 25%. This type of improvement repeated itself a number of times. However, when she focused on endurance, she did not see improvements in the time it took her to run a certain distance.

Using a Fitbit Aria, Laila tracked body fat while alternating training regimens.

Laila tracked body fat with a Fitbit Aria scale.

It’s hard to know what conclusion to draw from these results. Are these the right metrics for assessing performance? What does it mean to respond more to strength than endurance exercise? However, the question of why Laila seemingly responds better to strength-based exercises may be found in her genetics. She used a DNA test from 23andMe and the results suggested that she shows a propensity toward building fast-twitch fibers which allow for better performance at explosive activities, such as sprinting or weight-lifting. On the flip side, people who are more proficient at building slow-twitch fibers tend to do better at endurance-type activities such as running long distance. Everyone has a combination of the two types of muscle fiber, but the ratio seems to be correlated with performance, depending on the type of activity.

Screenshot from Laila’s 23andMe account.

With these results, Laila decided it made sense for her to focus on strength-building exercises, since it seems that her body was built for that type of activity. Laila feels that having this information is allowing her to personalize her regimen and be more intentional about how she exercises, rather than be too influenced by the latest fads in fitness.

It can be debated whether it makes sense to focus on strength as opposed to endurance, depending on which one you see progress in. For Laila, the appearance of progress is important psychologically, in that it is easier to motivate herself if she sees improvement. There could be a downside to appearance of quick improvement, though. Ralph Pethica also uses genetic data to inform his training. He is the opposite of Laila in that his body is better suited for endurance exercise. What he finds, though, is that he improves and adapts too quickly and sees his performance plateau. To overcome this, he found that switching between steady-state training sessions and high-intensity intervals minimized the time he spent plateaued.

Training with knowledge of your genetic background is still a nascent practice. It’s still unclear how this information can and should be used. Useful ways to take advantage of this genetic information is still being tested and developed, but progress could be hastened if more people knew if they had more slow-twitch or fast-twitch muscle fiber. If this awareness is increased, it could lead to better strategies to get more out of exercise and reduce frustration and, hopefully, abandonment of the gym.

You can watch Laila’s entire Show&Tell presentation that she gave at a QS Boston meetup. You can follow up with Ralph’s Show&Tell from the QS Europe conference.

Tools used:
Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale

23andMe DNA Test – Health + Ancestry

QS17 Tickets are Available

Our next conference is June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s a perfect event for seeing the latest self-experiments, debating the most interesting topics in personal data, and meeting the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only a few early-bird discount tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.

Posted in Videos | Tagged 23andme, Fitbit Aria, fitness, genetics, qstop, videos | Leave a comment

Stefano Schiavon: Using Data to Understand Personal Comfort

Posted on February 21, 2017 by Steven Jonas

Stefano Schiavon is an assistant professor and researcher interested in sustainable building design. As he told us at last month’s Quantified Self meetup in Berkeley, California, “I am Italian. I love architecture. And I think buildings are beautiful.”

One goal of building design is to increase individual comfort. However, this poses a problem. Everyone is different. For instance, what should the temperature be set at? There is no one temperature that is comfortable for everyone. It doesn’t work to try find a temperature that is pleasant to the largest number of people. As Stefano puts it, it is like going around and measuring everyone’s foot to get an average, say 9, and then dictating that everyone wear size 9 shoes to the office.

So how does this connect with Quantified Self? Stefano and his colleagues have embarked on a series of studies to better understand people’s individual preferences for their environments and they are doing it with QS tools. The first study was fairly simple. They tracked the ambient temperature and air quality of the person’s surroundings and used an app for feedback on whether the environment was “acceptable” or not. Carbon dioxide and temperature measurements were taken throughout the day, while the person was in the car, at work, the restaurant, etc.

Stefano and his colleagues noticed a couple things. One is that there was higher exposure to CO₂ in air conditioned rooms as opposed to naturally ventilated rooms. While Stefano says that this CO₂ level is not a concern in of itself, it correlates with other pollutants, such as, airborne transmitted diseases (e.g., influenza).

Despite these data, Stefano and his colleagues found that just recording the environment gave him a limited ability to predict a person’s comfort. He is hoping, and the focus of his next study, is that by getting a person’s QS data (heart rate and body temperature), this predication ability will improve, making it easier to personalize a space’s comfort for each individual.

For Stefano, all of this is in support of a larger cause, climate change. He was saddened to discover that nearly 40% of greenhouse emissions come from buildings. He hopes that by building better models for personal comfort by using QS tools, he can help people enjoy their environments more, while minimizing the environmental impact.

You can see the entire video of his talk at his QS project page.

Here are links to some of Stefano’s papers:

Get your tickets for QS17

Our next conference is June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s a perfect event for seeing the latest self-experiments, debating the most interesting topics in personal data, and meeting the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only a few early-bird discount tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.

Posted in Videos | Tagged environment, heart rate, qstop, temperature, videos | Leave a comment

College Performance by Tiffany Qi

Posted on February 13, 2017 by Steven Jonas

Tiffany’s calendar

I think I spent more time flailing than planning in college. Though I’m not sure, because I don’t have the data. Tiffany Qi does, though. During her four years of undergrad, she meticulously tracked her time, putting it in one of several categories, “planning” being one of them. Now that she has her degree in Business Administration, she spent some time analyzing the wealth of data she collected as an undergrad. For this talk, given at the a Quantified Self meetup last month in Berkeley, California, she focused on the relationship (or lack thereof) between how she spent her time and her academic performance.

In particular, she explored the following questions:

Did her commitment to her studies wane over time?
How much did time spent studying matter for her final grade?
Did the amount of time spent on fun help or hinder her grades?
Did having a job or other job-like responsibilities lower her grades?

You can watch the full video at Tiffany’s QS project page. For a more detailed look at this project, Tiffany wrote about it here and here.

Tools used:
-Google Calendar
-CalenTools (Tiffany’s custom tool that she made for this project)

Get your tickets for QS17

Our next conference is June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s a perfect event for seeing the latest self-experiments, debating the most interesting topics in personal data, and meeting the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only a few early-bird discount tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.

Posted in Videos | Tagged google calendar, qstop, show&tell | Leave a comment

QS17 Conference Program!