Slashdot Mirror
The Numbers of a Life
porsche911 points out a recent post by Stephen Wolfram in which he plots out data on his communication habits collected over a period of years — or in some cases, decades. He presents visualizations of the times and frequency of a third of a million emails since 1989, 100 million keystrokes since 2002, phone calls, meetings, modification times on his personal files, and even the number of footsteps he takes in a day. It provides some interesting correlations and insights into the structure of a person's life, and how that structure shifts over the years. He says,
"What is the future for personal analytics? There is so much that can be done. Some of it will focus on large-scale trends, some of it on identifying specific events or anomalies, and some of it on extracting 'stories' from personal data. And in time I'm looking forward to being able to ask Wolfram|Alpha all sorts of things about my life and times—and have it immediately generate reports about them. Not only being able to act as an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened—and then making projections and predictions. As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."
If ((age IS GREATER THAN 25) & (number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN (age-16)) || number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN number-of-times-starwars-seen)
{
Loser = true;
}
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"As personal analytics develops, itâ(TM)s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."
Here's a clue - if that would "give a whole new dimension to experiencing your life", you need to step away from the keyboard and get a life!.
At first glance, the whole idea of personal analytics seems kind of worthless. But imagine comparing analytics among populations and drawing correlations between habits, lifestyle choices, and diseases. That could be a helpful step toward the kind of preventative health care we need as a people. Lifestyle choices matter a lot more than the strictly-retroactive fix-me-up-after-my-heart-clogs-up-with-french-fry-grease healthcare that much of the US and I'm sure other countries seem to encourage.
Nothing is more dangerous than a programmer with a screwdriver.
As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives.
I see it just another way to pigeon hole people, restricting their options and using "analytics" as a way to pre-judge people.
Like those "personality tests" that are becoming more and more common when applying for jobs. And the only feedback you get is "thank you for applying. We are going with another candidate. Please feel free to apply again for other career opportunities here at Big Corp."
Then your family wonders why you're an out of work bum. Makes a Libertarian want to be Democrat.
I find this fascinating. What I find even more fascinating is how can the man sustain such a momentus amount of activity while maintaining a family? Seriously, he works every waking hour of every day, with no interruption of email activity except dinner and sleep... Where does his family fit in? In my case, my wife won't let me, so perhaps this is just my unique situation. Anyone else have commentary on family life vs work/passion life?
If I count my emails, does Wolfram now expect a royalty check?
Don't talk about life. Don't analyze life. And most importantly, don't view your own life from a 3rd person perspective 24/7. Observation and introspection is healthy. Too much of it is a waste of time. If you're having to think about your life all the time, it means your not living it. And if you're not living it, do something about it. Don't just sit on the sidelines.
Life is not for the lazy.
I hated this idea when Doctorow introduced me to it as "Reflective Analytics":
http://www.tor.com/stories/2008/08/weak-and-strange
It's meta-mental-masturbation. Exactly the kind of thing he would write about.
This is pretty sweet. I'll bet you could get all sorts of insight about a life in this fashion. But what are the chances that (the average) someone will be able to gather this data and run the analysis and then keep the resulting insight under their own control? What are the chances that this data could be used by a person to improve their quality of life, as opposed to used by a corporation to more effectively vacuum up the money and utility people shed?
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Did you want to say USa? Because, this is the guy who is more interested in your insides, and who is willing to abuse you....
Sure, my memory will fail me in the future (it's already crap now), but I'm okay with that. If I were living in a time where this sort of detailed breakdown and analysis were applied to everyone, I'd much rather forget things and not understand the reasons behind events 100% than have a database of every little detail of my life in it for anyone who'd pay to check it out. If one guy decides to do it for himself, I guess that's cool for him. But when you take this idea to its logical conclusion and start applying this to large groups of people, it sounds much too like Big Brother for me to be comfortable with at all.
It also strikes me as the most likely way people would wind up living in some sort of Orwellian, totalitarian state. At first, they'll tell us of all the benficial things this could give us, and phase it in gradually. They might tell us of how it could help medicine, and we agree to let them start monitoring our food and drink consumption, along with our exercise habits. And when something good, such as a cure for some difficult to vanquish disease, comes as a result, people will see that it provided them some tangible benefit this time. And from there it will slowly bleed out into other areas of life. This slow, creeping invasion of privacy strikes me as a much more likely route to such a future than such a government having a revolution and things changing overnight.
Personal analytics on large populations will ultimately suffer from the same problem so many schemes involving information and power do. If it happens, we'll probably have welcomed it for the perceived benefits to society we can get from it on a small scale, naively believing individuals in positions of power will be benevolent rulers. Most people will act shocked when this power is abused and steadily has its limits expanded. The rest of us will sit down and say, "When we were talking about this happening 20 years ago, we were the conspiracy nutjobs, eh? I'd say I told you so and leave you to deal with it, but instead I'll thank you for screwing me over too."
OCD much? Seriously, who keeps track of this kind of stuff?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
100 million key strokes? I hope for his carpel tunnel's sake that he has an IBM Model M.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I think it is safe to say that this data could be considered Facebook porn.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
The plot of episode 3 details how a mans life is effectively ruined by perfect recall*.
Forgetting all the fun of interesting stats generated by this Wolfram project, is that what you want?
Peace,
Andy.
* spoiler alert for those of you who have not watched this brilliant series
The blog post is much longer, and there is much more analysis than real, meaningful, useful results. So many numbers and pretty graphs, but no conclusions: what is good, what should change, what is bad, what should not change.
S
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
What if your life is all about keeping track of your life?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
It mostly tells me that collecting all this data is pretty useless. I've accumulated a lot of data myself, but never got around to analyzing it. Now I won't bother.
This is fascinating if for no other reason than to compare against my own workday. It's quite evident that this guy's day starts at roughly 10am and ends by about 3pm. So on average 5 hours of work per day. I wish my work day looked like that, even if it meant meant some work on the weekends.
This guy is pioneering digitizing life (something that on this scale, is for the most part unexplored territory). He just might be ahead of his time, this might become the norm in 10-20 years. You assholes are doing nothing but putting him down. Do you think he's an idiot? Do you know how hard it is to develop something as intricate as the site he made? Could you have done any better? Shut the hell up. _You're making fun of nerd on a nerd news site_. Furthermore this nerd will probably be more successful and make more of an impact than any of the negative commentators' lives combined (plot that on your own life graph you fuckwits). Don't be so short sighted, just because you can't see the implications yet because you made fast judgement. Your time might be better spent thinking about how you can do even half as much as what this guy has done. I really hope he never reads this news site or at least has the sense to gloss over the meaningless commentators.
Why do I need a large data set and analytics to inform my decisions? Will this be a significant improvement over intuition and introspection to justify this guy's time spent on the endeavor? Probably not.
This guy has been producing 'annual reports' on the numbers in his life since 2005. These are beautiful. Check out http://feltron.com
"casualties from falling meteors are rare. . .0.0000001 persons per minute die that way"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Google, Facebook and Twitter.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Imagine Facebook Timeline for your entire life. Including everything your phone ever did. Being monitored by Homeland Security.
At least you should be able to look at it yourself.
100,000,000 keystrokes.
1 IBM Model M
That the best times to call him are between the hours of 2 am and 8 am as he is most likely to not be engaged in a phone call. Guess whose getting calls between those hours.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The time spent analyzing emails and phone calls could have been spent learning how to write more effective emails, make more effective phone calls etc. Don't analyze your life to death and then brag about it. Organize it so that you maximize your gain for minimum effort.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+