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The Numbers of a Life

Posted by Soulskill on from the plotting-out-a-person dept.

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."

6 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. More useful than you think by mws1066 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:More useful than you think by daem0n1x · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Better yet, correlate the data with happiness.

  2. Fascinating by JeffSh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Fascinating by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Maybe he just isn't maintaining his family. You don't know how happy or unhappy his wife is with him.

  3. Cory Doctorow introduced me to this idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. 100 million key strokes by Stargoat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.