Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Find Self Tracking Useful Like Stephen Wolfram Does?
New submitter Manzanita writes "The domain of personal analytics, or 'Quantified Self,' is rich with interesting things to measure and many hackers have started projects. But they will only take off if it is sufficiently easy to gather and use the data. Stephen Wolfram has collected and analyzed a lot of his personal data over the last 20 years, but that is far beyond what most of us have the time for. What do you find worth tracking? What is ripe for developing into a business?"
Yes
Lots of useless data is still useless...
Being able to forget who you were is important too.
Does that count?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... I spend reading articles about tracking things that I track.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Check your premises.
There are lots of ways to go for my daily commute. Just because one is faster one day doesn't mean that it always will be.
Yes, I have kept logs for my travel times. I figure that saving a minute a day definitely adds up over the course of a couple of years.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
If the average person is sat down and told how much of their life is spent in front of the TV or playing video games, I would expect them to have a breakdown. It's one thing to know "I watch TV for 2 hours a day" but it's completely different when you're told "In the last year you spent 732 hours (yay leap year) watching TV." It's bad enough when MMO's and Steam made it possible to see your playtime. :)
Not generally driven by efficiency, but happiness.
I guess theoretically the data could be used to increase happiness, but I'd rather use my tried and true method of:
- doing things that I know make me happy
- investigating things I suspect will make me happy
- avoiding things which will not make me happy
- maintaining balance in the necessary evils and mitigating negative aspects (career properly balanced between enough money to be happy and job that while I don't dance out of bed in the morning, I generally enjoy).
That said, different things make people happy. Some people are efficiency junkies. Some people are financial junkies (everyone knows at least one obsessive day trader who doesn't make much money, and knows it, but still spends every free moment playing in the stock market).
Yo dawg, I heard you like tracking
... indicate at what point collecting and analyzing personal data becomes indicative of a narcissistic personality disorder?
A vast amount of data is useless unless you can filter it and analyze it to pick out the important information.
Your brain already does this as you live your life.
Tracking other mundane shit is a pointless exercise in nerdsturbation.
Inflation is a bitch, ain't it? Tracking wages is like rubbing salt into an open wound.
Life is not for the lazy.
There was a good comic about people that run "efficiency blogs" that was along this same line.. but can't find it!
Psychiatry/psychology, to help all the people who feel that this sort of thing actually makes their lives relevant somehow (generally the same types of people who measure their self-worth by the numbe of "friends" they have on facebook or other anti-social media.
The drug companies, to sell them drugs so that they won't feel so bad about being so into something so stupid in the first place.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
What do you find worth tracking? What is ripe for developing into a business?
Oh please, anything worth tracking is already done by this new business called Facebook.
Tracking how much gas you put into your tank, how many miles you drove on that gas, and when you put it in can be highly useful in a lot of ways: From a personal standpoint, this sort of historical data can reveal some interesting trends similar to what Wolfram saw in his data. For example, a large increase/decrease in mileage might indicate a move, marriage, or job change. From a financial standpoint, knowing exactly how much gas you are consuming can help you make a more intelligent decision when purchasing a car or considering other transportation alternatives. You can use information about your mileage to extrapolate what your mileage would be in a car you are considering purchasing, or you can use miles driven to determine whether or not you would be able to stick to a low-mileage lease without paying overage charges. Keeping track of insurance payments, car payments, and every repair you do to the car can also help in determining total cost of ownership, which can again help you make reasonable decisions when considering transportation alternatives. You can get a rough estimate of this data by looking over past credit card statements and figuring in changes in the cost of gas over time, but it won't be nearly as accurate as manual tracking.
Part of a healthy mind is the ability to forget unimportant or no longer relevant information in favor of more recent and accurate things. If i tracked myself I wouldn't be able to forget the unimportant or push aside the less desirable. I would be governed by old data and held to means and modes of things that may not reflect current realities.
This seems more like punishment than an aid.
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
see Confirmation Bias
Splunge?
The only thing I'd be interested in tracking (and I partly do) is exercise & health-related. These can help to show trends and improvement in fitness, and can help manage your life to live better/get stronger, etc.
How many emails I sent 10 years ago: Who the fuck cares? The time's gone, it doesn't affect me today or in the future. I've got a different job and spend my time in a much different manner.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Wolfram's self-tracking is nothing compared to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile
Here's the deal -- it's interesting as a sample. You might extrapolate a lot from his data. For a better sample tools just aren't there, except are they? A smartphone knows everything about your habits. I have been tracking any walk, jog, cycle, hike, or paddle I take with an app on my smartphone for about two years. Guess what I found out? I don't care enough to do anything with the data. I'm fit, I'm healthy and happy, I'm not an obsessed athlete. I get the idea and the nerdgasm of data, but I it doesn't help me enjoy life more.
Fortunately, I have lots of time for this sort of thing.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
That's it!
And it was xkcd too! I'm so damn embarrased right now .. :(
At some point the marketeers will hijack it anyway and turn it into something aweful.
"What do you find worth tracking? What is ripe for developing into a business?"
Money and food. I use less of each when I track each and avoid excess.
Won't that make you go blind?
Self Tracking could, and thus will be influenced by the observer. With targeted ads I guess.
But I've used Google Latitude's history to look back when I did a bad job of tracking which clients I was at and for exactly how long.
fencepost
just a little off
I find general health worth tracking. For a while, as part of my new year's resolution, I had a spreadsheet to track my body weight and blood pressure as well as to keep a log of everything I ate and drank and the amount I had exercised. I also had columns where I'd score my subjective well-being and stress levels, and one for general comments. Some interesting findings were that, unfortunately, exercise had a positive effect on my blood pressure. I also found that my stress levels strongly correlated with my alcohol intake the night before. Nothing like some first hand experience to learn something. Later on I found out that the hormone cortisol is responsible for those stress levels and yes, released when taking alcohol. I'd hardly call what I did solid science, but it is nice to find out when solid science confirms your own feeble efforts.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
imagine humans as more efficient like machines
alot of useful things could be learned from our inner workings, and if i could measure myself in these specific ways using proven scientific methods and devices, i say why not?
http://www.metalev.org/2012/03/stephen-wolfram-quantified-self-and.html -- just sayin'.
Combine it with the Berkeley HTML5 Timeline Tool and you might have something. http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/15/1218240/berkeley-html5-timeline-tool-can-show-a-day-or-the-lifetime-of-the-universe
It all starts at 0
Maybe for you. My real wages have definitely grown since becoming an adult, even considering inflation. But then, I started from pretty low down....
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Modded
Sorry about that last one, folks. I'll try to do better next time.
Have gnu, will travel.
This kind of think was already addressed in "The Great Gatsby."
Useful for recording all the vehicle's expenses and tracking all the trips you do.
That is about all the data I really keep up to date.
I use Runkeeper on my Android phone to track my runs and my commute by bike. I would also use it for tracking weightlifting, but I can't find a good app or shake the feeling of being a douche bag while I sit on the bench, swiping at my phone.
What I really want is a way to more effectively integrate the phone's senses with the data collection apparatus , like if my phone knew I went on a run from data from the accelerometers and automatically used my gps data to send me an email with my average pace.
If I could specify a weight and a lift and let the accelerometers count the reps, and have the phone give me my next set target, I would totally pay for that.
I wonder how hard it would be to train an AI to react like Stephen Wolfram based upon his emails.
San Francisco Bay Area Event (March 20 @ 6 PM, Stanford GSB Cemex Auditorium) — The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking
Description:
What happens when we add the power of Social/Mobile and always-on personal devices to the evolving health markets? What are the successful Quantified Self business models that entrepreneurs are now exploring? Join the conversation at the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) event, The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking, on Tuesday, March 20th at the Stanford School of Business Cemex Auditorium. 6:00 - 7:00 pm Demos, Networking and Refreshments; 7:00 - 8:30 pm Panel Discussion, moderated by Gary Wolf, Co-Founder of The Quantified Self and contributing editor to Wired. Panelists include three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond. Event website: http://bit.ly/yGBApV
The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth and success of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures by connecting ideas, technology and people.
How about the number of times I visit and minutes I spend reading/posting to slash.dot each day/week/ :P
Fourteen years ago, I worked for a company (which was long since partitioned and spun-off) that tracked personal web usage to the extent that each employee and his/her manager was sent an email detailing weekly web usage: url of each site visited, amount of data downloaded from each site, and the employee's over-all bandwidth usage for the week compared to everyone else in the company. The manager of my department didn't care and my neighbor usually ranked in the top 50 out of 2000 and was proud of it XD
It's an exercise in gathering completely useless data.
How many people on Slashdot still have emails they sent in 1990? 1991? 1992? How many of those emails that you still have are actually relevant today? Worse still, how relevant to today is it to know how many emails you sent in 1990, 1991 or 1992?
Even more useless....number of keystrokes per day for the last 10 years.
This guy is going to die someday and his wife and kids are going to toss all this crap right into the dustbin.
It is interesting and useful as a concept. You cannot really improve anything if you cannot measure it accurately, and so data gathering and analysis can certainly be extremely useful.
However, I don't see much value in just collecting these digital signals like typing and email. Contrary to the title of the post, it is very impersonal. It is just email, really, and even for a serious tech head like Wolfram, that is surely a tiny part of his life.
I also am one of those people with a huge email archive going back decades, and it is fun to play with. Certainly it is fun to find the first emails you sent to someone from ages ago. I also saved all of my old engineering notebooks, and it is great to go back and see things from the early days of QuickTime or notes from the very first time I saw a Mac Laptop - that sort of stuff.
But I think it would be great if I could keep a detailed record of the things that I really care about. For example - I would like to know how much exercise I am actually doing, so I can see if I am really taking the stairs more. I would like to know how much time I spent in the car, so I could make more accurate decisions about the cost of living far from work. I would like to know how many new people I am meeting every week, so I can see if I am becoming more or less social. I would like to know when new topics are trending for me, so I can make sure I am continuing to expand my interests. I would like to monitor how much time I am spending with friends and family as opposed to just work and workmates. I would like to know how many times I gave a sarcastic answer to a question to make sure I am not becoming a dick. Now that I have a Kindle, I can't tell if I am reading more or fewer books than I used to. Am I really watching less TV because I play more video games, or am I keeping that constant and stealing video game time from other non-screen activities? These are just a few examples. No doubt you have your own list.
The point is that if you care about acting a certain way, it is super useful to measure it. You can measure all of the things I mentioned right now, but many of them are a huge pain. If technology could somehow make this easier, I would be all for it.
I just don't want FaceBook or Google to do it without asking me. :-)
- davevr
Personal analytics like anything else can become an obsession. I think tracking your caloric intake, weight, blood pressure, exercise and money spending are worthwhile for health and financial well being (I've lost 40 lbs this way). Writing down the names of people you meet (if you're bad at remembering names) is good for social happiness. Writing down yearly goals is probably good for achieving your definition of success. If you care about it, you should probably track it.
Something I wouldn't mind having a record of: Video footage around my home, video footage of the area around me, gps coordinates of my location, audio from all of the video, and index of faces and text against timecode for all of the video footage.
Why? Lots of reasons. For one, I can submit video evidence regarding anything that happens that might concern a court (well, assuming you get rid of backwards laws, or maybe I wear a T-shirt and post signs informing all of what is going on). I also can spot any unusual activity - like unusual people around my house/etc. If somebody robs me, chances are that I not only have video of it, but video of the same person driving their car by my house two years prior and their license plate, or maybe their face in my kid's yearbook when I happened to thumb through it 10 years before that. When somebody walks by I don't have to guess where I know them from. If I'm shopping for cereal at one store, I can look up what the price was on the cereal when I happened to be in another store a week before. And so on...
There's a reason DHS is paying a lot of money to collect this kind of data on everybody. If you just retain data long enough, you can get quite a bit just from everything you happen to incidentally encounter.
The next step is to pool information with others. Do that with enough people and suddenly you know as much as anybody about everything going on.
I do self-track certain things that are very useful. I keep two logs: 1) concepts log 2) information flow log, and one moderate sized list.
The concepts log records interesting or useful concepts as I encounter then, so I do not have the situation of sitting there wondering where was that discussion of how to do XYZ I'd read six months ago.
The information flow log is a raw stream of ideas and information locations (sites, books, articles)
As a side matter, I keep a list of things I do not know but need to learn. Richard Feynman kept one and it helped him spot holes in his models or domain knowledge.
There's a fourth area where I keep things, and that is a series of 'Library' drives with a large number of directories, one for each area of learning I track, and I copy material into it when I run across it. Thus I can immediately find where I have information on, for example, certain topics in AI, physics, tax law, etc. There is one drive for science, one for technology, one for humanities and more. I use these daily to find things I might have run across years ago.
I wouldn't find it useful; it would feel neurotic. So I don't self track. What gets me is other engineers who do self-track in some manner, and regard me as abnormal, insane, and/or less of a technical person because I don't.
Unless median real wages are going down VERY fast, each individual's real wages are still rising even as the population median falls; the point is they're not rising as fast or as high as your parents experienced - on average, of course.
it depends on the ego.
Unless there was some kind of tangible goal involved, and I'd like to see examples of this. What impact does it have to quantify how much I spend on facebook? I can pretty much intuitively guess whether I waste time doing this or that on the computer (or any other task in daily habits), or whether it is affecting my life in some way without looking to numbers to support that intuition. Important analytics are already measured (blood sugar, blood pressure, diet, exercise routine, etc.) on an as-needed basis so unless the world of psychology and psychiatry determine there is a life-impacting medical or mental hygeine reason I should record certain data about myself, I'm just going to leave life alterring decisions to my intuition rather than a data set.
Have you tried the WiThings scale and blood pressure cuff? I believe the later requires an iOS device, but the scale just requires wifi.
I have the scale and like it a lot. You just set up an account and weigh yourself, their website produces a graph for you automatically and can even export the data to other sites or your own spreadsheet. It takes a chunk of the work out of monitoring your health, which I appreciate.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I really wanted to get the word out about this event coming up at Stanford. I feel like a bit of a fool for not putting the link in the submission!
There will be a panel discussing just this topic at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB). VLAB puts on a great event. If you are in the area you should definitely join us!
The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking
http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
When:
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
6:00 - 7:00pm Networking and Refreshments
7:00 - 8:30pm Panel Discussion and Q&A
Where:
Stanford Graduate School of Business
CEMEX Auditorium at the Knight Management Center
Moderator:
Gary Wolf, Co-Founder, The Quantified Self & Editor, Wired Magazine
Panelists:
Rick Lee, CEO of Healthrageous
Mark S. Gainey, Co-Founder Strava, Inc
Leslie Ziegler: Creative Director, Rock Health
Greg LeMond, Three-Time Winner of the Tour de France
Event Description
Large companies, as well as, garage hackers are leveraging smaller,
cheaper sensors and powerful mobile devices are accelerating the
virtuous circle of goal setting, data collection, analysis and social
motivation necessary to stimulate lasting and steady gains in health,
sports performance or other areas of self evolution.
What happens when we add the power of Social/Mobile and always-on
personal devices to the evolving health markets. Peer pressure (social
reinforcement) and data tracking have significantly contributed to the
success of the $11B self improvement and $55B weight loss markets.
Legacy business such as Weight Watchers have relied on snippets of
painstakingly input data. How will the game be changed when personal
data goes from a drop in the bucket to an ocean?
What new perspectives do start ups provide using sensors and on-line
services, to disrupt and support the incumbents in self evolution and
health? And, what is needed for break-out success?
What new opportunities will exist in widespread tracking?
How do you keep users engaged long enough to make meaningful changes?
Will a start-up create virality to accelerate growth, become
a category killer?
What are the challenges of collecting and applying meaningful data?
What incentives are effective to encourage adoption outside
of tracker enthusiasts and early adopters?
Can a single offering service survive or will those
aggregating multiple data streams dominate?
Can these services grow on an ad based model or is a
subscription necessary?
How are companies using social motivation to encourage
consistent engagement and long term participation?
http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
Yo dawg, I heard you like tracking
so I put a tracker on your tracking so you can track while you track!
(come on dude, you have to finish it...)
I agree that the effort you have to put in has to be pretty low and the value of the feedback you get has to be better. There are some things where this is already the case. And, if you add in a social aspect it can actually be fun and compelling. For tracking your bike rides and runs, check out Strava - http://www.strava.com./ It does really still appeal to those who are already pretty motivated to ride. But it does stoke up that motivation a little. It is sort of addictive to see how you are doing, and they really do provide enough value in their feedback. They will be on the panel at the VLAB event discussing personal analytics businesses at Stanford - http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438.
A result of stagflation I presume?
Life is not for the lazy.
IMHO stagflation is a descriptive term rather than explanatory. Personally I think globalization is the main cause - it is winding down the relative advantage we enjoyed after the rest of the developed world destroyed itself last century. That created a labor shortage in the US that was wonderful for median incomes here.
No, if you arrange that into a Cellular Automata you will find that he is a pretty smart guy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Many years ago when I gave up smoking, I asked for a receipt every time I bought a pack of cigarettes and did the math every week. It was a really good incentive.
Yo dawg, I heard you like tracking your information so I put a tracker (?) in your tracker so you can track yourself tracking yourself.
I think the most important things I would want to learn are -- am I exercising well? Is it affecting my sleep? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I over-training?
So I would love to track when I eat, maybe what I eat, when I exercise, when and how well I sleep (I have a Zeo which already does this), and resting heart rate.
So exercising is really good for you... UNLESS you start over-training. If you over-train, your sleep quality goes down and your resting heart rate goes up.
I think a LOT of people over-train and it makes exercise unnecessarily grueling and potentially harmful. It also robs you of energy instead of giving it to you.
Also, if you exercise, you need more sleep. Knowing if you get enough sleep is important.
Food and drink can drastically affect your exercise and recovery and your sleep too.
Chronic diseases like Alzheimer's, congestive heart failure and depression could usefully be followed using personal analytics. In fact, the medical assessment of these conditions often include assessment of the patients ability to perform "activities of daily living". So yeah, it would be useful for a physician treating patients with these conditions to see trends and how the patient is actually responding to different drugs and other interventions. Come on all you 20 something geeks in Silicon Valley, think out of the box, or at least out of your age bracket.
For the past 2 years i have been logging my precise location in 15 minute intervals thanks to the GPS in my iPhone and the ability to scrape apples find my iphone website. I have actually found it to be rather neat to see where i have gone, and rather helpful to be able to see when i was at certain places.
Heres my travels on the east coast over the past 2 years using a custom made heatmap. Red dots indicate i was in that location for 12 hours or more. http://grab.by/cnUm
Stephen Wolfram has collected and analyzed a lot of his personal data over the last 20 years, but that is far beyond what most of us have the time for.
Stephen Wolfram has exactly the same amount of time as the rest of us at twenty four hours per day. He just uses them more effectively.
Slashdot - no one mentioned Monty Burns and his jars of urine!?
"Oh, we'll hang on to those."
Self-tracking's finest moment!!!
Why would anyone want to track Stephen Wolfram anyway?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm a geek. I code in C++ all day long for a big automaker. I like to modify cars but fell out of love for the Domestic V8 after riding in a heavily modified Lancer Evolution IX that was producing 790 horsepower from a little 2.0 liter Inline 4 cylinder with full-time four wheel drive. I was immediately impressed and quickly bought one myself and started modifying it.
I was producing roughly 360 horsepower per liter, to the wheels. Meaning my little 2.0 liter was going from a measly 120 horsepower to a whopping 720 horsepower at the wheels. The car went 9.6 in the quarter with hardly a hint of wheel spin. It goes 0-60 in 2.3 seconds from a dead stop with all-season tires in the pouring down rain. I have walked away from Z06 Corvettes, 911 Twin turbos, GT500s you name it.
Even better is when one of my Vette kills recognized me in the winter driving around in 2 feet of snow. He was in his truck and pulled in to the gas station I was at to chat. He said "You drive that thing year round?!?!? It's very fast what do you have done to it!". "Man I wish I could drive my Z06 in this kind of weather". I mentioned that I was running 36 pounds of boost with a forged rotating assembly and a 6262 Turbokit. With a big turbo it doesn't spool down low so the car gets a whopping 32 miles per gallon highway and 24 city. But floor it above 5000rpm and hold on!
I track my kills, by how many cars, what fuel I was running that day, conditions humidity, recent tuning work such as a test tune or kill tune..... I track how much money I make destroying domestic V8's in racing since they are oh so proud of their big motors and 2 wheel drive. It's a hell of a lot of fun driving an ugly 4 door which looks like a front wheel drive car that maybe has 120 horsepower. Sounds like crap too.... until the boost kicks in.
2) Type "/played"
3) Cry
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Really? Inflation is hovering between 0% (2008) and ~3% now. That's bothering you that much?
Republicans WISH inflation were a problem. They keep citing it as this big huge problem, when it's quite under control, despite gov't spending. The reason your wages are stagnant is because you have no bargaining power, and because of globalization.
Believe me, your boss (if your company is big enough) is seeing a very pleasant rise in his income. Some of that comes from wages he might have had to give you if you had been able to bargain for them.
If only there were some way for people to band together, in order to increase their bargaining power... oh, but that would violate our credo of individualism. Also, the boss's private security company might remind you that the state does not, in fact, have a monopoly on violence.