Ask Slashdot: Do You Find Self Tracking Useful Like Stephen Wolfram Does? 139
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?"
Been tracking real wages going down for 30 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Does that count?
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Maybe for you. My real wages have definitely grown since becoming an adult, even considering inflation. But then, I started from pretty low down....
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1. I track how much time... (Score:4, Funny)
... I spend reading articles about tracking things that I track.
2. ???
3. Profit!
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There was a good comic about people that run "efficiency blogs" that was along this same line.. but can't find it!
Re:1. I track how much time... (Score:4, Informative)
Fortunately, I have lots of time [xkcd.com] for this sort of thing.
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That's it!
And it was xkcd too! I'm so damn embarrased right now .. :(
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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...)
Traffic patterns (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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So what have you done with those "saved" minutes? You can use time that has already passed.
Re:Traffic patterns (Score:4, Insightful)
Noted things down in his log, of course!
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It's a floater.
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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.
Jesus Christ, do you time how long it takes to shit each day too?
Not tolerable for the average person (Score:5, Insightful)
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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. :)
Just throw it at them as a percentage.
The average person spends between 25 and 40% of their life sleeping.
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That sounds good.
33.2% of a year sleeping
22.7% of a year working
8.3% of a year complaining about Apple/Google/OpenSource
0.0% of a year having sex
adjusted for /. demographic
Re:Not tolerable for the average person (Score:5, Insightful)
But I enjoy my play time. A moment enjoyed is never a moment wasted.
Re:Not tolerable for the average person (Score:4, Interesting)
Generally agree, but I'd throw out there that sometimes enjoyment turns into habit which turns into routine. I agree one shouldn't feel guilty about "wasting" a bunch of time on anything they enjoy.. but I do think it's a good idea to from time to time take a good look at what one spends their free time doing.
I know I've fallen into the whole daily routine hole .. and it's surprisingly hard to recognize / climb out of.
1) Log into World of Warcraft (Score:2)
2) Type "/played"
3) Cry
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So much for pithiness.
Re:Not tolerable for the average person (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually had one of these moments.
I wrote a quick perl script that scanned through my IRC logs and graphed how much time I spent on there. I did it mainly as a joke (was also graphing some other channel regulars) but the numbers actually led me to do serious thinking about how I was spending my free time. I still spend a lot of time on IRC (I recognize it as something I enjoy and have little guilt about it) but I've also got into other hobbies as a result.
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In the last year you spent 732 hours (yay leap year) watching TV.
Minor nitpick/personal view .. but I have a very hard time absorbing stuff when dealing with large numbers (how man hours are in a year.. I really don't have a clue). Percentages are much more shocking. Percentage of free time would probably be much more scary.
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Well, 2000 hours gives you 40 hours/week for 50 weeks.
So, 732 hours of TV is a part-time job. :-P
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Well, 2000 hours gives you 40 hours/week for 50 weeks.
So, 732 hours of TV is a part-time job. :-P
But how many "areas the size of Wales" is that?
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I see no problem with watching TV. No different than reading a book (which for some reason is considered a higher form, but is still just entertainment).
And I try to erase my tracks from being recorded. Fake handles for example. I don't need some employer or voter (if I ran for office), googling my name and uncovering everything I did. It's bad enough there's a track ranging from 1988 to 2002 (when I stopped using my real name). I prefer to be hard to find.
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A book requires you to engage your imagination to visualize what is happening.
A good novel also contains far more depth than is possible to capture in a theatrical format.
Re:Not tolerable for the average person (Score:5, Funny)
It's bad enough when MMO's and Steam made it possible to see your playtime. :)
It's worse when you treat it like a high score.
"Ha, 5,000 hours in Diablo II! Suck on that, friends I no longer have!"
-sobs quietly-
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daytum.com (acquired by facebook) is personal tracking gone mainstream. they have iphone/android apps so you can easily track things throughout the day, and then can generate pretty reports of your activity. one of the co-founders has been putting out his "annual reports" for a number of years, see http://feltron.com/ar11_02.html [feltron.com] for an example. his report includes things like number of days spent in NYC, servings of coffee during the year, etc...
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People may find it uncomfortable to be reminded, but that is why simple feedback like looking in the mirror or weighing yourself can be so helpful in improving oneself. Ideally, with regular feedback, not just once a year learning that you have wasted a lot of time, you can keep on track without too much pain.
Check out this company that has a product that gives continuous feedback about posture - http://www.lumoback.com./ [www.lumoback.com] I know I would do better with my back pain if I had their product. They will be demoin
No (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:No (Score:4, Funny)
.. and I guess I enjoy abruptly ending posts mid paragraph with no final conclusion!
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
I wouldn't sweat the whole ending posts mid paragraph thing. Sometimes I
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If you're patient
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You can sometimes get more mod points
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And project the feeling of Haiku
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
Burma Shave.
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What is this I don't even
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doing things that I know make me happy
Some people enjoy collecting data, calculating statistics and drawing graphs.
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That was largely the intended point of my last paragraph. If you enjoy analyzing your life and getting a thrill from making statistically verifiable improvements .. by all means go for it! Pushing it on others as something everyone should be doing however is a little silly I think.
Any studies yet that ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... indicate at what point collecting and analyzing personal data becomes indicative of a narcissistic personality disorder?
Re:Any studies yet that ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally at the beginning, when one starts voluntarily aggregating it.
It's one thing to write a journal, it's another to maintain data when not required to. The stuff I keep organized are either all required (taxes and other mandated record keeping) or things that are part of collections that I don't want to buy in redundancy (movies, books, music), or things that need records to ensure reliability and functionality (auto and house maintenance).
Pictures we take are usually sorted just by date, and we occasionally browse through them, like a normal photo album. The only major exception to that is when we were house-hunting, and those pictures were functional records. Most of those house photos have been archived or deleted, unless we saw something cool that we'd want to do to our house.
Filtering and Analysis (Score:3)
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.
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We're talking about Stephen Wolfram here. His brain is capable of filtering and analyzing an infinite amount of information. For mere mortals, your mileage may vary.
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We're talking about Stephen Wolfram here. His brain is capable of filtering and analyzing an infinite amount of information. For mere mortals, your mileage may vary.
He actually IS the Singularity. It must be so frustrating for him that the rest of humanity has failed to acknowledge this self evident truth yet. He is probably minded to destroy all us puny human beings with a cleansing fire.
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On the other hand, often you can only recognize the importance of some piece of information when you actually need it.
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On the other hand, often you can only recognize the importance of some piece of information when you actually need it.
Actually, "extremely rarely", not "often".
Important stuff you tend to remember: Fire hot, food tasty, poop smelly, etc.
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Learning that eating that 1 free bagel on friday every week at the office equates to 5 lbs of body fat over the course of a year would be non-trivial.
So the rest of the junk that you ear is irrelevant, you can pin down your slowly increasing weight purely to that specific Friday bagel?
Mileage (Score:1)
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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.
True, but that level of precision isn't always needed. Do you need to know that you drove 12872 miles and use 92.8 gallons of fuel or will 15000 and 100 do when deciding whether or not to plunk down $30,000 on a new car? Some of the stuff he seems to be doing is like trying to get 5 digit precision on a Fermi Calculation [wikipedia.org].
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Personally I just eat the cost.
I pay the going rate when my tank runs out. I buy a car based largely on how it feels from the driver seat.
Sure I'm missing out on some money savings, but I get to use that time/chunk of my brain for other things I enjoy
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I would hope you'd remember your marriage, move or job change without having to infer it from changes in your gasoline usage....
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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.
When you buy a modern car, you know what its fuel economy is going to be, the information is available and independently verified. If you buy a three ton monster truck instead of a Nissan Micra, you'd have to be unbelievably thick not to know in advance you're going to get a lot fewer miles per gallon.
Memory pruning (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Dumb Question (Score:1)
see Confirmation Bias [wikipedia.org]
No, it's mostly pointless IMO (Score:2)
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.
Study Electricty and needed inventions (Score:2)
Dymaxion Chronofile (Score:2, Informative)
Wolfram's self-tracking is nothing compared to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
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Agreed... one of my hobbies is running, and as a gizmo geek I dutifully wear my GPS watch and heart rate strap. For most exercise (essentially always unless I forget my watch and/or strap a few times a year) I collect data: map, mile splits at whatever course I'm running, heart rate, and then after I'm finished I can see distance, moving time, various averages, etc.
And after I upload the data into Garmin Connect and check it out for a few minutes, I almost never look at it again. The basic info I'm looking
Money & Food (Score:3)
"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.
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I use less of [what I track] and avoid excess
I think this illuminates a good rule for answering the "Should I track X about myself?" question. Tracking provides introspection and self-monitoring. It is a good thing when you feel that you're doing something inefficiently, or wasting a resource. However there are some parts of your life that you don't want to self-monitor: doing so can make those things less fun. For example tracking your video game playing might be a good idea if you feel like your gaming is getting in the way of your job or family...
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"It is a good thing when you feel that you're doing something inefficiently, or wasting a resource."
Agreed.
Tracking for the sake of tracking saps a lot of joy out of life and is a waste of time unless there is a problem.
Tracking helps bring things to your awareness in a way that adds momentum to reducing/increasing behaviors in a positive way........or giving you enough information to evaluate things fairly.
No (Score:1)
Not that level of it (Score:2)
General health (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of weight and blood pressure... (Score:2)
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.
I did this 4 years before Wolfram (Score:2)
with Berkeley Time Line tool? (Score:2)
For important stuff ... (Score:5, Funny)
Modded
Sorry about that last one, folks. I'll try to do better next time.
I use self tracking for fitness (Score:1)
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.
AI (Score:1)
Here is the event that motivated me to post (Score:1)
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
How about... (Score:3)
Completely useless data (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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This guy is going to die someday and his wife and kids are going to toss all this crap right into the dustbin.
It belongs in a museum!
Seriously though, Wolfram seems like an intelligent guy; as such, I doubt he's expecting to care about his data after he's dead. Further, if he enjoys his (unusual) hobby at the detriment of no one, he should absolutely carry on. Finally, having some idea of his meticulousness, he's probably already got the meta-analytics he needs to make an objective determination of the psychological/physiological/monetary value(s) he derives from personal analytics. =)
That is not personal data... (Score:3)
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
If it's important to you, you should track it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see the value (Score:2)
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 an
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three logs I keep, and more (Score:2)
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 le
Tracking for Geek Cred? (Score:2)
Related event with Gary Wolf and Greg LeMond (Score:2)
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 [vlab.org]
When:
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
6:00 - 7:00pm Ne
how I gave up smoking (Score:2)
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.
I would LOVE to track a few things. (Score:2)
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
There is one business ... actually, two ... (Score:2)
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.
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While not my cup of tea.. I'm of the attitude that one should do whatever makes them happy.
People get off on all kinds of weird stuff.
Look at collectors. I don't get that shit either. People will spend as much as I did on a used car to buy a lamp with the same functional value and in some cases asthetic appearance you'd get at walmart .. because it was made a long time ago and/or is rare. Oh but not everything rare/old is valuable! There isn't even a clear definition or reason why one old/rare thing is pric
But why? (Score:2)
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I'm of the attitude that one should do whatever makes them happy.
As long as they keep it to themselves. I don't want sadistic rapist-murderer paedophiles making themselves happy at the expense of other people, thank you very much!
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Re:Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram (Score:2)
No, if you arrange that into a Cellular Automata you will find that he is a pretty smart guy.
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I guess you missed the study that showed that facebook users are insecure, narcissistic, and have low self-esteem. [dailymail.co.uk]
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Lots of useless data is still useless...
Being able to forget who you were is important too.
That statement was uselessly profound.