"personal analytics" entries

What is smart disclosure?

"Choice engines" are helping consumers make smarter decisions through personal and government data.

Smart disclosure is when a company or government agency provides consumers with periodic access to personal data in an open format. Citizens can put their own data assets to work in making better choices about finance, healthcare, travel, energy, education, real estate and more.

Four short links: 19 March 2012

Four short links: 19 March 2012

The Quantified Professor, Bus Monitor, Arduino Confessor, and Ethics of Deceit

  1. Examining His Own Body (Science Now) — Stanford prof. has sequenced his DNA and is now getting massively Quantified Self on his metabolism, infections, etc. This caught my eye: George Church, who has pioneered DNA sequencing technology and runs the Personal Genome Project* at Harvard Medical School in Boston that enrolls people willing to share genomic and medical information similar to what’s presented in the Cell report, says some might critique Snyder’s self-exam as merely anecdotal. “But one response is that it is the perfect counterpoint to correlative studies which lump together thousands of cases versus controls with relatively much less attention to individual idiosyncrasies,” Church says. “I think that N=1 causal analyses will be increasingly important.”
  2. Bus Arrival Monitor (John Graham-Cumming) — hacked a toy doubledecker bus with LED display feeding bus arrival info from the Transport for London API via a modded Linksys WRT router.
  3. Arduino Tool That Connects Each Board to Its Own Source (Ideo) — If you create something with Arduino and put it out into the world, there is no well-established link to the source. If you personally made the device, the source can get lost over time. If you didn’t create it, you could have a tough time tracking the source down. You have the physical device, why can’t it tell you where it’s code lives? I made a tool for Arduino called “Upload-And-Retrieve-Source” that for the most part solves this problem. (via Chris Spurgeon)
  4. Mike Daisey is a Liar and So Am I — I linked to the original This American Life story, so now I’m linking to the best commentary on their retraction of the story. This is an excellent piece on the ubiquity and ethics of Daiseyesque means-justifies-the-end for-a-good-cause deceit.

Strata Week: Infographics for all

A new infographic tool, San Francisco upgrades its open data efforts, and decades of Stephen Wolfram's data.

Visual.ly launches an infographic creation tool, San Francisco upgrades its open data initiative, and Stephen Wolfram offers a peek into more than 20 years of his personal data.