- Hippocampus Text Adventure — written as an exercise in learning Python, you explore the hippocampus. It’s simple, but I like the idea of educational text adventures. (Well, educational in that you learn about more than the axe-throwing behaviour of the cave-dwelling dwarf)
- Pandas — BSD-licensed Python data analysis library.
- Building Lanyrd — Simon Willison’s talk (with slides) about the technology under Lanyrd and the challenges in building with and deploying it.
- Electronic Skin Monitors Heart, Brain, and Muscles (Discover Magazine blogs) — this is freaking awesome proof-of-concept. Interview with the creator of a skin-mounted sensor, attached like a sticker, is flexible, inductively powered, and much more. This represents a major step forward in possibilities for personal data-gathering. (via Courtney Johnston)
"quantified self" entries
Four short links: 12 August 2011
Learning Adventure, Python Data Analysis, Lanyrd Technology, and New Sensor
Four short links: 4 August 2011
Personal Video, Open Source Sensors, Bad Science No Biscuit, and Playing the Odds
- Skate Through NYC With A GoPro — this is the first I’ve seen of the GoPro cameras, which are two dimensions of clever. First, it’s video instrumentation for activities where we haven’t had this before. Second, it’s clever specialization of the Flip-style solid-state recording videocameras. (via Infovore)
- Pulse Sensor — open source heart rate sensor project on Kickstarter. DIY hardware has made the quantified self phenomenon possible; look for many more gadgets that build your personal data cloud. (via Brady Forrest)
- Science’s Bad Ideas (Peter Griffin) — a recap of a lecture by Lord Robert Winston where he the dark side of science and catalogues numerous instances where scientific progress has been accompanied by unforeseen consequences, ethical atrocities and detrimental impacts on society. […] The overall message is that science can’t remain aloof from society, that scientists must engage and better understand the needs and concerns of society as they introduce new technologies that could bring about profound changes.
- A Game With a Windfall For a Knowing Few — gambling is a tax on bad math, but poorly designed games sometimes rewards those who are good at math. Because of a quirk in the rules, when the jackpot reaches roughly $2 million and no one wins, payoffs for smaller prizes swell dramatically, which statisticians say practically assures a profit to anyone who buys at least $100,000 worth of tickets. During these brief periods – “rolldown weeks’’ in gambling parlance – a tiny group of savvy bettors, among them highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern University, virtually take over the game. Just three groups, including the Selbees, claimed 1,105 of the 1,605 winning Cash WinFall tickets statewide after the rolldown week in May, according to lottery records. (via Hacker News)
Report from Open Source convention health track, 2011
OSCon shows that open source health care, although it hasn't broken into the mainstream yet, already inspires a passionate and highly competent community.
Four short links: 29 July 2011
SQL Injection, Optical Stick, SQL for Crowdsourcing, and DIY Medical Records
- SQL Injection Pocket Reference (Google Docs) — just what it sounds like. (via ModSecurity SQL Injection Challenge: Lessons Learned)
- isostick: The Optical Drive in a Stick (KickStarter) — clever! A USB memory stick with drivers that emulate optical drives so you can boot off .iso files you’ve put on the memory stick. (via Extreme Tech)
- CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing (Berkeley) — CrowdDB uses human input via crowdsourcing to process queries that neither database systems nor search engines can adequately answer. It uses SQL both as a language for posing complex queries and as a way to model data. (via Big Data)
- The DIY Electronic Medical Record (Bryce Roberts) — I had a record of my daily weight, my exercising (catalogued by type), my walking, my calories burned and now, with the addition of Zeo, my nightly sleep patterns. All of this data had been passively collected with little to no manual input required from me. Total investment in this personal sensor network was in the range of a couple hundred dollars. And, as I rummaged through my data it began to hit me that what I’ve really been doing is creating my own DIY Electronic Medical Record. The Quantified Self is about more than obsessively cataloguing your bowel movements in low-contrast infographics. I’m less enthused by the opportunities to publicly perform private data, a-la the wifi body scale, than I am by opportunities to gain personal insight.
Top stories: July 11-15, 2011
The HTML5 paradigm shift, Java's missing community leader, and the "programmable self"
This week on O'Reilly: We took a deep dive into HTML5, Mike Loukides looked for Java's next community leader, and we learned that quantifying the self is a step toward programming the self.
If you can quantify the self, can you also program it?
Fred Trotter on how the "Programmable Self" can be applied to healthier living.
Fred Trotter is examining the Quantified Self through the lenses of motivation, behavioral economics, and software. He expands on each of these topics in this interview.
Data and a sense of self
Gary Wolf on how Quantified Self marries data with personal improvement.
User data isn’t the sole domain of marketing manipulation — we can harness and apply that data for our own purposes as well. In this interview, Gary Wolf explains how the Quantified Self is encouraging “the personal use of personal data.”
Four short links: 21 January 2011
Sensor Trojan, node.js IDE, Quantified Conference, and P2P Streaming
- Proof-of-Concept Android Trojan Captures Spoken Credit-Card Numbers — Soundminer sits in the background and waits for a call to be placed […] the application listens out for the user entering credit card information or a PIN and silently records the information, performing the necessary analysis to turn it from a sound recording into a number. Very clever use of sensors for evil! (via Slashdot)
- Cloud9 IDE — open source IDE for node.js. I’m using it as I learn node.js, and it’s sweet as, bro.
- The Quantified Self Conference — May 28-29 in Mountain View. (via Pete Warden)
- Bram Cohen Demos P2P Streaming — the creator of BitTorrent is winding up to release a streaming protocol that is also P2P. (via Hacker News)
Strata Gems: A sense of self
Network-connected sensors track your fitness
Small data matters as much as big, and none more than data about ourselves. Fitness and health tracking is going wireless and personal.