Friday’s Big Idea

The Quantified Self

If you care about your personal health, you can track your progress in real-time, thanks to technologies that leverage personal data. What exactly does this data do for you?

For one thing, when linked up with social media, you can share your accomplishments with friends. This "motivational hack" works like an accelerating engine. As you compare your achievements with friends, it is human nature to want to look good in their eyes.

In today's lesson, photographer Rick Smolan, who heads the Human Face of Data project, explores the way that the data revolution is demonstrating its enormous potential through the mobile health revolution. In numerous ways we are able to track our behaviors and the behaviors of others that we care about (such as aging parents) in ways that enable us to accelerate our own progress or respond to emergencies more quickly.

How to Read Your Own Body With Data

by Daniel Honan

We are very good at generating data. We are just learning how to utilize it, but the mobile health revolution is one of the most promising applications we have seen in this field.

Counting Down to the Era of the Quantified Self

by Dominic Basulto

What’s exciting (and simultaneously scary at the same time) is that people are finally realizing that all of this data that we are accumulating about our bodies and our lives has economic value.

Can Big Data Change Who You Are?

by Rick Smolan

We have generated a huge amount of information, which is very cheap to collect. But we are now able to see patterns and develop a new understanding of data. This gives us the potential to change our behavior.

Launching a Democratization of Data Science

by Stephen Wolfram

It’s a sad but true fact that most data that’s generated or collected—even with considerable effort—never gets any kind of serious analysis.

Inventing the Future

Friday’s Big Idea

The Quantified Self