Personal data analysis
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Jun 12, 2007
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Being the geek I am, I think it would be interesting to track and analyze various things that happen throughout the day. Google already sort of does this. They have a history feature that lets you analyze trends such as common search terms, search results, and hourly, daily, and monthly search activity. Google Reader has a slightly similar feature that lets you see what you read, when, and how much. But these are Google-specific features that only track Google things. SparkPeople is a website that lets you keep track of what food you eat, the calories and fat you take in, and how much you exercise. Pedometers let you see how many steps you take throughout the day.
It would be really interesting to see trends for seemingly insignificant little details like how much radiation I get from my cell phone, what chemicals I come in contact with on a daily basis and in what quantities, and which words I miss in Super Text Twist. Patterns and trends can reveal a lot. Each individual event is somewhat random and doesn't carry much weight. But over time, most actions develop patterns, and it's interesting to see these patterns in an organized way such as with respect to time, location, age, etc.
The problem, as with all data logging, is that it needs to be logged. That's the hard part. Nobody wants to sit around and manually enter every calorie they eat throughout the day, or every cell phone interaction they make. If this stuff was automated, it would be a lot easier and less time-consuming. Plus, it would take the human aspect out of it. When I used SparkPeople, I was actually keeping track of what I ate, the specific quantities, and how much of which nutrients were in each quantity. I didn't eat some things because I didn't want to go through the hassle of entering them on the website. But if this kind of thing was tracked automatically, I would live my life as normal and not curb things cased on the amount of difficulty they would cause. #psychology
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