DailyDirt: Personal Analytics.. On The Rise?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've talked about lifelogging a bit before, where people record nearly every moment of their lives (and make it public somehow). Ignoring Facebook statuses from people's running shoes is just the beginning. Here are a few more examples.

• Stephen Wolfram posted an analysis of his emails/keystrokes/phonecalls for the past decade or so. If he ever publishes the raw data, it'll be pretty simple to figure out all of his passwords. [url]
• XKCD covers lifeloggers with a nice comic that summarizes a typical technogeek dad. "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was 5 years ago, but now I don't want to get any older." [url]
• Ben Fogarty plotted his life in a stacked area chart from age 0 to 32. It's a cool chart, but the area under "listening" as an activity makes it look like he went deaf at age 27. [url]
• To find some more bizarre/crazy stuff, check out some things that other StumbleUpon users have found. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: lifelogging, quantified self, stephen wolfram, visualizations, xkcd

Yet Another Truth Telling Computer... Haven't We Seen This Before?

from the believe-it-when-I-see-it dept

For years and years and years, we've been hearing about hugely ambitious projects to try to create "thinking" machines that can absorb a ton of information and spit out facts. Yet, every time, when the true tests begin, the project never gets very far, for a variety of reasons. First, the technology usually isn't that good. Having a computer decide what is "truthful" isn't exactly an easy problem -- especially when plenty of humans can't even agree on what is, and what is not, truthful. Second, these companies have failed to come up with a reason why anyone would really want/need to use such a thing. After all, how useful is a "truth" machine compared to a simple search engine? These projects come and go, and there's always someone insisting that the holy grail is on its way. The latest is Stephen Wolfram, something of a high tech oddity. He built a tremendous success with Mathematica and clearly is a sort of techie's techie. That's why it's not as easy to simply dismiss his claims to have created just such a knowledge system. That said, I'm still not convinced there's a particularly good use case for the product -- and, even if it's much better than what's come before, chances are it still has an incredibly long way to go. Wolfram is a super smart guy -- and I do hope he's figured out how to really create such a thing, but given how many similar claims we've seen in the past, it seems only wise to express some significant skepticism.

Filed Under: computers, stephen wolfram, truth