Gary Wolf
Gary Wolf, contributing editor Wired magazine, co-founder Quantified Self
Gary Wolf is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he writes regularly about the culture of science and technology. He is also the co-founder (with Wired magazine colleague Kevin Kelly), of ‘The Quantified Self,’ a blog about ‘self-knowledge through numbers.’
His work has appeared in The Best American Science Writing (2009) and in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2009). In 2010, he was awarded the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism prize. In 2005-2006 he was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
He is the author of two books: Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader (with Joey Anuff, 2000); and, Wired: A Romance (2003). He was an early editor at Hotwired/ Wired Digital, and helped push the technical and editorial limits of the early web.
About the pioneering of ‘The Quantified Self,’ Gary says that it is a collaboration of users and tool makers and serves as a regular ‘show & tell’ meet-up in several cities, making self-tracking easier. In the past, the methods of quantitative assessment were laborious and arcane. He says that you had to take measurements manually and record them in a log; you had to enter data into spreadsheets and perform operations using unfriendly software; you had to build graphs to tease understanding out of the numbers. Now much of the data-gathering can be automated, and the record-keeping and analysis can be delegated to a host of simple Web apps. The makes it possible to know oneself in a new way.
For instance, people involved in self-tracking projects share what they are doing, describe their conclusions, take questions, and ask for help. Some correlate DHA with cognition, caffeine consumption with concentration, and sleep with diet Pepsi consumption, among many others. The group includes scientists, software developers, healthcare folks, academics, artists and several individual hobbyists and pioneers.
‘We usually associate self-knowledge not with numbers but with words — a kind of inner voice of consciousness and conscience. Supplementing that with quantitative tools is one of the most interesting trends emerging in our culture.’
More about this speaker:
- http://aether.com/quantifiedself
- Gary Wolf tweets @agaricus
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