Living and working in Europe, one might underestimate the relevance of participating in international banking. Globally, over 2 billion people have no or limited access to financial transactions. This must change. As a young person, when I was traveling through Europe, there were no Credit Cards (the Europeans with exceptions of the British were very […]

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“The future is already there, it is just not evenly distributed” as William Gibson said. At re:publica 2014 conference in Berlin we will demonstrate methods and tools to make good predictions and foresighting from sources found on the Net. “With Big Data comes the end of the pundit” – foresight, predicting the future from the […]

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[Opening the QS Europe Conference 2013: Gery Wolf (left) and Ernesto Ramirez (right)] The Quantified Self Europe Conference will take place May 10th to May 11th in Amsterdam. This year we are excited to not only visit but also take an active part in the conference. We will host a session: QS and philosophy We […]

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Tracking your life can mean any form of recording: some body measures like weight, your workout, your food intake, your sleep patterns – this is the “classic” Quantified Self. One of the most intrusive, yet intriguing ways of tracking your life, however is actually track it visually. Lifelogging, taking visual record of your life, has […]

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In this post, I will make some predictions on the nearer and farther end of the Quantified Self movement. Using McLuhan’s Tetrad, I will argue that Quantified Self will get huge incentives from enhancing healthcare, crowdsourcing science, and support a strong common ground, people will organize their life upon. Also, Quantified Self will weaken institutionalized […]

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Many parameters a smartphone accidentially measures are useful in monitoring the environment. We have recently discussed, how air pollution with particulate dust can be monitored with an easy ad on to the phone’s camera. But there are even more subtle ways by which users can help to research and monitor environmental conditions. Another example is […]

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Asthma is one of the most common chronical conditions. For many who are affected, it would be necessary to monitor their lung functions much more frequently than by visiting their doctor once or twice a year. Spirometers which measure the volume of air taken in and out whith a breath are expensive and even if […]

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iSpex is a plastic contraption that can be clipped on top of a smartphone’s camera. In this simple slit spectrograph light is defracted and polarized by shining through birefringent plastic sheets and a polarisation film. iSpex measures how aerosoles – microscopic or nanoscopic particles hovering in the athmosphere – change the polarization of the highly […]

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When photons, the particles of light, hit the chip of a smartphone’s camera, they excite electrons on the chip’s surface and change the conductivity or even generate voltage within the small area arround the impact. Gamma rays which are often products of radioactive decay, are also electromagnetic waves, just like light, however much more energetic. […]

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