Nicole Lazar

Earlier this semester, one of my colleagues came back from vacation excited about a new gadget she’d acquired—a pedometer. As she explained it to me, this little device counted every step she took, and she could even “synch” it with her computer at home to download and track her daily pedestrian excursions, plot values over time, calculate simple summary statistics, and so forth. “Ah …” I said to her. “You are part of the quantified self movement, are you?” She wasn’t familiar with the movement, which is a fascinating blend of self-improvement and the data collection and exploratory data analysis aspects of statistics.

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