Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.

There are already institutions that deal with the far reaches of the fact timescale. On the fast end, there is a company started a few years ago called Ambient Devices. A spin-off from the MIT Media Lab, Ambient Devices creates a number of informational appliances for fast-changing information, including the market and weather data mentioned above. On the other end of the spectrum, there is The Long Now Foundation. The Long Now Foundation is geared towards fostering long-term thinking and awareness.

Mesofacts.org is devoted to raising awareness of the middle category of facts. By continuing to educate ourselves and others about the many mesofacts around us, we put things into a new light and perspective. Simply being aware of how much we know about our place in the universe gets us to think a bit differently, in addition to the possibility of how it can help us to synthesize knowledge differently. For more information, please read an introductory essay about Mesofacts, by our founder Samuel Arbesman.

Welcome to the first iteration of the City of Ann Arbor's Data Catalog website. This site is part of our ongoing commitment to enhance citizen participation and local government transparency. We are pleased to make City datasets freely available to the public in machine-readable formats.

Django Smuggler is a pluggable application for Django Web Framework that help you import/export fixtures via the automatically-generated admin interface.

A list of some sources for maps of crime in the area, including the data sources, the finished digital product, the finished print product, and summary analysis.

"a web service that allows you to share snippets of information from the minutiae of daily life in the form of simple statistical graphs"

"The number of sheriff's deeds recorded in the Register of Deeds office is a precise indicator of distress among homeowners in that county." Monthly data, January 2002 through April 2008.

"Data Store API is in open BETA now. There is no need to get approved any more. Any application can access it now."

This appears to be the wagn manifesto.

Reading list.