Part of the assignment for the week is to read a study about American youth and flow/happiness here. I’ve read it through once and am about to give it a second pass in order to get a stronger understanding and opinion. At this point though, I recall the study to be engaging, but the method and the read itself to be semi-tedious…
2nd go: While some of the study seems to fall into the realm of common sense: “teenagers are happier when they do certain things (e.g. in leisure) than when they do others (e.g. study)”, it also introduces many interesting points of discussion. I found the excerpts below to be noteworthy.
- Hope, optimism and the ability to experience flow can be learned and thus moderate one’s level of happiness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Seligman, 2002).
- Experience Sampling Method (ESM) … relies on subjects’ responses to an electronic pager that signals at random times during the waking hours of the day, yielding up to fifty measures of happiness at specific moments during an average week.
- To measure whether a person was more likely to be in a Flow condition we calculated the percent of time spent in situations that were above the mean level of challenge and the mean level of skill at the same time. When a person was above the mean of skills but below mean challenge, the condition was considered conducive to Relaxation. High challenges and low skills were counted as Anxiety, and low challenges with low skills as Apathy.
- Discussion from pages 196-198.
The other part of the assignment is to plan an environmental logger. The Logomatic and Logomatic v2 from Sparkfun seemed like the most simple solutions for the task but are currently out of stock. Fortunately, this misfortune caused me to take a closer look at several of the links from the class blog, including WayMarkr, Sensecam, UCLA, Biomapping, Off-the-shelf. So now I’m in a predicament: uncertain hardware plan and possibilities aiding my indecisive nature. I really just want a Sensecam… hopefully tomorrow’s class will give insite and I’ll still be able to get supplies soon enough.
A sidenote while looking at other sensors on Sparkfun and thinking about trusting my body as a sensor of sorts: So yes, we’re tracking our environment beyond our body, beyond what we see, smell, hear, feel, taste, (and remember), so as a humans, we are equipped with some pretty awesome physical “tools.” A thought entered my mind though, which is nothing new (ie the existence of a bio-tech industry), but I guess new to me — What if we could upgrade a component of our body in the same way we upgrade our devices? Corrective lenses, earpieces, etc aside, I’d like some more memory and a nicer internal filing system. Better battery life wouldn’t hurt either.
* I’ve decided to go with a Blackberry Pearl for my sensing device, which will take a days worth of time-lapse photography. I’m thinking of positioning it at waist level to give an idea of what a child would see. Power issue – check. Storage issue – to buy microSD card. Functionality – to research today.