Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

April 26, 2013

From: Interview by Patrick Tucker, IEET

How do you see personal analytics trends evolving in the context of present-day battles over privacy and over access to information technology? And what has to happen in order for the self-quantification trend to become a truly sustainable movement?

Right now, for most people, it’s dealing with this data. There’s all kinds of plumbing that has to be done. Like, how do you actually get your cell phone call record out? It’s going to stay a complex, multi-part, multi-vendor environment, where people have different phones, email systems, computers, and little devices like pedometers. Those devices will come from lots of places. So the main thing that holds things up is just the practical difficulty of all of this plumbing, of getting data from here to there, and so on.

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