Data Clean-up, Day 3

Sick and tired of data clean-up. But you may be thinking "hey, just because your job is sometimes boring is no reason to start a blog." And you may be right. But I have a cool idea, or at least I think it is cool. So I started this blog.

Here's the idea: A few years back this psychologist began to study happiness and did some innovative research, which he spun into a theory and a cottage industry centered around the concept of "Flow." This blog duplicates and expands upon this research with a couple of novel twists.

1. Twist number one is the fact that it is online. This sort of thing has only recently become possible, and certainly was not possible when Csikszentmihalyi was doing his research. Cell-phones were in general use, so Csikszentmihalyi's researchers called people at suitably random times of the day and night and asked people to fill out a short questionnaire that asked them what they were doing and whether they were happy (I am not sure about the actual questions asked--I will have to dig into this before this is formalized.) This site will attempt to randomize text messages, which will ring my cellphone. If I schedule them a few days in advance, I should be able to ensure that I don't know when the phone is going to ring in advance. I will note in a post when the actual experiment is to begin, although this afternoon (September 11, 2006) I will type in some random (if I can figure out how to randomize them) times into www.emailthefuture.org.
2. It is centered on me, an individual. The idea here is to find out what makes me happy, and how to spend more of the day happy. I know most everyone thinks that they already know what makes them happy. I don't think that is the case, however. It is a sad fact of modern life that most people have a very warped sense of what makes them happy. They are saddled with the American ideology of Consumer Sovereignty, which means, more or less, that advertising tells you what makes you happy, and while you don't believe individual advertisements, you take them all in and triangulate and suck up the main message, which is: buying something would make you a great deal happier. There are other myths that we are saddled with, and most people are simply not self-reflective enough to examine themselves with an eye to figuring out what would really make them happier, and even if they were, would not have the research skills to fugure it out with any degree of certainty.
3. Additionally, this record is visual, so we have a record not only of certain data points that will enable statistical analysis, we have a visual record that will be suceptible to qualitative analyses of various stripes. This will, hopefully, generate new theories that we can test.