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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think there a scientific point for those QS data sets that can be automatically measured with a high scale of granuality. Very frequently people measure less data because they don't want to store all the data that a single sensor can produce.
Currently acclerometer data get's compressed into the variable of "steps". That variable has the advantage that it has an intuitive meaning but it's likely not the best possible variable to gather when doing scientific work about how Pokemon Go leads people to do more exercise.
Doesn't that have as much to do with battery life and software engineering effort than anything? Those sensors could already log data in much more detail by streaming into an off-the-shelf compressor like
xz, but they don't because good compression inherently requires a lot of computation/battery-life and adds complexity compared to naive methods. There don't seem to be many use-cases where people having already plugged in zpaq but that just isn't enough and they need even better compression.I think translating accerlerometer data into steps is effectively a way of data compression. But it's a way of data compression that's not optimized for leaving important features of the data intact but about trying to give users a variable they think they understand.