From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

Bob Garfield is away this week.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week's show is devoted to data, which is being collected and crunched in breathtaking quantities at breakneck speed.

According to the economist, Walmart logs more than 2.5 petabytes of information about customer

transactions every hour, equivalent to 167 times the books in the Library of Congress.

News producers and news consumers love data. It's nonpartisan and predictable as arithmetic.

But we've talked a lot on this show about data omitted or abused in medical journals, data stretched or muddled in political polls,

baseless numbers bouncing like volleyball from pundit to politician and back again.

Data are so ubiquitous in media, we don't feel the need to belabor the point.

Instead, we'll start by tying the data to you.

On a recent New York evening, I attended a meetup of self-quantifiers,

people who closely track a wide variety of their own behaviors

or emotional and physical states at various points in the day

or when engaged in activities ranging from cycling to sleeping, or just living.

That's what Sandy Sontra does.

He takes about 7,000 calls per year at his job at a

computer help call desk, as he told the group, I track yearly salary, blood pressure, migraines,

time alone, happiness, meltdowns, that happens at work, panic attacks.

I put new goals on a spreadsheet.

And if I keep doing those push-ups every day,

21 days later, the goal turns from red to green.

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