What follows is a still perfectly up-to-date show we first ran in May of 2011.

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 meet-up 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. I'm there. I've made it a habit.

What is all this? Data plus information compiled and organized turns into knowledge. It makes self-improvement inevitable. And I like that. Thank you.

Some of the young men and women, mostly men here, embrace self-quantification variously as a creed.

Others pursue it as a hobby or a health plan, business opportunity, or art project.

...