My friend sent this to me the other day: “If I go to bed at 10:30 pm, I often wake up at 4:30 or 5:30 am and can’t go back to sleep. But if I go to bed at 1:00 am, I fall asleep easily and can sleep until 9:00 am. Throughout the work week […]
Interview with Dr. Amy Bender
In a recent interview with Dr. Amy Bender, she talks about the importance of improving the sleep of professional athletes. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you work on? I’m the Director of Clinical Sleep Science at Cerebra. We’re a sleep technology company focused on better diagnosis and treatment […]
Visualizing MESA, pt. 1
One of the things we’re interested in as scientists is what longitudinal, large-scale data collection can tell us about sleep. Along those lines, one of our research projects involves looking at how models of circadian rhythms, as well as different sleep regularity metrics, can help us understand different outcomes for different folks. And as part […]
Book Of The Month (March)
When by Daniel H. Pink Another month, another Book of the Month! Starting with its title, When by Daniel Pink hones in on just how simple the idea of timing things better really is. The question of “when” is in the same fundamental category as where, why, how, and what. Yet, as Pink notes: “We […]
Scientific Tests
Algorithms are really easy to mess up. Take your pick for how: overfitting to training data, having bad training data, having too little training data, encoding human bias from your training data in the model and calling it “objective”. Feeding in new data that’s in the wrong format. Typos, subtle typos, nightmarishly subtle typos. Your […]
Official Company Stance on Permanent DST
NOOOOOO!!!! Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!! (To hear our actual stance on permanent DST, check out this blog post. Short version: we love getting rid of the seasonal time change, as long as we end up on permanent standard time, not permanent DST.)
Interview with Dr. Louise O’Brien
Thanks for letting us interview you, Dr. O’Brien. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience—where do you work, what do you do? I’m Louise O’Brien, an Associate Professor at the Division of Sleep Medicine, Department of Neurology, at the University of Michigan. My work focuses mostly on sleep disruption in pregnant women and its […]
Book of The Month (February)
Sync by Steven Strogatz For our second book of the month, we picked Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, by Steven Strogatz. This might seems like a bit of an oddball choice for a company that’s working on consumer apps in the health space. Why pick a math […]
Biophysics for Better Living 2.0
In my last blog post, I talked about the power and potential for biophysics engines to contribute to clinical care and ragged on my own ability to play video games. The short version of it, if you don’t have time to circle back: If you’re going to make a digital twin of somebody, base it […]
Biophysics for Better Living
One of the highest stakes moments of my life was the time in graduate school when I was (badly) playing Donkey Kong at Pinball Pete’s Arcade, and a very, very good Donkey Kong player came over to watch me play in silence. I’d just spent six dollars worth in quarters dying repeatedly on the first […]