This blog is the spiritual sequel to our last blog post on ways of measuring sleep regularity. Unlike the last one, though, which was based on an excellent review article, this post is Olivia’s off-the-cuff (and extremely wonkish) thoughts on the topic of circadian amplitude. There’s a reason for a lack of formality, though, which […]
Like anyone talking about anything, I tune my content to the audience. When I talk about our tech to travelers, I tell them our apps can help them get over jet lag faster. When I talk about our tech to shift workers, I highlight how we can help them sleep more and get them to […]
It’s a common term, but what do we really mean by jet lag? I would say jet lag is a kind of circadian misalignment that happens when: 1. your body is aligned to your environment, meaning you’re sleeping at night and active when the sun is up, then … 2. you quickly travel to a […]
Although circadian rhythms are being recognized more and more for their relevance to jet lag, shift work, the grogginess people feel after daylight saving time transitions, and health and medicine at large, it’s still a long way behind sleep in entering popular discourse. People know “8 hours a night,” but they don’t know “align your […]
Thanks so much for joining us this morning! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests? I am currently a theoretical and computational chronobiologist. I work in the area of circadian clocks. My PhD was in the field of wireless communications with a focus on designing new technology to provide […]
We’ve already looked at the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) dataset—an absolute treasure trove of sleep data, available from the NSRR at sleepdata.org—once, through the lens of sleep duration. But what about other dimensions of sleep health? After all, sleep regularity may be just as important as sleep duration in a number of contexts. We […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
