Anyone coming from the College Park area?
btrettel
There are only two people here, myself included. The other guy is Kevin (see below). We’re leaving.
A door to the basement was open. We should have stood by it to make this more obvious.
Either way, I think we should reserve a public room (not the basement of a dorm) for another meetup at UMD. I know how to do this and I’ll see what I can do.
Sure, we can meet then if no one else objects.
I tested out of most of the introductory general required classes in undergrad. My undergraduate degree is in engineering. My department’s introductory classes generally were broken into multiple sections of about 30 students, so my experience here is perhaps not representative. The 4 large (100+ student) classes I took were in the math and physics departments.
In the physics classes (which were specifically for engineers, not physicists), the actual topics were dumbed down so much that I had to modify my thinking to do well in the class. And I found the classes to be dreadfully boring in general because the more interesting topics that used math were avoided. Anything involving more than the simplest calculus was avoided. If I could think of a way to do something involving differential equations, surely that was not what the professor wanted. I often had difficulty figuring out why certain (unnecessary) assumptions were made, and I came to the conclusion that they were made to make the class more manageable for the least capable students. Often which assumption to use was ambiguous because any number of bad assumptions could be made.
My experience here is that these classes were designed for the lowest common denominator, and with a large sample size your probability of having someone who’ll really hold back the class is near 1. Often this worked to the detriment of the most capable students. I speculate this was done because the engineering school wants to produce more engineers. Seems that their main approach to this is to dumb down classes. I’m somewhat convinced this does more harm than good, partly because I think most of the least capable students would struggle no matter what they were given, though I don’t have strong justification for these beliefs at the moment.
Another impression I got from the physics classes was that the professors didn’t want to teach these classes. They seemed to consider it a chore, like taking out the trash. There was no consistency between semesters or years in who taught these classes. I’d guess the physics department required professors to teach these introductory classes on a rotating basis, i.e. “It’s your turn to take out the trash.” There was no passion in these classes, which contrasted heavily with the one upper-level physics class I took.
This did not change my desire to become an engineer. I would fill in gaps in my knowledge on my own time. These classes mostly harmed my time efficiency.
One of these classes required me to buy a clicker, but it never was used in the class. One of the courses used some online homework thing that I thought was dreadful, mostly because I had a difficult time thinking in the constrained way they wanted me to, and also because some of the answers in there were wrong! These courses used Blackboard to manage the other course content, but I didn’t use any of the advanced features. I recall downloading assignments and checking my grades.
The large math classes (calculus and differential equations) were for all majors (including math majors) and I didn’t feel the topics were dumbed down or that the professors didn’t want to be there. My impression was that the professors were not concerned that people couldn’t keep up. If a student couldn’t keep up, that was their problem. I think this might have partially motivated me to take more elective math classes than physics classes during undergrad (2 undergrad + 1 grad math class vs. 1 undergrad physics class), but applied math is more my interest, anyway.
The math classes had their own websites. No advanced things like clickers or Blackboard were used.
I found the textbooks for the physics classes to be poor jumping off points for more advanced topics. Once you understood calculus, there was little reason to read these books. They also were basically worth no money after the class was over. I vaguely recall throwing mine away because they were so worthless. In contrast, I still own and sometimes refer to my calculus and differential equations books.
Interesting to hear your experience as a TA validates mine as a student. That’s a good example of what I mean by an unnecessary assumption or simplification that was done purely to make the class more manageable for some students.
A not-insignificant portion of engineers don’t know much anything about physics or math and want nothing to do with either. This is very scary, because these people tend to blindly follow standard engineering practice (which is not necessarily correct) or worse, make up something that is very wrong. A friend of mine told me they went to a job fair and heard a recruiter for an engineering company brag that you won’t have to do any more calculus if you worked for them.
Two mistakes from when I was figuring out where to go for my PhD:
Not applying to more PhD programs. I limited myself to four because (a) I only wanted to apply to strong programs in my field, (b) I was very picky about location, and (c) I was too confident. Ultimately, this worked out okay, but I now regard the decision as arrogant and risky.
Not validating code and data used to decide which PhD programs to apply to and which PhD program to choose. As part of these decisions, I collected data about many things. For one of the more important things, I wrote a web scraper to collect data and processing scripts to distill the data into something useful. In this case, the result was a table ranking cities in a particular quantity. Unfortunately, some data corruption combined with sloppy coding seriously skewed my results. I did not notice this problem until well past when I made my decision. After restoring a backup of the data and writing a validation script to check the data’s quality, I noticed that the city I selected actually was among the worst in this particular quantity, not acceptably worse than average as I had thought before. Oops. Software Carpentry has some good notes about how to handle data like this. (This point has intentionally been written abstractly because what the data represents is not important.)
Hey all. This is a quick note that a few of us will be meeting today (Nov. 30, 2013) despite the thanksgiving break.
I’m considering attending this meetup. Is it at 3 am as the page suggests, or is 3 pm the intended time?
I’d be interested in seeing some reliable evidence about this.
I sleep fairly poorly, and consequently I’ve used earplugs nearly every night for 5+ years now. I do have bad tinnitus (it is congenital), but it has not become worse from this. I have not had any ear infections in this period. I’ve had my hearing checked twice over the past 5 years, and it is stable at all frequencies.
It’s worth noting that most earplugs will fall out after an hour or so, or at least the ones I’ve been using will. I buy a ton of cheap foam ones and rotate them periodically.
The only thing that has made my tinnitus worse best I can tell was a bursting rubber tube, which was basically as loud as a shotgun. This added a specific and identifiable frequency to one of my ears, oddly enough, but had no other long-term effect.
I am generally good at finding papers via various techniques, but some have evaded my grasp. Try your luck at the documents listed below. I wrote some notes about my own unsuccessful attempts to find these documents. Apologies in advance for likely reducing you all’s success rate!
FOUND: H. G. Haines. 2004. “A pilot study evaluating the bioavailability and absorption rates of two vitamin B12 preparations in normal human subjects”. Health Plus International, Inc. (study protocol # HPI-NF-B12-1).
J. Hovingh, “Stability of a flowing circular annular liquid curtain,” Lawrence Livermore Lab., Internal Memo SS&A-77-108, Aug. 8, 1977.
Б. Я. Кузнецов. “Аэродинамические исследования цилиндров”. Труды ЦАГИ, в. 98, 1931. (B. J. Kuznetsov. “Wind channel tests of cylinders”. CAHI/TsAGI report number 98, 1931.)
M. J. McCarthy, “Entrainment by plunging jets,” University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, 1972.
Which stimulants/eugeroics have a short (< 3 hours) half-life? I did some research into this. Nicotine and selegiline (~1.5 hours) are the shortest I could find. Methylphenidate comes in next (~3.5 hours), but that’s longer than I’d like. I don’t particularly like any of these choices for various reasons and am interested in learning about others. Alternatively, if there’s a way to significantly reduce the half-life of modafinil, I’d like to hear about that.
I’ve considered amphetamine, armodafinil, atomoxetine, caffeine, ephedrine, methylphenidate, modafinil, nicotine, pseudoephedrine, and selegiline.
gwern is partly right about my motivations.
I have some sort of sleep disorder (perhaps narcolepsy; the sleep study I had was inconclusive on that, though it did rule out sleep apnea) where the treatment might involve taking stimulants. My sleep quality at night might be particularly bad in general, and taking a stimulant could make it worse. Modafinil’s half-life is about 15 hours, which is quite long. Even if I took it in the morning, it still might impact my sleep at night.
Also, the stimulants I have had generally do not agree well with me. Often they make me nervous, even in low doses.
If I were to take a stimulant regularly, I’d rather take a short-acting one, and only take it when absolutely necessary.
I have some armodafinil now and am going to do a study on myself. My sleep doctor suggests testing my concerns as they may not pan out in reality.
Thanks for the advice. I think I see what you mean in this post about asking a more general question. Perhaps I’ll post a discussion item about advice for rationalists with hypersomnia disorders, or post something to the next open thread. Most of the advice I’ve seen about sleep on here seems to apply only to normal people, or even just a subset of normal folks.
Yes, I’m not very interested in stimulants largely because of the side effects (on my mood, or sleep, or cardiovascular system, etc.), but they are the first line of treatment for whatever it is that I have. My sleep doctor offered to prescribe me modafinil, but I declined, citing tolerance, its long half-life, and the side effects, so instead he gave me some free samples of armodafinil and said to try it and see, which is reasonable. (Perhaps this makes me a bad rationalist. Given all of the discussion of modafinil here, I’m sure some people would see declining legal modafinil paid for by my insurance company as a great folly.)
Non-drug treatments interest me greatly. Unfortunately, there is little research interest into them, but I have read two detailed reviews of behavioral treatment of narcolepsy and other hypersomnia disorders. My sleep hygiene is excellent, and could hardly be improved. Right now I’m working two naps a day into my schedule. Naps are one of the few behavioral changes I’ve found to help. There are some difficulties in terms of logistics, but once that is settled I should see a marked improvement in my functioning. I am also working in more exercise into my schedule, as exercise will wake me up (though not for as long as a nap, which seems supported by the literature I’ve read). I already get an adequate amount of exercise, but there seems to be a few things I can do to optimize my wakefulness and sleep quality via modifying my exercise routines.
I am curious. What would be the goal in getting into a deep state of trance? Would this serve to help me sleep more solidly?
Thanks. I had intended to try some meditation for other reasons. I’ll investigate your other suggestions, as well. (Edit: Checking my notes, it seems I had considered some form of hypnosis before as well, but I forgot about it.)
Your idea of improving sleep quality at night to improve daytime functioning in hypersomnia disorders is not so unusual. The goal would be to increase deep sleep (most narcoleptics have far too little). One of the main treatments for narcolepsy takes exact approach via pharmaceuticals (Xyrem/GHB). Unfortunately, GHB is neurotoxic when used chronically, but there are other drugs (ritanserin, trazodone, etc.) that have the same effect. Ritanserin is particularly effective and has no real side effects best I can tell, but it’s also unfortunately not available cheaply because narcolepsy is such a small market.
In my case, there’s no objective evidence that my sleep quality is bad. My amount of deep sleep is not unusual, though it is a little low according to my sleep doctor. My sleep was not particularly fragmented, either. This does not explain why I don’t feel particularly rested when waking after sleeping a normal (7 to 8 hours) duration. It is possible that my sleep study was misleading for any number of reasons (my sleep doctor suggested two weeks of data would be much more definitive), but until I set up my home EEG (I’ll be using a modified NeuroSky Mindwave Mobile as Zeo went out of business), I can’t check the accuracy of my sleep study. Whether my brain is actually doing what it should be when it’s in deep sleep is another question. For the moment, I believe the sleep study was accurate, and my top hypothesis is that I’m a long sleeper who requires 10+ hours of sleep per night. This possibility has not been examined as rigorously as the others.
Thanks for your comment.
If I don’t particularly like modafinil for its long half-life then I’ll take a closer look at others. I’m sure my sleep doctor would be glad to give me a few samples of other stimulants.
I wasn’t aware of the effect of nicotine on caffeine. Seems to be potentially useful.
Nonpharmacological treatments generally don’t do much anything in my experience. Naps work fairly well, though they can leave me groggy. Exercise wakes me up during its duration, but not for much longer afterward (This is consistent with normal people’s experiences). Though, I have used exercise before to “anchor” my circadian drive (i.e., running in the morning helped my body know when to wake up), which I found worked well. Standing prevents me from falling asleep involuntarily, but it won’t stop me from feeling very sleepy. Neither does walks; I need a certain level of physical activity to counter sleepiness. Some large meals make me very sleepy, but not all. Eating delicious greasy food at an alehouse on Fridays with some coworkers last summer at about noon tended to cause outright collapse at 2 pm (note that I don’t drink alcoholic beverages), whereas eating a Chipotle burrito, which is similar in volume, causes no postprandial somnolence. Talking seems to wake me up more than I initially expected. I haven’t tried cold showers, but I suspect they’d be counterproductive as a decrease in body temperature is known to trigger sleep.
I thought I had issues with my sleep quality at night. I generally don’t wake up feeling rested, and the sleepiness continues through the day, usually abating sometime after dinner or an afternoon nap. I just recently got the results of an overnight sleep study, and they indicated that my sleep quality should be okay. Assuming that the study was not misleading in some way, this leaves the possibility that I am a long sleeper, i.e., that I require 10+ hours of sleep per night to function correctly.
I hadn’t considered trying to counteract the nervousness induced by stimulants. I’ll have to look into various relaxation techniques.
If your hypothesis is that timing matters but the blood level doesn’t matter, what’s the underlying biochemical mechanism? Is there any evidence that the right time in the circadian cycle is crucial?
I see evidence that both matter to sleep. It seems that the blood level of vitamin D is linked to excessive daytime sleepiness. (Warning: the authors of this paper overfit the data, so you can ignore their conclusions about race and very low vit. D levels, but their data does show a negative correlation between serum vitamin D levels and excessive daytime sleepiness.)
My own serum vitamin D level was pretty low, but since supplementation, it has increased appreciably to within the normal range. So far, I don’t think it has had an effect on my daytime sleepiness, but I have not been keeping track of the appropriate factors, so take what you will.
It also seems that taking vitamin D at night seems to disrupt sleep for some individuals. My experience suggests taking vitamin D at night has no effect, but (as before) I have no hard data to justify this. It is possible that the sleep disruption only applies to those who have adequate blood levels of vitamin D. The explanation that I have seen (which I can’t find right now) is that vitamin D influences your circadian drive as sunlight would because your body synthesizes it from sunlight; taking vitamin D is like getting “concentrated sunlight”. I’ll agree with ChristianKI, though, that no mechanism needs to be identified to validate an observation.
For other things (i.e., not sleep), I haven’t seen any evidence of timing effects.
You are full of good suggestions!
I had not considered beta blockers at all. Perhaps I should; it appears that they also treat some of my other (minor) health issues.
I have not tried a caffeine nap. Doing some quick reading suggests that it may counteract the grogginess I experience.
I haven’t read the paper, just looked at their plots, and my impression is that there is nothing there but noise.
That may be true. The correlation is at best weak. There appears to not necessarily be a causative link between vit. D and daytime sleepiness; increasing my vit. D levels had no perceptible effect on my own sleepiness. Though others have had different experiences.
We have anecdata, but have there been actual studies?
I have not seen any studies into that. The closest that I’ve seen is gwern’s tests.
Great advice Luke.
I have a suggestion for those who don’t want to abuse university resources. Some universities give donors to the library access to journals. I’ll be graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park, soon and I’m fully addicted to journals in basically every subject, so I intend to take advantage of their Friends of The Libraries Borrowers Program. This, unfortunately, is not free, but it’s well worth the money to me.
This program would also give me access to the library’s Interlibrary Loan services, which I’ve found to be incredibly useful for obscure papers and books.