I read an article on Slashdot about John Carmack where he said, (emphasis mine)

" After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).

I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then. "

The phrase "doubling my programming knowledge in 6 months" caught my eye and I thought I'd take a crack at it. I've set aside 6 months to do this. Given my smaller "quantum" of knowledge as a compared to Carmack it should be easier :-P.

So anyway, I've set a fairly ambitious(for me) agenda

(1)work completely through Algorithms by Cormen et al and Randomized Algorithms by Prabhakar and Raghavan, doing every exercise in each book,

(2)become really good at lisp and Forth - write about 10,000 "lines of code" in each language, versions of the HRL library (see below)

(3) release an Open Source java library of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms (something extracted from a consulting project I recently completed.).

I've taken a 6 month sabbatical from my consulting work. It was kind of weird explaining to my clients that I am completely unavailable for the next 6 months, but I think it is worth a try. The bank account looks healthy enough (touch wood). I've been working on this for the last 10 days, averaging 12 hours a day and loving it. .

So set your alarm an hour earlier tomorrow and commit yourself to playing your guitar (or whatever) for an hour before starting your day. If you're tired and go to bed an hour earlier, so what, you were going to waste that hour watching TV anyway, get some sleep and get up early and do it again the next day. Then soon this will just be what you do and you'll wonder how it was ever any other way.

Also as Confucious said, if a man chases two chickens they will both get away.

People with nothing but their own anecdotal experience about the subject trying to (and failing at) criticizing a scientific paper. No one has pulled off a "correlation != causation", but most other usual suspects are already there.

Disclaimer: 1) I work in neuroscience , but not in sleep research. This (hopefully) makes me qualified to assess the seriousness of the methods, even though I don't have much background in circadian rhythms. 2) I'm biased in this case since I know personally the first author of the paper and some of the other researchers involved (and they are among the smartest and more conscientious people that I know of).

If there were any methodology error lay people would be able to spot in the paper, it wouldn't have been published in any respected journal in the field (and most people who commented here are lay people regarding (sleep) science). This is Science Magazine... They have the best reviewers in the world ("best" as in "smarter than you can probably imagine").

There are shortcomings inherent to this kind of study, of course. You cannot control experimental parameters like you can in physics or chemistry. That's why you have to 1) build your research on solid ground (i.e. solid results already published and reproduced) and 2) be as careful as possible in designing your protocol in order to have your bases covered. Schmidt et al. used the gold standard, they're frankly out of reach of such "low hanging" criticism.

</rant>

I enjoin you to have a look at the paper and the supporting material.

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Full text: http://www.innovatieforganiseren.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/...

Supporting Online Material: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/324/5926/516/DC1/1

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Here's the beginning of the latter:

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1. Material and methods

Subjects.

[Ethical committee disclaimer]. [All subjects] were screened for morningness or eveningness according to their timing preferences as defined by two questionnaires (MEQ (1) and MCTQ (2)). The two groups were matched according to age, sex and educational level and did not differ in their anxiety and depression levels as well as in sleep quality and day time sleepiness (all ps > 0.1; Table S1). Morning and evening types significantly differed in their scores on the two chronotype questionnaires (MEQ and MCTQ). Exclusion criteria were reports of medical, psychiatric and sleep disorders, medication or drug consumption, alcohol abuse, excessive caffeine consumption or physical activity, shift work within the three past months, and transmeridian travel or disturbances in the sleep-wake cycle within one month before the experiment.

Design and Procedures.

An overview of the study design is illustrated in Fig. 1 of the main text. Individual times were scheduled according to each volunteer’s preferred sleep and wake timing. Criteria for such timing preferences included sleep schedules adopted on free days as assessed by the MCTQ (2) and after interviewing the subject to ensure that the scheduled timing was as close as possible to the schedule that he or she would spontaneously adopt. In a second step, the screened subjects came to the sleep facility for a habituation night. After this night, they were asked to follow the sleep schedule (± 30 minutes) they would spontaneously adopt while free from any social and professional constraints. Target bedtimes and wake times were determined for a sleep duration of about 8 h (± 30 minutes). To assess the subjects’ compliance to the selected rest-activity patterns, motor activity of the non-dominant arm was recorded using actimeters the week prior to the experimental sessions along with sleep-wake logs. After this week under actimetry recording, subjects came to the sleep laboratory for 2 consecutive nights. The precise schedule of each session was individually adapted according to the subject’s habitual bedtime on the basis of the mean timing of the subject’s sleep midpoint derived from actimetric data of the preceding week.

Subjects reported to the laboratory 7 hours before habitual lights off on day 1. After the hook-up of the electrodes, they continuously stayed under controlled conditions in dim light (< 10 lux) in order to avoid the influence of bright light on circadian rhythmicity parameters (3) and in the aim to equalize pre-scan conditions between subjects. Subjective sleepiness (Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS (4))) and objective vigilance (a modified version of the PVT (5)) were assessed at hourly intervals while awake. Furthermore, hourly collected saliva samples were assayed for melatonin using a direct double-antibody radioimmunoassay validated by gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy with an analytical at least detectable dose of 0.65 pg/ml (6). Circadian phase was estimated by the calculation of the mid-range crossing time of salivary melatonin (7, 8). For each individual curve, the maximum value and the minimum value was averaged (mid-range value pg/ml) and taken to determine the mid-range crossing time (time of day, h) on the abscissa.

Polygraphic data (see below) were recorded during the nights preceding fMRI sessions. After lights off, subjects were allowed to sleep for 8 hours. Then, 1.5 (morning session) and 10.5 (evening session) hours after wake up of scheduled sleep timing, they underwent a fMRI session during the practice of various cognitive tests, including the psychomotor vigilance task on which we focus here. For half of the subjects, the morning session followed the first experimental night and the evening session the second night, whereas for the other half of the volunteers the morning session followed the second experimental night and the evening session the first night. Subjects were allowed to leave the facility between the two experimental nights. They stayed in the laboratory under dim light conditions (<10 lux) for at least 4 hours before the scanning sessions (see dashed line in Fig. 1). They wore protective glasses avoiding excessive light input when going to the scanner room.

The order of selected cognitive tasks was counterbalanced across subjects and sessions. Before the start of the experimental protocol, all subjects underwent a short habituation scan session in order to familiarize them with the noise and the body positions associated with the fMRI environment.

I disagree. Statements made in a public, academic context should be debated and corrected in a public, academic context. This is perfectly appropriate; indeed, taking it private may well be inappropriate. This is the nature of academia, and anything less is a disservice to the greater academic community in question, who are shut out of a private conversation.

Obviously some professional courtesy is called for; such debate should not be acrimonious, and sending a note to the originator of the debated items is probably appropriate unless you know they can't miss it. But I'm not seeing anything egregiously wrong with the author's approach or tone in this article.

Many of the corrections in question involve objective facts, too. While I am keeping in mind I am seeing only one side of the story, I have a hard time seeing what justifies responding to a debate about what the objective fact of the matter is with any sort of accusations or stonewalling. The March of Dimes example seems pretty open-and-shut, for instance.

The problem is not with the boy.

What. The. Heck.

How old do you have to be to understand "If a train derails, people die. People dying is a bad thing. Trains are big and complicated and are operated by professionals or at least people trained to use them, like, you know, cars." ?!?!

For several thousand years of human history we expected 14 year olds to go off to war, die gallantly, and come back and raise children if they survived. They proved up to the challenge. Now they're infantilized to the point where they cannot be reliably expected to show empathy for people who die as a result of their actions.

What. The. Heck. Words fail me.

[Edit: Gah, the more I think about this the more livid I get. GAAAAAAAAAH. I used to be a teacher and my child developmental psychology is a little rusty, but I also used to be a Boy Scout and can remember what we were doing when we were eight. It included practicing for emergencies such as What To Do If Someone Falls In The River. Answer: don't enter the river, because they are panicking and will drown you, instead, throw them a rope or flotation device. We did not have to explain to eight year olds that people drowning in the river is a bad thing or that the predictable consequence of pushing someone off a bridge into a river is that they will die, this is a bad thing, accordingly don't push someone off a bridge into the river even if you think he will look really funny falling into it.]

Specifically, I've been trying to do things to Arc that will make News shorter. I'm running out of room, though: News is 1886 LOC, and it's rare now when I can find something that will cut as many as 5. So I'm going to try writing some other types of applications to make short.