vogonism

After only 5 hours of sleep (for tango and other stuff worth my time), I ran 4 subjects. Ok, for people who have no idea what I mean, a "subject" refers to a human participant in my study. When writing journal articles now, we are encouraged to use "participants" instead of "subjects" because "participants" sounds more human-like and more respectful. However, in lab or in this jargon-filled research field, we researchers still call participants subjects when talking to each other.

Alright, I sat in the room, running 4 subjects from 10 am to 3 pm. I did my best to keep my eyes open without help from coffee. Well, it's Friday, meaning I want to sleep well and long tonight, suggesting coffee should be avoided.
Anyway, finally I finished today's duty of running experiments.

Millie the lab secretary came to me, telling me I should have booked the room before I ran experiments. She was nice and helpful. She taught me how to book the room.
I know it's necessary since our lab does not own the room. This kind of bureaucracy is very mild.

And then I started making copies of all the consent forms.
Yes, formS.
When I was in Penn State, there was only one consent form with 2 pages max.
Now my subjects have to sign 6 to 8 forms and fill out questionnaires, taking 10 to 20 minutes before actually doing the experiment. And I have to photocopy everything for them.
I have taken it as well as I could. No complaint. At least not this moment.

I was sitting in the room doing 3-holing and filing. Kristen came to show me how to send checks to subjects who had participated in the study.
I thought it was as easy as enveloping the check and mailing it.
No, in stead I wrote down 8 steps for the whole procedure. My head was aching. I missed my bed.

Many photocopies have been made since I started my job. Each copy of the same information goes to different departments for almost the same purpose. The same evidence has been scattered to the entire research center and beyond for the purpose of "protecting" participants and ourselves.
If A is not done, B cannot be done. If B is not done, C will come to yell at you, and no one will notify you which step has gone undone.

I had advertised my study through email and many listservers and by posting flyers.
Now I cannot do that. Everything has to be proved before hand. As if I was going to inject illegal drugs to subjects. As if I was going to wash subjects' brains with my boring visuo-spatial tasks. As if I was going to lure more people with thirty dollars.
Yeah, 30 bucks sound good for an hour of participating in simple behavioral experiments. Back in Penn State, we only pay at most 12 per hour for time-consuming psychophysiological experiments. However, if you paid me 30 bucks to drive away from my home or work, I would have rejected you.
Campus is always the best place to get healthy participants. But I am not on campus now.
So my point is why the IRB restricts me so much now!

Paperworks slow down progress.

Yet another real example happened these past two days.
I wanted to go on the website of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but found it blocked.
I was like WHAT? WHY? It is a government website!
Immediately I emailed the good geek IT person (not Mr. M) and complained. Mr. B told me to send an evaluation of the website so that the IT consultant company could unblock it.
How could I evaluate it without seeing it? So I wrote on the evaluation page that CDC.gov is a government website with information for the public and I have no idea why you think the website is not appropriate for people who work in medical research institutes to have access to it.
Well, actually I did not write the words after "and" in the last sentence. I was being nice.
After one day, it was unblocked.
After precious 24 hours, it was unblocked and I had forgotten why I wanted to go there in the first place.

Vogonism!

Yes, I invent this word from the vogons in the movie "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy". Vogons do not do anything without paperworks.

I spent one hour doing paperworks after running experiments today. Unbelievable.
I could have read a paper, written a paper, or gone back to my bed for that hour.

Ugly fat vogon!