red tape

the first draft of my project proposal is due next friday, so It officially Starts. the honeymoon was nice, though, and longer than expected. the accelerator gets stepped on in psychology not because of reading (unlike in the humanities), but because of the logistics of working with human subjects -- U.S. institutions in particular make you jump through an infuriating number of hoops before you can so much as lay eyes on a human volunteer (we have the nazis to thank for this, by the way). i am glad, though, that it's not reading that i'm going to be crushed by -- vic tells me that he burns through about 600-700 pages of text a week, and although i'm sure that minz will tell me this is not uncommon, it is nonetheless staggering and not a thing i'd particularly relish doing.

the first-year project is due in may '07, which is a pretty short time, particularly for a multi-day imaging study. i foresee: 2-3 months for planning/back-and-forthing on the IRB and 3 months for data collection, minus the christmas break, which leaves frighteningly little time for analysis and writing. all this for a study that will likely not even be publishable because we will not yet have enough subjects for a random-effects analysis at the end of it. this is rather frustrating -- i'm used to having the peripheral bureaucratic annoyances kept to a minimum so that i can focus on the actual data, but penn apparently believes in such irrelevancies as "sharing equipment" and "ethics".