Blessed by the Potato

Exactly zero people have helped out with my “Very Quick Experiment” post. For that reason I shouldn’t tell you why I was asking.

But, I have a weakness for ranting, so I can’t help myself.

Please let me know what your head size is. You can measure your head size with a tape measure, going around the circumference of your head, just above the ears.

Those (what I hope were) very simple, very straightfoward instructions are sent to potential research subjects for my study. The issue is this: we have two EEG caps — one small, one medium — they are very expensive, and after cleaning them in the disinfectant, they take a while to dry. So we can’t afford to buy more, and we can’t really use them more than once a day. However, we want need to scan approx 10 subjects per week, which means we need to try to get in one person with a medium-sized head, and one with a small sized head on the same day at least a few times a week. So when scheduling people, we need to know their head size. Since we schedule by phone or email, we need people to (at least somewhat accurately) measure their own heads.

Wayfare said that would never work as soon as she found out about it. No way were people going to be able to follow simple instructions and measure their head size. I figured that it can’t be that hard, especially since most of our volunteers are university students; science undergrads for that matter.

Well, either Wayfare was right, or we’ve got some extras from Beetlejuice coming in to volunteer.