Thursday, August 23, 2018

Getting The Right Pilot Study Equipment

By Daniel Peterson


In terms of physical abilities, there should have been no way that human beings should be the undisputed dominant species on the planet. Pretty much every single animal of similar mass is physically superior. Even when the comparison is whittled down to just the great apes, humanity is still at a massive disadvantage. An athlete with the strictest training, best genetics, and the finest pharmaceutical enhancement is still going to be at a massive disadvantage when compared to a gorilla or even just a chimp. But if humanity does have one thing going for it, it is its brain. Unlike other animals, human beings are more than capable of abstract thought. They can think. They can learn at a much quicker pace. And one method by which they do that requires a bit of trial and error using pilot study equipment.

A pilot experiment is fairly similar to an actual experiment. The main difference is the scale on which is it is performed. While a pilot experiments will generally have hundreds or even thousands of test subjects, a pilot study will have a fairly small pool of subjects.

The purpose of such an experiment is fairly simple. Whereas most experiments seek to unravel some grand, hitherto undiscovered truth about the universe, a pilot experiment just wants to work out kinks before they go about attempting to discover that grant, hitherto undiscovered truth regarding the universe. In short, it is a rehearsal.

A concept, science is not completely unified. In fact, there are many different branches to it. It splits of into the social sciences, which generally deal with people, and the natural sciences, which deals with the world around them. Because of the schism, there really is not concrete guidelines as to what sort of equipment should be used. For sure, there will computers and such, because data has to be recorded somewhere. But there will also be equipment used in one discipline that is going to be fairly useless in another.

The most important factor will be the scientists, the people carrying out the experiment. They are the ones who are going to observe and then record those observations. It is vital that they then be objective. The last thing the world needs are experiments being tainted with confirmation bias.

A lot of basic equipment should not be all that hard to find. Anyone can walk into a big box store and buy a bunch of laptops and pens and pads of paper. But certain items like high powered telescopes capable of seeing light years away may prove to be much harder to come by than an average microscope.

During a pilot experiment, the things that are done are fairly similar to what is done during the actual experimentation. Just smaller. They record information, present their results and then build on those results as per the scientific method.

Now, the main reasons that pilot experiments even happens is simple. Because everyone needs to practice. If a mistake is made at this phase, then it can be corrected. Athletes, after all, do not go to the big game without first logging in hundreds of hours of practice beforehand. They test out their strategies. A scientist is very similar in that regard.

The thing about the world was that it was never meant to be easy to live in. But humanity changed all that. It went ahead and made it easy.




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