No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
No matter how much research is organized, the unit is the worker. Houses are arranged habitations but the unit is the building block. Without careful choice of the unit no research can be successful. After all, it is the men who do the work.
There is no royal road to success in choosing men. Part of it is experience--in life as well as in science, but a good bit of it is a gift, a quality of estimating men and their capacity in a short time and a wise director is one who pays particular attention to the choice of his personnel. The power of organization is great and the effect of a few may be multiplied almost indefinitely and what one individual can accomplish may not be great, but if the units are not carefully chosen, the aggregation into an organization will suffer.
Of course, the choice is limited by the type of research organization. In an industrial research, there must be profits to keep the show going: in some, there are more immediate demands for profits from research than others. Some are so short-sighted as to require research to produce results as required--"Put in the thumb and pull out a plum.". This is as unsatisfactory as is the long time research in universities whichoften continues on and on without a definite aim but goes by continuation and often becomes merely a multiplication of detail.
At one end is technology and at the other is abstract science. One looks upon the other as academic and the other scorns the one as merely practical. The classification of science as organized knowledge is confusing because it suggests an entirely artificial separation between pure science and technology. Civilization began in technology and pure science arose when technology made possible the leisure necessary for its pursuit: but today the applied scientist uses the same strict criteria of accuracy and logical evaluation as does the pure scientist. Actually there are all graduations and no definite division except at one end is the shop laboratory to control the quality of product and at the other end is the cloistered pure scientist remote from the world who may or may not produce a valuable result. Should all results be valuable? Practical necessity may not be required for scientific advance and many inventions of apparatus devised for scientific advance have been subsequently transferred to practical use. As examples of such invention, Haldane cites the telescope, the cinematograph, barometer, gasometer, galvanometer and creamseparator. Most of these have to do with measurement and are really of the nature of scientific aids to extend man's senses and powers
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
The extensive claim and medical bill payment databases of the Washington state workers' compensation system have been used to conduct epidemiologic and outcome studies of work-related conditions. Computerized administrative data must he supplemented with medical record review and structured intervie