Traditional Research

Traditional research proposed by W. H. Heinrich showed that 88 percent (the majority of all accidents) could be caused by the unsafe or high risk behavior of people. The high risk meehanical, physical, or environmental conditions could cause 10 percent of all accidents (minority of all accidents) and there is a small percentage ( 2 percent) of all accidents that are beyond our normal control and that can be contributed to natural causes, acts of providence, or other phenomena that we can neither predict nor control. 

Years of experience and international accident investigations clearly show that all accidents have multiple causes and cannot simply be explained away as worker failure. 

The engineer should be aware of specific handbooks, dictionaries and encyclopedias, indexes and abstracts, standards, journals, specialized guides, and online resources. A comprehensive bibliography of the engineering literature was compiled by Charles Lord and published in 2000. Although 

Information Sources in Grey Literature, 4th ed. London and New Providence, NJ Bowker-Saur. Unique tool for showing the more difficult and obscure types of technical literature. 

European Sources of Scientific and Technical Information, 11th ed. 1994. Harlow, Essex Longman New York Stockton Press. The editors make an effort to include a source for every country by providing the name, address, library facility, consultant information, and types of publications for the prime technical body within each conntry of the world. 

Guide to Information Sources in Engineering. Englewood, CO Libraries Unlimited. This is an excellent, comprehensive bibliography of aU engineering specialties. It is also available for purchase as an e-book. 

Macleod, R. A. and J. Corlett. 2005. Information Sources in Engineering, 4th ed. New York Bowker-Saur. Another title in the Guides to Information Sources series includes experts presenting and evaluating the variety of reference sources in engineering, from conferences to standards. 

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The costs involved are much smaller than for traditional research. This applies not only to direct financial aspects, but also to requirements in terms of human resources, and to ethical matters related, for example, to the origin of wet tissue or organ samples. 

In a serial mode (Fig. 36.1), one experimental step (in catalysis research this is usually the preparation of the ligand or the catalyst) is repeated n times before moving on to the next step. The only difference with traditional research is that the complete experiment (synfhesis/testing/analysis) is carried out for a set of catalysts rather than for an individual species. For example, a library of ligands from the same class can be assembled via traditional organic synthesis prior to its testing in catalysis. (A library of compounds is a rather large collection of different compounds with some common features and usually the same function, for example triarylphosphines or imidazolidinones.) Ideally, the compounds in the library can be structurally varied in at least two positions to ere-... 

Costs. It has been established that chemical firms are allocating R D resources to solve environmental protection problems. Even though this research may be highly desirable from a societal posture, it does represent a diversion of R D resources from traditional goals of product development and process improvement. This diversion represents "opportunity costs" or the loss that the firms sustain by foregoing the benefits that are provided by traditional research projects. 

Concerning the classes (a) and (b), which fall into a traditional research field, available reviews [1-4] cover recent progress. Advances in class (c) have accelerated over the past two decades to form a part of the lively research fields covering the utilization and functional development of cellulose and other polysaccharides. Actually, this kind of microscopic approach is also useful for enhancing the performance of various gross composites, for example, through modification of their bulk surfaces or the adhesion of ingredient interfaces. 

Traditionally, researchers have concentrated on understanding these two forms of matter as separate entities and it is only in the last few years that fundamental questions have been posed [i.e., what is the minimum number of atoms required to exhibit an electric conduction band or the number of atoms or... 

Symyx has become a pioneer in the use of combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening as a method for discovering new materials for chemical and electronic applications. Its approach is up to 100 times faster than traditional research methods and reduces the cost per experiment to as htde as 1 percent of that of traditional research methods. 

Starting in 2004, we replaced the traditional research paper in our organic chemistry course with a major outreach project (the GOLum project ), which... 

Jane and Maureen s movie poster activity provides a DCM heuristic for uncovering educators values about writing. DCM-inspired activities are inherently visual, and they provide alternatives to traditional interviews, surveys, and questionnaires. DCM-driven methods, such as this movie poster activity, make visible aspects of rhetorical values that traditional research methods may not be able to reveal. In fact, Broad (personal communication, October 6, 2006) explained that UNR s innovative application of DCM reveals educators "latent rhetorical values" using a "psychoanalytical approach." Stalions... 

An improvement in this situation has occurred recently with the arrival on the market of a number of tracking devices from Human Performance Measurement, Inc. (Arlington, TX). These devices are a natural extension of those developed by Kondraske et al. [1984]. Off-the-shelf availability of computer-based tracking tests, including sensors for both upper- and lower-limbs, opens up the possibility of a much broader and widespread use of tracking tasks. In particular, one can look forward to a much greater utilization of tracking tasks outside of traditional research areas and in more routine assessment applications in clinical, rehabilitative, vocational, sports, and other environments. 

Chemical education researchers are often the only such specialist in a chemistry department. This situation often leads to possibilities of collaborating in the research projects of other faculty who need an expert in chemical or science education research as part of their team. Chapter 3 (7) describes how a chemical education researcher can build collaborations to support his or her own research. This chapter discusses the many ways in which being the chemical education expert in a department or on a campus can provide additional opportunities to work with colleagues in science and engineering who carry out traditional research, with school of education colleagues, with K-12 systems, or in community partnerships. Regardless of the size of the collegiate institution, its location, or its specialization, there are opportunities to participate in collaborative projects that can impact science and education research. 

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