A man of great intelligence once said, “The ability to acquire — collect information; and use the knowledge with skill is an important part of intelligence.”
Yes, we come across people who learn from computers, robots and gain knowledge. A senior citizen who had learnt typing in his younger years, types at a fast speed and if any spelling mistake occurs while typing on his computer, it corrects it automatically, before the mind puts it right. Similarly, electronic pocket calculator which does the work of adding, subtracting, multiplication and division does the work very promptly, even before humans can do all the summation simultaneously.
Stephen Hawking said in December 2014, Artificial Intelligence will eventually reach a level where it will essentially be a “new form of life that will outperform humans. Humans who are limited by slow biological evolution can never compete with AI and would be superseded.”
In olden times, some people had the capacity to read and understand what was written on books and would make others aware about their “bookish knowledge”. As an effect of that, many people came out of unawareness and acted cleverly. Similarly, helpers in garage on viewing other mechanics could grasp the skill and repair vehicles in disorder with their ‘street knowledge or visual intelligence.’
Research is ‘imaginative’. It is a systematic work of studying various facts and mixing up different collected ideas and arrives at new conclusions — a new discovery, which influences people’s behaviour.
According to the American sociologist Earl Robert Babbie, “research is a systematic inquiry to describe, explain, predict and control the observed phenomenon. It involves inductive and deductive methods.”
Discovery is the act of detecting something new, which was previously not known; and exposing it for fear that original ideas may be lost and buried in the grave.
God painted the world with beautiful sceneries and the first human painter copied it; then the second and the third collected different drawings from different painters for research; and with modifications, made something new. Their discoveries of caricatures were a figment of their imagination, an exaggerated design, which their spirit achieved with hard work. Yes, comic strips are an important form of visual art of narrating an abstract thought of reasoning with the help of sketches.
Scientific discoveries have been possible because of working together as a team. It is because of the work of earlier scientists that the current scientists are able to make significant scientific advancements. Hence, the statement ‘There is no perfect research’, because in research errors cannot be perfect; it is subject to errors. Different research studies conducted on same subjects have yielded different findings and conclusions. Research in its basic definition is the process of gathering and accumulating knowledge with a purpose of discovering new phenomena and shedding light on complex life problems. The notion that there cannot be a perfect research was first coined by Prof Morwenna Griffiths in her book Educational Research for Social Justice. Her hypothesis was that research by an individual cannot be the best research ever to be conducted.
Evolution is the gradual development of something. In biology, evolution ‘is the change in the heritable characteristics of populations over several generations.
Therefore, it is said, “we should think before publishing any research work whether it is true; whether it is helpful; whether it is inspiring; whether it is necessary or whether it is kind.”
