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These Open Learning Units are entirely web-based and non-customised where we actively encourage the use of adapted Wikipedia together with other relevant information sources on public domain.
Research is often described as an active, diligent, and systematic
process of inquiry aimed at discovering, interpreting
and revising facts.
This intellectualinvestigation produces a greater understanding of events, behaviours,
or theories,
and makes practical applications through laws and theories. The term research is also used
to describe a collection of information about a particular subject, and is usually associated
with science and the scientific
method.
The
word research derives from Middle French (see French
language); its literal meaning is 'to investigate
thoroughly'.
A hypothesis is a suggested explanation of a phenomenon, or alternately
a reasoned proposal suggesting a possible correlation between
or among a set of phenomena.
Normally
hypotheses have the form of a mathematical
model. Sometimes, but not always, they can also be formulated
as existential
statements, stating that some particular instance of the
phenomenon being studied has some characteristic and causal
explanations, which have the general form of universal
statements, stating that every instance of the phenomenon
has a particular characteristic.
Scientists
are free to use whatever resources they have — their
own creativity, ideas from other fields, induction, Bayesian
inference, and so on — to imagine possible explanations
for a phenomenon under study. Charles
Sanders Peirce, borrowing a page from Aristotle (Prior
Analytics, 2.25)
described the incipient stages of inquiry,
instigated by the "irritation of doubt" to venture a plausible
guess, as abductive
reasoning. The history of science is filled with stories
of scientists claiming a "flash of inspiration", or a hunch,
which then motivated them to look for evidence to support
or refute their idea. Michael
Polanyi made such creativity the centrepiece of his discussion
of methodology.
Karl
Popper, following others, developing and inverting the
views of the Austrian logical
positivists, has argued that a hypothesis must be falsifiable,
and that a proposition or theory cannot be called scientific
if it does not admit the possibility of being shown false.
It must at least in principle be possible to make an observation
that would show the proposition to be false, even if that
observation had not yet been made.
the
success of a hypothesis, or its service to science, lies
not simply in its perceived "truth", or power to displace,
subsume or reduce a predecessor idea, but perhaps more in
its ability to stimulate the research that will illuminate
… bald suppositions and areas of vagueness.[7]
In
general scientists tend to look for theories that are "elegant"
or "beautiful".
In contrast to the usual English use of these terms, they
here refer to a theory in accordance with the known facts,
which is nevertheless relatively simple and easy to handle. Occam's
Razor serves as a rule of thumb for making these determinations.
is an interdisciplinary branch of mathematics which uses methods like mathematical
modelling, statistics,
and algorithms to arrive at optimal or good decisions in complex problems
which are concerned with optimizing the maxima (profit, faster assembly line, greater crop yield, higher
bandwidth, etc) or minima (cost loss, lowering of risk, etc) of some objective function.
The eventual intention behind using Operations Research is
to elicit a best possible solution to a problem mathematically,
which improves or optimizes the performance of the system.
