Another part of our little series: Working as a research assistant. Today’s article will be dedicated to scientific research and it’s core component. No matter in which area of science you are working, it boils down to find the right starting point. You can’t find answers if you don’t ask the correct questions.
As a little digression, I’ll start with one thing that has been bugging me for some years now and surfaced again this morning, virtually forcing me to write this article. I love to listen to music. Music grounds me, brings me down and helps me to start my day, nearly as much as coffee. To stay informed of the happenings in the world out there, I usually turn on my radio in the morning, to get some news mixed in with the music. And this morning it was there. Again. This song, with always triggers the scientist in me: Katie Melua’s Nine Million Bicycles. Gosh, I hate this piece of „art“. Well, not hate, no space on my list for such trivialities, but at least strongly dislike. I’ll give you the first eight lines, which should be enough to trigger every reasonable human being out there:
There are nine-million bicycles in Beijing.
That’s a fact,
It’s a thing we can’t deny,
Like the fact that I will love you ‚til I die.
We are twelve-billion light years from the edge.
That’s a guess,
No one can ever say it’s true,
But I know that I will always be with you.
Let’s do a quick analysis. There are at least two words we can consider undisputably connected to well defined scientific meanings. Those are
fact and
guess. Those words fall loosely into the same category as hypothesis, theory and estimate. I’m not going into detail about all those words and their exact differences, as I’m not a linguist or philosopher, but Ms. Melua follows, at least in my opinion, a classical „flat earther“ argumental structure here, a fallacy deeply engraved in the minds of wide parts of the general public. „I can see a bike, I can count that bike, so the total number of bikes in Beijing must be easily countable. So it’s a fact!“. Well sorry, it’s not. To be fair, the chinese government probably has the power to do so, ordering every single person in Beijing to leave their city for some days, recruit an army of bicycle counters and search every damn street, building and cellar of the entire city. I doubt they did so, I doubt they’ll ever do. So I can say for sure, that it is definitely not a f****** fact, that there are nine million bicycles in Beijing, at best it’s an estimate. I tried to research the source of that claim and actually did not find one single reliable source of that. What I found is the number of 2.4 million rental bikes. Even more interesting: I found this hilarious quote in an article: „There’s a saying that you’re not a Beijinger if you haven’t lost any bikes“ (
source). So even if you’d ask all the citizens about their bike ownership you wouldn’t get a reliable number.
On to the „guess“: twelve-billion light years from the edge. I don’t know where Ms Melua get that from, just a little research would have led her (or her writer) to a pretty accurate estimate of 13.8 millions, with an uncertainty below 1% depending on the source. If you wan’t to look up where this numbers origin, BBC did a pretty good
article on that matter.
To conclude, I’ve read numbers between 8 and 12 million bicycles in Beijing, which puts the error in the magnitude of 30%, with no reliable facts founding that matter, while most sources agree on the probable error in the calculations of distance to the edge to be around 21 million light year, which sounds a lot but is actually around 0,15% in a relative perspective. WHAT’S A FACT AND A GUESS NOW? SCIENCE, *****!
You see I become quite agitated when it comes to spreading wrong ideas about facts and guesses and science in general to the public, even when it’s not intended and done in such a way, but I don’t consider it harmless at all.
Which brings me back to the actual topic of this article: Asking the right questions. Questions have to be S.M.A.R.T., to quote a tool from project management. Well actually this is intended to be a helpful acronym for the construction of goal, but since the ultimate goal of each scientific question is to answer it, I hope you’ll forgive me on that minor slip.
Smart goals are specific, measurable, achivable, relevant and time-bound. There are actually multiple interpretations and words behind each of the letters, the outcome is more or less the same.
But since it’s late and this article is long enough, I’ll promise to continue on the formulation of research questions in a follow-up post.
Stay tuned.
