Discussions ***ZEEK THE GEEK***

Classmates,

Within my day-to-day work as a supervisor to 16 personnel I've found too often the term "to trust, but verify" is easier said than done. Luckily the scientific method has assisted in many situations to verify something quantitatively in terms of the quality of accomplished maintenance or the qualitatively analyze how often maintenance or tasks take to meet standards. One of my common hypothesis here would be "If a technician is capable of accomplishing maintenance and documenting their accomplishment independently, then they are trustworthy employees that require less supervision and should be rewarded more responsibility because of their current capability."

Controls here should include a means by which to evaluate an employees progress, quality of work, and leadership abilities to ensure they have both the potential for growth and are managing their work effectively. Variables in this hypothesis would be the independent variable of the maintenance task and the dependent variable of the result,  where that be the qualitative appearance or quantitative hours until the task is must again be repeated.

Austin:

An example that I can give of using the scientific method in my daily life is how I cook my eggs in the morning. I prefer my eggs to be prepared a certain way (over-easy), but I find that cooking them at a high heat setting causes them to be harder. Below I’ve outlined the scientific method and how it applies to my morning routine of preparing breakfast.

Observation:

Cooking eggs over-easy at higher heats causes them to taste harder.

Hypothesis:

Cooking eggs over-easy at a lower temperature will create a softer texture.

Test the hypothesis:

The experiment will occur every morning while I’m preparing my breakfast. Constants in the experiment include the pan that I’m preparing the eggs in, the brand of eggs, the stove that I’m preparing the eggs on, and the olive oil that I use to coat the pan. The independent variables of my experiment are the specific heat that I use to prepare the eggs and time that the eggs are cooked. A higher heat requires a shorter amount of time to cook, while a lower heat requires a longer time. In order to ensure that I cook the eggs to the same consistency, I generally use the yoke as my indicator. I don’t flip the eggs and consider them to be done by the indication of small amounts of white appearing on the top of the uncooked yoke. Another way that I could ensure this to be more accurate is use an IR thermometer to test the temperature on the top layer of the uncooked yoke. Each day, I use a different temperature to cook the eggs and log how the eggs tasted with different temperature settings. My control group would represent the original setting that I was using prior to the experiment (higher heat).

Analyze data:

Unfortunately, this experiment is relatively subjective in nature as it’s judged by my interpretation of how soft the eggs taste to me. Without having quantitative measurements, I’ll instead have to rely on my opinion of how they taste on different heat settings as a qualitative measurement of the experiment to develop my dependent variable.

State conclusions:

After conducting my experiment and analyzing my data, my conclusion might sound like something similar to this: Eggs cooked over-easy in olive oil at temperature setting 4 for a time of 5 minutes are softer than any other temperature settings.