Striving+for+Accuracy+and+Precision

__Striving for Accuracy and Precision__
//Do you turn in sloppy or incomplete work? Are you more anxious to get rid of the assignment than to check it for accuracy and precision?//

I can't truthfully say that I haven't overlooked precision and accuracy in favor of speed on occasion, but I'd like to say that in general, my measurements and calculations are quite accurate. While I may not always add in the ±0.01 in my scale measurements, and carry every little detail through, I don't consciously neglect significant parts of the assignment.

However, the isotopes assignment with the Sciencerockium, a psuedo-Carbon atom, prompted me to start checking very carefully and look over my work. Being a carbon-like atom, Sciencerockium had isotopes of 11, 12, 13, 14 neutrons. We were given containers containing cubes that represented protons and neutrons, and, using only the weight of a single cube and the weight of the container, we had to estimate the number of 'neutrons'.

This was going well - it wasn't a hard assignment, just a lot of number crunching - when I hit a number that seemed a little deviant. The cubes weighed around a gram each, so the total weight of most of the containers (minus the weight of the containers, of course) were somewhere around 23 to 25 grams or so. This one measurement gave me a number of 13 as the total weight - obviously wrong. I had copied it off my group mate, as we had a person weigh the containers (me, incidentally) and a person record the weight, but it seems that either I said the number wrong or my group mate heard me wrong.

This was but one measurement in twenty-five different containers, a small number that seemed a bit off. We could have just forged on ahead without even noticing, but unfortunately the questions at the end demanded a through analysis of every measurement, as well as recording which isotopes seemed common and uncommon - and an isotope containing 1 neutron is glaringly wrong, completely throwing off any overall calculations (like average mass) that we would attempt on it. Added to that the fact that I felt extremely uncomfortable turning in any assignment with sloppy work, I ended up tracking down that one container (a harder job than it sounds - I had to go through every container, and the culprit container coincidentally turned out to be the last one I checked), and re-weighing it myself, just for one measurement.

While I was at it, I also re-weighed the 11-neutron isotope, as it was the only 11-neutron isotope we had in the list, but it seemed that 11-neutrons was a natural occurrence and not just a measuring inconsistency.


 * In the end, it seems that every measurement in science, chemistry in particular, is important**. Multiple trials should have been done on each container, to prevent the measuring failure we had, but time constraints kept us moving fast. In the end there was no harm done, but in the future, I would have to be careful in measurement accuracy and precision. Much of our measurements are measured and calculated as a whole, so one mistake could throw off a whole series of calculations - and they might not be noticed until too late.

