This week's session notes - Week 2 (7 and 9 August 2018)

Hi everyone

Welcome to week 2 of the Problem Solving and Decision Making paper!

On Tuesday, we started the week with a quick test. This was an impromptu quiz on some of the material that we covered last week (and which I wrote about in the Week 1 session notes, sent out through Moodle).

Following this, I showed you the jar that we will be using for the Great Jellybean Challenge. You have until the end of the term to give me your calculation of the number of jellybeans in the GJC jar. See the session notes from last week for more information about this activity, along with discussion around the different strategies that you can use for this exercise.

To help you with the GJC, I then gave you a mini version of the GJC, using M+Ms. We split into three teams and I gave each team a mini jar of M+Ms, along with the following instructions:

* Your task is to test your PSDM skills, ahead of The Great Jellybean Challenge.

* You need to develop your strategies for accurately calculating the number of items in the jar by practicing on a mini GJC jar.

* In groups, identify and design as many different strategies as you can. What will you need for each strategy?

The teams each chose three measurement strategies and set about working out what they needed for each strategy. For instance, if you used a direct measurement strategy based on volume, then you might need to know the volume of the jar and the volume of an individual M+M (including the ‘dead’ waste space around it in the jar). If you decided to use a survey strategy (asking lots of people for their estimates of the number of items in the jar), then you needed to think about who you could ask, and then go out and survey them.

Once students had their measurement strategies in place, they went off to find the things that they needed. This involved finding rulers, weighing scales and other devices. Some students also took pictures of the M+M jars so that they could find similar jars, which they could use as models.

(As we were doing this, we noted that the teams were using some basic PSDM tools and techniques, such as brainstorming. Brainstorming is a technique which involves listing out as many alternatives as possible. This is a quantity method, in which team members list out as many alternatives, ideas and possibilities as they can. Ideally, there is no evaluation of these ideas until the list is complete (or as complete as possible), in case the flow of ideas is interrupted. Once all the ideas have been listed, then we go back over each item on the list to discuss the pros and cons associated with each one. This then gives us a ranked list of alternatives to either action or investigate further.)

On Thursday, we continued with this exercise and the groups finalised their calculations. Once all the teams had completed their calculations we put the results up on the board and compared the results. See the pic of the results, on Moodle.

There were a couple of ‘rogue’ results but, on the whole, our results gave us some fairly consistent values (especially once we had averaged them over the methods used!) The actual number of M+Ms in each jar was either 127 or 128 and our averaged results varied between 121 and 128!

Even though our sample sizes were very small, you can see how a statistical approach brought us quite close to the actual number.

Following the M+M challenge, we continued with our look at different sorts of problems. In particular, we looked at the problem of successfully sending people to Mars. Some of the questions that we pondered included:

* How long does it take to travel to Mars?

* What is the temperature on Mars?

* Can you breathe the atmosphere on Mars?

* Is there any water on Mars?

* What is the gravity on Mars?

* What can you do on Mars?

* What are the problems involved in sending humans to Mars?

We then discussed some of the major issues involved in this problem. Broadly-speaking we divided these problem areas into the following:

* Physiological issues (e.g. exercise; health issues; effects of weightlessness; medical issues)

* Psychological issues

* Social issues

* Systems failure

* Ethical issues.

This discussion then led us to consider some of the choices that we might make for ourselves and on behalf of others in the flight crew. Our task was to choose three small personal items that we would take with us for a 21 month mission and three small items for sharing with the crew.

Finally, I left you with two case studies of isolation which may or may not give us insights into the complexity involved in solving problems of this nature.

The first was the case of the Rose Noelle, which left Picton in 1989, bound for Tonga. Three days out the trimaran was swamped by a massive rogue wave and turned over. The four crew were unharmed but they had to spend the next 119 days confined to a small cabin within the hull or outside on the upturned surface of the hull. During this time, they expected to drift towards South America and probably die of starvation on the way.

Through a series of freak conditions, the Rose Noelle floated in a massive current loop and ended up back off the coast of New Zealand after four months at sea. The crew made it to shore and survived to tell their tale. Of particular interest to us is the effect that close habitation, under difficult conditions, with little expectation of survival, had on the crew. The psychological effects were quite significant and the survivors lived with the consequences post-event.

The second case study was Biosphere 2. This was a facility built in the Arizona desert, and consisting of several biomes (ecological zones such as rainforest, grassland, wetlands, and desert). The facility was set up to study closed ecological systems and a team of eight volunteers was locked into the facility for two years, in the early 1990s.

There were many interesting things that came out of this experiment (which I will leave you to discover) but one of the most interesting for us was the way in which social interactions between team members changed over time. Unlike the Rose Noelle crew, the Biosphere 2 team knew that they could ‘escape’ if necessary and that their welfare was being monitored. However, that didn’t stop frictions arising and there were conflicts over the mission and how best to complete it.

Neither of these two case studies tells us what would actually happen to crew on a mission to Mars, but they do give us some insights into the complexity of systems involving living (human) creatures. You might like to think about what this could mean for PSDM in normal (as well as abnormal) environments. Over the next few weeks we will continue to refer back to the way that people respond in PSDM situations and we will think about how this affects (and is affected by) our attitudes, expectations and behaviours.

Looking ahead to next week, I will put some time aside for us to discuss to discuss Assignment 1. Please make sure that you get underway with this assignment and also note that you are welcome to start Assignment 4 at any time. Remember that Assignment 4 covers all the material that we will be looking at this semester, so it is a good idea to complete bits of the assignment as we cover them in class.

Have a good weekend and I will see you again on Tuesday!

Cheers

Phil Sales