Papers & full reports
The Green Bowl: Where Sustainability Wins the Game!
Full report for Problem B. This is the four-person team’s competition work; I served as captain. It is presented as a contest report, not a journal publication.
What we disagreed about
Some teammates emphasized fans’ travel emissions; others focused on water use, waste, and local capacity. I favored data-derived weights because calculated numbers seemed more objective than our individual judgments.
Questioning my preferred method
Fuel ethanol received a weight of 0.3286, nearly four times the next highest weight. I began asking what the number represented. Annual data differences do not directly establish how important a factor is to a particular event.
I wrote the three positions on a whiteboard and asked everyone to add a sentence: if this claim is true, what should we see in the data? My teammates were discussing priorities; I was proposing a way to set priorities. Both needed justification.
A shared choice with limits
To compare candidate cities, we used the analytic hierarchy process to make judgments explicit. We jointly accepted equal weights for transportation and waste management while still disagreeing about their relative importance.
Equal weights allowed us to continue working; they did not prove the two impacts equally important. The model and paper were team work, and we still needed to explain the choice.
A question beyond the contest
Could they raise concerns the model had missed, and have those concerns affect the choice? I want to take responsibility for the calculation and for why I choose to use it.