The Third Way

There are many, scary scenarios for the end of the world. Which one will it be?

Well, just pick one and prepare for it. Correct? Buzz! Wrong!

Judgement day: a compendium of misfortunes

Lets start with an old look at this problem. The Book of Revelation was written by the apostle John, and is the last book in the Bible. A fitting place, just like The Last Battle is the final book in the Narnia series written by C. S. Lewis which brings the Narnia series to an end. (I sure hope they do a movie on this. But it will be chilling if they do.)

The Bible starts with “In the beginning…” in Genesis and ends with the total annihilation of earth, and then the presenting of the “new heavens and new earth” of a very different, other-dimension type of place. I think of this as a product recall, scraping the old, giving a new, better replacement.

To stop digressing, Revelation contains a lot of descriptions regarding the end of the world, and not at one time or place. More like a continual bombardment of misfortune. There are wars, plagues, famines, things falling from heaven into the seas (asteroid? volcano? toxic waste? a piece of the falling sky?) and all sorts of maladies resulting from that.

As a child, these stories filled me with terror. As an adult, I see bits and pieces of all these maladies in our present world. And ask anyone who is so unfortunate as to be living on location where one of these maladies is playing out; they would say, it is the end of the world.

Let’s spin the wheel of misfortune—it’s shake and bake time

One of my favorite comic movie about survival is Packin’ It In (TV 1983). The movie is survival spoof on escaping civilization by running to the wilds to live. Everyone was prepared for some form of disaster. The one family even had a cement bunker and weapons, ready for nuclear war. Other families had their specialties. And what happened? It rained so hard that they had mud slides that wiped out all their cabins and filled the bunker with mud. Everyone lost everthing. No one was prepared.

I loved the movie 2012–the end of the world as a massive geologic restructuring of everything, a destructive rearrangement of everything. We see this everyday. Businesses call this downsizing. Although the geologic truth is stretched, it makes a great movie.

By the way, why would people think the end of the world would occur in 2012. The civilization that put that calendar together ended hundreds of years ago, far ahead of schedule.

Let’s spin the wheel of misfortune—right off its axis

Let’s use risk assessment and mitigation techniques: risk assessment, risk mitigation. What will this enable us to do? To devise multiple scenarios, determine the consequences of each, and assist the probability that this scenario may come about. Or more likely, the probability that parts of this scenario will happen.

This information will give some common areas of risk that result from any number of scenarios. For these, the risks need to be studied and mitigated. This will provide us with a set of common problems and the solutions to them. We may not be prepared for a specific scenario; however, we are prepared for the more common consequences from a number of likely scenarios.

An example

If the scenario is a severe plague or flu, then our infrastructure may be brought down. A one-year supply of food would help to sit this one out. Or if there is a nuclear EMP attack to the US as described in One Second After, there is no fallout but a total infrastructure collapse. And a one-year supply of food would truly save your family’s lives. And if a small asteroid or comet hits earth, a one year supply of food might be stretched out further until the dust settles.

This is just an example to show that the specific action of “one-year supply of food” provides survival and benefits for a number of scenarios. There are other important actions that help in multiple scenarios: having a few weapons, living in a far away place, having silver and gold coins for barter, learning how to garden or other skill for living without modern infrastructure, books, medicines, and many more.

And there are a number of activities, such as gaining skills for living off the land, that help us in our present situation, and not just in the by-and-by.

Enemies of the wheel of misfortune—risk assessment and mitigation

Risk assessment and mitigation will provide us with the greatest bang for our buck, the best return on our valuable time. With these tools we can determine which things have the greatest probability and concentrate on those.

Shamelessly selling my own product

The multiple-criteria, multiple-option program will prove helpful in sorting out the best and worst candidates for consideration. The program will assist in culling out the unlikely and unimportant.

This program is free with the instructions on how to use the program in an earlier blog. The link to the downloadable code is Google Open Source Code: MCMO Decision Analysis Program. Help yourself.

The program for the program is complete and now available for download. Absolutely free. Licensed as a GNU public licensed software — meaning that anything this code is used in also becomes free and publicly available.

http://code.google.com/p/multiple-criteria-multiple-option-decision-analysis/downloads/list

This is a final and full version, albeit, a work in progress. This is not a trial version that frustrates you with partial functionality that ends up wasting your time. It does not have popups telling you that if you pay some extortion fee you can get the “real thing.”

Yes, there are a bunch of features that would sure be nice to have, like saving files and opening them. Next version. Wanting to get this program into the public’s hands, some important functions were relegated to a later time and place. Since I also use this program, I also want those extra features, too. They are coming down the pike.

A look at the finished product

First, we will select three options and all the criteria from the previous blog for the demonstration.

Options:

• Take a cruise
• Take a closer vacation to the beach or mountains or lake
• Visit some relatives

Criteria:

• Which will cost me the least (or put the most money in my pocket)?
• Which is something that more people in the family would like rather than only one or two individuals?
• Which would take the least time to get to and from, to avoid wasted travel time that takes away from our fun time?
• Which is the easiest to do, at hand?

When entered in the main form, the form looks like this:

First the criteria must be ranked. Click on the Rank Criteria button to get to the voting form for all criteria.

How does the left item compare with the right item? Simply click the equal sign if they are about the same. Or click an arrow to show that one is favored over the other. The double arrow means the criterion is much more favorable than the one on the other side.

When every possible pair of criteria have been compared, the Finish button is enabled and a message that you are done appears as follows:

This takes us back to the main form. The two additional buttons enabled are to display the results of ranking the criteria, or to proceed further with ranking the options against the criteria.

The following shows the displaying of the ranked criteria.

Note that the most important criterion is what is the most fun to the most family members. In second place is the time required to get to and from the vacation destination.

Proceed to ranking the options. Compare every pair of options in light of the first criterion. Then compare every pair against the second criterion, and the third, and so on.

Once all the criteria have been used as the measure by which to compare all the pairs of options, the form indicates this with a message and the Finish button enabled.

Upon Finish, the main form now shows that the results can be displayed.

The results screen can then be selected.

Interpreting the results

The first table shows the ranking and weights assigned to the criteria. This is the same table displayed earlier. From this we see which criteria were more important and those not so important.

The second table is the result set for which we are looking. This is the final, calculated ranking for the options. It looks like the vacation to the beach, mountains or lake is the winner, but visiting the relatives is a close second. This means that either of these two are likely to be a good choice.

The last table shows each option by each criterion. This information is helpful to see where bumps and dips in the numbers occur.

Printing the results

To print the results, right click in the report window. Since this is a browser object, the options should be similar to those on your normal browser. Print… is usually one of the options.

The Main Form

The first step in decision analysis: obtain the criteria and the options. The program presents an opening form to do this. (Program will be ready for download by New Year’s day.)

Multiple Criteria, Multiple Options Decision Analysis, Main Form

What’s the difference between Criteria and Options?

One way to decide if something is a criterion or an option is this:

Criteria: attributes of things and actions, a comparative quality, a measure
Options: things or actions

Examples of Criteria used to compare two Options:

• Which costs less?
• Which takes more time?
• Which is easiest to do?
• Which is more pleasing to the eyes?
• Which is more colorful or tasteful?

Examples of Options (things or actions or resulting states of being):

• Buy my favorite new car
• Buy a used car
• Go back to school full-time
• Get a degree from online courses
• A new job
• This couch or that couch, or chair, or picture

After using this program for a while, you get a feeling for the difference between criteria and options. To my knowledge, there is no precisely scientific or mathematical separation of these. But it makes common sense that when comparing a thing or action or state with another, the basis of the comparison is some quality or measure that allows me to judge one from the other.

Criteria are all positive or negative

All criteria should lean the same way. That is, a higher value indicates desirability or undesirability across all criteria. For example, the two following criteria likely conflict–leaning in two different directions:

• Which item costs more?
• Which item will save me the most time?

This appears to say that both costing more and saving time are desirable. Usually, they are at odds with each other. Likely, the first criterion gets reworded as follows:

• Which item costs less?
• Which item will save me the most time?

Likewise, if you are trying to find the most undesirable options within a set of option (a form of negative analysis), then these criteria get reworded in the opposite direction so that the worst option has the highest value.

• Which item costs the most?
• Which item saves the least amount of time?

How to use the main form: the steps

The steps for using this initial form are as follows:

1. To enter a criterion, type it in the text box above the List of Criteria.
2. To remove a criterion from the list, double-click that specific criterion on the list.
3. To remove all criteria, click the Clear All Items button below the list.
4. Add and remove options in the same manner as done for Criteria.
5. If you wish to save your work to this point, (Step 2 on the form) click on Save Criteria and Options.
6. First rank the criteria (Step 3 or Rank Criteria on the form). This will take you to a different form where you select or rate each pair of criteria. This will be described in the blog on that form.
7. Sometimes, there are some criteria that have very low weights. Ranking options against these may be a waste of time. In such cases, return to the first three steps and cull out low value criteria from the rest. You may also want to re-rank the criteria again.
8. Once the criteria are ranked and assigned their weights, you can then rank the options against each criterion (Step 4 or Rank Options for Each Criterion on the form).

The print function is available through the File menu item. There are several reports that are helpful.

• Ranked criteria report: This report lists the criteria by weight in descending order. This report lets you know if there are some criteria that are just not important enough to include when ranking the options later.
• Ranked options report: This report lists the options by summary weights in descending order. This is the summary of all your work and the most important of the reports.
• Ranked options report with details: This report contains the summary report, but contains the weights for each criteria. You can see if there are bulges and dips in the numbers, and you can see what separates the winners from the losers.

A Caveat

This program is for information and entertainment. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the comparisons, weights, and process. However, this is only for information. You are responsible for any decisions you make should you base some of your rational on the reports produced here.

And I can’t refund your purchase price. This program will be free.

When searching for the one-year supply of food, a Google search surprisingly turned up some mainstream stores. Normally, this search provided links to suppliers related to one or another religious group. But this time, Google listed places I have shopped.

To explain, I’m not in the market for a one-year supply of food. However, being interested in preparedness and surviving natural or man-made disasters often led to searches for “one-year food supply.”

This latest recent search identified the of the most popular warehouse clubs. And both are really carrying a one-year supply of food.

The good and the bad of mainstream: anyone want a rat

On one hand, we can take comfort that a disaster preparedness food supply is locally available and at a reasonable price. On the other hand, seeing such things in the store is somewhat unsettling.

Consider the rat. In normal times when there’s plenty of food and life is going well, the rat is a pest. Except for pet stores, no other stores sell rats. But let a famine or disaster wipe out the food supplies. In times of famine the butcher shop may carry rats. And rats become a delicacy at premium prices.

In times of plenty, people shop for food weekly and some even daily. When mainstream stores carry long-term food supplies, there must be a market for it. People are thinking about survival in some form or other. People are worried that the food won’t be on the store shelves for their frequent trek to the grocery.

Worrying about the infrastructure

Several years ago, the Southeast experienced a bad drought. The dryness and lack of water was disconcerting. Upon searching for information on droughts, one article showed that this area typically has a major drought every 10 years or so. Our droughts are a common and expected occurrence and we needed to take this into consideration.

The Atlanta metropolitan area has grown so much over the past many years. The water usage and infrastructure to support water supply was fine for most of the time. However, it wasn’t prepared for handling the drought in conjunction with the large growth of the city. What a collision. Some estimated the city had only six weeks of water left when the rains returned. Six more weeks of drought and we would have been out of water.

Imagine a major American city running out of water. How does a city of this size cope without water? Not very well.

A sign of the time

Now that the mainstream stores are carrying the one-year supply of food, I am both glad and worried. Guess I will save up my money and get me one of those, just in case. And hope I never have to rely on it.

A number of people wanted a spreadsheet that they could start with for analysis with the multiple-criteria weighted-ranking decisions. You can now download a spreadsheet for this purpose.

The spreadsheet is provided for informational purposes only. Let the buyer beware. I am responsible for nothing, although I take credit for creating this.

Multiple-criteria weighted-ranking spreadsheet (Excel 2007/2010 format)

The way to use this spreadsheet is covered in earlier blogs. However, a few remarks may help.

• This is created for up to 10 criteria and up to 10 options.
• Data is entered in the green blocks. The yellow blocks identify the automatically calculated items.
• If you have less than 10 options, just don’t entere any title or name in the remaining option headers. Likewise, the remaining criteria can be left as-is. I think that the statistics can then be ignored for those options not used. And the unused criteria may average itself out. — But I haven’t experimented with this method.
• For better statistics, enter in all the options and criteria. Then delete all the data or forumulas (not the rows or cells) for the unused criteria. Do the same with unused options, delete formulas but do not delete rows or cells.

This should give you a start. The previous blogs provided details on the steps and how to use this for analysis.

Enjoy!