Maps and Decisions: Part II, Ambiguity

Abstract

General Introduction

Tournament level duplicate bridge is a card game that is a sport. As is the case with sports, generally, there is an overseeing body: in basketball it is the National Basketball Association (NBA); in bridge it is the American Contract Bridge League for North America (ACBL) and the World Bridge Federation (WBF) for all nations in the world. The ACBL is a non-profit organization based in Memphis, Tennessee. The ACBL has about 150,000 members in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico. The WBF has more than 10 million members. The ACBL owns two buildings in Memphis where they house a large staff to maintain records, databases, publications, and a host of other operations associated with this business in the entertainment/sports sector of the business world. The second author of this work is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the ACBL. This Board, as do equivalent boards of other corporations, sets policy for the organization, makes decisions that affect the entire population of ACBL members, and oversees the work of the Chief Executive Officer. There are 25 Board members, each representing one geographical "district" of the ACBL. Thus, the members of the Board of Directors are also referred to, even though their charge is to represent the interests of the entire ACBL, "District Directors."

Ambiguity

The second author is the District Director for District 12, including all of the lower peninsula of Michigan, part of the upper peninsula, and northwestern Ohio. The map in Figure 1 shows the geographic extent of each of the districts with respect to the conterminous USA and suggests boundaries in Canada and Mexico (to see a full characterization, visit the ACBL website). In addition, Figure 1 shows the count of members for each district as of March 2005, according to ACBL databases. One reason for an individual district director to care about maps of all districts is individual district norms can be evaluated against national ones. A national view may help to put local issues in perspective. Decisions made at the national level affect individual districts. The idea is a straightforward one employed in many arenas: map the data at one scale in order to make cross-scale evaluations of various sorts. As long as the data and maps work well together, the process works well. When that mesh is not there, however, sometimes extra insight for decision-making comes from the mere process of mapping the data as the case below will show.