Real-Life Decision Making
You have been accepted as a graduate student working for a prominent botanist.
He specializes in tropical plants. You will travel to exciting areas of the
world to study these plants. For your first field trip, you're going to visit
Costa Rica. You will spend two months gathering specimens of exotic plants
that are growing in the region.
One of your jobs is to help classify the plant specimens that the supervising
botanist finds. One day, the botanist brings you a number of different specimens
of plants. He thinks they might be members of the plant family known as heliconias.
Heliconias are beautiful plants with large, flowering shoots. Some people
call this plant "lobster claw."
Although the botanist thinks these plants are heliconias, he is not sure.
He asks you to do some preliminary research and let him know whether or not
the plants are likely to be heliconias. If they are not heliconias, he might
have discovered a new kind of plant that people don't know about. This would
be very exciting.
"I would write and publish articles about this plant, and maybe even get
to name it," he says.
"It is very important to confirm your findings," the botanist tells you.
This means you must check with two or more sources to be sure everyone says
the same thing
You get to work with your research. First, you study the plant, making
note of its characteristics. Next, you log on to the Internet, using your
mobile computer. You visit a couple of botanical websites. You are surprised
to find that the two websites give slightly different descriptions of heliconias.
You visit a third web site and discover that the information there is the
same as the information on the first website.
"Two out of three web sites give the same description," you think to yourself.
According to this information, the plant specimen you are examining is indeed
a member of the heliconia family.
You wonder if you have done enough research. You have many other specimens
to classify and hate to spend more time on this one. Doing additional research
will mean you will have to drive to a nearby university to access their library
resources. You would also visit their botanical gardens to compare your specimen
against the classified heliconias plants growing there.
What do you do?