Although most pundits rely on polls to predict who will be our next President, the Presidential election is not a popularity contest--it's a partition problem contest. That is, the goal is to get a majority of electoral votes, and each state gives all of its votes to one of the two candidates (with a couple of exceptions). Most states are red or blue, but there are a few swing states, and who gets elected depends on which way these states swing.

A nifty OR model by Sheldon Jacobson (from the University of Illinois), Steven Rigdon and Ed Sewell (both from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) take advantage of the winner-take-all state elections to predict who will end up with the majority of electoral college votes. They use state polling information in a dynamic programming algorithm to determine the probability distribution for the electoral college votes using Bayesian estimators. As of now, the predict that Barack Obama will win the election with a probability of 87%.

Check out the model.

Some food for thought as the Olympics come to an end.

I enjoyed watching Usain Bolt break a few world records. If you're a geek like me, you noticed that he was actually faster when running 200m than when running 100m (looking at average speed), due to the time to accelerate. Freakonomics has posts on the average speed as well as extreme outliers in the 200m distribution.

Did the US win the medal count? Not is you only count gold medals or adjust for population and GDP (Read another ranking for GDP and population).

A couple of interesting tidbits on how OR can be used for HIV problems.

Newswise reports about research that sheds light on how to best use scarce resources for combating and treating HIV in resource-limited countries. The study was led by Wei Xiong of the Public Health Department at Weill Cornell Medical College and was published BMC Health Services Research.

OR was used to estimate that approximately 56,300 Americans were newly infected with HIV in 2006, which is 40% higher than CDC's former estimate of 40,000 new infections per year. The research was performed by a team that included Ed Kaplan and was published in JAMA. Articles about this research appeared in the NY Times, the WSJ, and AP.

I am curious of how the Olympics schedules were determined, especially for sports like swimming, in which athletes compete in multiple events. I became even more curious after seeing Michael Phelps's schedule. Sadly, revenue seems to be one of the top considerations when it comes to scheduling, since NBC admits this:

NBC was able to get the Olympics organizers to schedule most of the key finals early in the morning Beijing time -- for live primetime coverage on the East Coast.

If you find something, let me know! I've been enjoying watching the Olympics.

I read a review for Mama, PhD, a new book about having children in academia that I am looking forward to reading (You can read an excerpt). That prompted me to finally write about my birth experience and to now write about being a working mother.

First of all, I find all these books and articles on being a working mother overwhelmingly negative. Millions of women are working mothers. It's hard. We manage. Things could be better. It's not Doomsday. But if I wrote a book about it, I'd probably focus on the negatives as well. Things are not going to get better unless we talk about it.

Here is my brief take on motherhood and academia:

• Being an academic makes having a family easier (compared to working in industry) since our schedules are so flexible. Flexibility and being able to work from home occasionally make it all manageable.
  
• Things are changing rapidly. I am shocked to hear some of the horror stories about women having to teach a week after giving birth and not being offered leave. That isn't my experience at all. I applied for a Sloan Foundation grant to take a semester off from teaching, and other young academic mothers I know have received incredible amounts of support. Yeah, there are things that could improve, but I get the sense that maternity leaves are way better now than they were ten years ago (no, I never really left work behind, but that's another matter). Things seem to be much better in academia than industry.
  
• Things are changing rapidly for dads, too. Dads help out with child care and house work more than ever. They do like three times as much child care as dads a generation ago. Dads deserve support, encouragement, and praise.
  
• Mothers spend more time with their kids than they did a generation ago! (We're too hard on ourselves).
  

Here are my two big gripes about motherhood and academia:

• Day care. I worry more about day care than tenure. There are too few options for working moms, and it's hard to figure out child care when going to conferences. Very hard. Few universities have child care available, and universities that have evening classes ought to have options, since day cares close by 6pm. My baby can't crawl herself home and babysit herself while I am teaching.
  
• Nursing. If the thought of nursing makes you uncomfortable, stop reading now. Nursing at home is easy, nursing at work is more challenging. It's really hard to focus at a conference when I am struggling to discreetly take pumping breaks, pumping in a bathroom because someone turned my cozy private pumping room into a very public coat room, and constantly worrying about how I'm going to keep my milk cold before I get home when the hotel didn't provide the fridge I requested and the ice machine is broken. None of this is unique to academia, but we do have to do a lot of conference travel. It's all worth it, especially when babies stay so healthy (there are about 100 more benefits). I refuse to feel awkward about it, because hey, babies have to eat.
  

Mary Ann Mason (a dean at Berkeley) is an expert on women and men academics having children pretenure. The data shows that women who have children young don't get tenure and that men who have children pre-tenure are rewarded with tenure. In a talk I attended, Dr. Mason suggested that academic mothers tend to leave pipeline rather than get denied tenure, which is good news for those who stick with academia. Her data also showed that academic mothers average more than 13 hours of work per day (counting child care), which sounds about right. Don't get me wrong, motherhood is infinitely rewarding, but it is also a lot more work than I imagined. She wrote a book about this that I haven't read yet, but if it's anything like her talk, it will be great. You can also read her articles Do Babies Matter? and Do Babies Matter II?.

As many of you know, I recently had a baby. I wanted to get my act together before blogging about the OR of pregnancy, labor, and delivery. This is eight months overdo, but better late than never. I apologize if this is TMI, but I think it's important to write about work-life balance.

As far as delivery goes, trusting one's body seems to work best. I had my second natural childbirth with the help of the wonderful midwives at MCV. I'm normally all for conventional medical care, but a conventional labor and delivery yields depressing outcomes. For example, the rate of Cesareans is now at an all-time high of 31%. The rate of pregnancy-related deaths has also risen from a low of 7 per 100,000 in the 90's to 14 out of 100,000 in 2004, which has been blamed on unnecessary Cesareans. There's no shame in an epidural, but it's best to go without one if you can manage. You'll also get the best natural high of your life. I recommend seeing the movie The Business of Being Born to find out more about natural childbirth. It is a fascinating guide to prenatal care and birth. If you're like me and embrace the radical philosophy that pregnancy and labor should viewed as a natural and healthy part of life--not as a disability--you will love it (Yeah, some pregnancies have severe complications, but I'm talking about normal pregnancies).

I was looking forward to being pampered during my hospital stay, and although the staff were fantastic, operations at the hospital needed some improvement. First, a room wasn't ready for me in the newborn ward, which meant that my daughter was moved to the nursery while I waited in the delivery room. Because of hospital security, babies could not be taken from the newborn ward without setting off umpteen alarms, and I could not walk around the hospital by myself after going through labor and wearing a nightgown that didn't tie shut (although I contemplated it. I was flying on a natural high after the delivery and my inner mama bear was also released during delivery, which was prompting me to do all sorts of over-protective things and get huffy with any nurse that stood in my way).

When the hospital runs out of capacity in the newborn ward, they procure space in other places throughout the hospital. This is a great use of resources, in theory, but has bad consequences for mother and baby bonding and feeding because of hospital security. Luckily, a newborn room became available quickly, and I enjoyed a stay with my daughter sleeping by my side. There are several OR research efforts that address hospital bed issues, and I now truly understand the complexity of these applications (Linda Green wrote an excellent NY Times article on this issue).

Hospital meals were also a disappointment. I had to put my order in the day before, which meant that I couldn't order meals the first day of my hospital stay. I had to eat leftover food that was delivered to the maternity ward that no one else wanted to eat. As a vegetarian, my options were further limited. The cafeteria messed up the rest of my food orders as well. Luckily, a very patient hospital employee tracked down many fresh fruit plates and vegetarian sausage (which is surprisingly delicious!) for me. I still feel ill when thinking about all the inefficiencies with food delivery. There has to be a better way.

My daughter's name starts with an "E," which apparently means that she won't do as well in school if we gave her a name that starts with an "A." But she's now eight months old and is developing perfectly, so I'm pretty sure we haven't scarred her for life.