For a number of reasons, I am moving Punk Rock Operations Research to Wordpress, which will hopefully allow be to build a better blog. All the posts have been moved, and the new site is ready to go. Go here to visit the new site. Please update your bookmarks and rss feed.
You can also check out Punk Rock Operations Research on Facebook. I'm new to Facebook, but perhaps some of you can help me carve out a place on it for OR.
"To understand climate change in all its full complexity, you need to think about it at the level of a complex system. Who would have thought that energy policy would have implications for nutritional status in Mexico. But it did. Because as we shifted to corn-based ethanol, corn prices rose, and that had implications for the availability of food for people who were nutritionally insecure in Mexico. Without thinking about the system at that complex a level, it's impossible to understand it fully or to get the best solutions" --Howard Frumkin
This is a great sales pitch for operations research, but too bad operations research isn't mentioned by name.
This is from a five minute podcast with Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health in Atlanta, who wrote "Climate Change and the Health of the Public" (with Anthony J. McMichael and Jeremy J. Hess) in the November 2008 volume of American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The full list of podcasts can be found here.
Operations research is needed for solving a spectrum of environmental problems. Check out GreenOR, a blog by Ian Frommer, for more.
I recently saw my first silent movie: The Passion of Joan of Arc. Much to my surprise, I loved it. I can't wait to see another (I've got my eye on Nosferatu). I loved just about everything about the Passion of Joan of Arc and I didn't miss the lack of dialogue. The movie translated just a few of the lines that were "spoken" during the movie. Much of the dialogue was left for the viewer to "hear" by reading lips and body language. The acting and camera work conveyed the emotion of Joan of Arc's short life and trial, and it packed an incredible punch (Roger Ebert explains why this movie is a masterpiece much better than I can).
After seeing the film, I reflected on movies and technology. Movies are not just a product of technology but are also shaped by technology. Each time that movie technology changes, the movie experience fundamentally changes. Because special effects and dialogue are so easy to put in movies these days, there is too much CGI and talking to have an emotionally moving moviegoing experience most of the time. Most movies fail to convey what they really should be conveying, and as a result are flat and uninspiring (There are plenty of exceptions, and a quick glance at my Netflix history includes Tully, Gone Baby Gone, Lars and the Real Girl, Bella, and Juno).
The same can be said about operations research. We work in a technology-driven field, where we rely on software to do much of our work for us. Sometimes we rely on software too much and on good modeling too little. A IIE blog entry writes about blindly using software as a quick fix. When computing power wasn't very powerful, making a tight, efficient formulation was necessary for finding optimal solutions. I hope we haven't lost some of the art of OR.
This past week, I have been working on a research problem that is formulated as an integer program. I was curious to see what the optimal solutions look like, so I popped it into CPLEX. After letting CPLEX churn away on it for more than 72 hours, I felt a little guilty that I didn't spend more time to make an elegant and efficient IP formulation. There may be a great theoretical research problem to work on, but alas, I know that it was just laziness. Just because computing is cheap and easy doesn't mean that I shouldn't pay attention to theoretical aspects. Although to be fair, I thought there was a good chance that CPLEX would very quickly find an optimal solution, which offered little incentive to consider various formulations. We don't want to lose sight of important theoretical contributions just because it is easier to focus on computational challenges in OR. With journals like Mathematics of Operations Research that publish theoretical contributions to OR and journals like INFORMS Journal on Computing that publish truly innovative computing research, I am not worried for our field. But I will sit down and try to make my a masterpiece rather than let CPLEX churn on endlessly (Eventually, mbuilding had a power outage, so I never found the optimal solution with CPLEX. I wrote some code that takes just a couple of hours to run. It's not the most elegant algorithm, but an improvement).
With four days until the election, here are a few interesting articles and blog posts about the election that deal with numbers:
Now that I've had about a week to digest the 2008 INFORMS Annual Meeting, here are some of the highlights as I experienced them (in no particular order).
I am a bit biased, but I think the WORMS events at INFORMS were among the highlights of the conference. I am grateful to all 193 of you who came to the reception and the sold out lunch. The WORMS events have really grown since I first attended an INFORMS conference.
My favorite part of the INFORMS conference every year is the WORMS lunch, where the Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS is given. Dr. Candi Yano (of the University of California Berkeley) received the 2008 award, and although her speech was very modest, it was inspirational and moving. Like her predecessors, I am simply blown away by what she has done for women in OR/MS. Dr. Karla Bourland (of Overstock.com) gave a particularly moving speech that highlighted how she overcame “exogenous circumstances” to obtain a PhD at the University of Michigan while being mentored by Dr. Yano.
If you missed Dr. Lawrence Wein’s (of Stanford) Philip McCord Lecture, you missed a good one. He spoke about potential catastrophic emergencies, including anthrax attacks, pandemic flu outbreaks, fingerprinting at border crossings, and botulism in the milk supply (I’m glad I’m a soymilk drinker!). What was most interesting about Dr. Wein’s talk was that he focused on the back story that tied all of his homeland security articles together. The behind-the-scenes details of how he wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times, testified before Congress, and hobnobbed with the movers and shakers in the highest levels of government was fascinating. Talk about Doing Good with Good OR! My favorite nugget from the lecture: to prepare for an anthrax attack, buy N95 surgical masks and put pantyhose over your head (and surgical mask) in the event of an anthrax attack. You can read more about the lecture here.
The only sad part of the conference was that I lost a knitting needle.
ESPN is looking for ways to tell stories with numbers as well as it tells stories with pictures. Jeff Bennett and Noel Nash, two team members of ESPN Analytics, gave a talk and answered questions at the spORts business meeting at the INFORMS Annual Meeting. ESPN Analytics is composed of approximately 50 full-time and 90 part-time analysts that collect and tell stories with data. The most important task that these analysts face is collecting and maintaining the integrity of their data. Collecting data is a three step process that involves
“The amount of bad data out there is incredible,” said Nash. Maintaining the integrity of the data is challenging, especially since ESPN does not have ownership of all sports clips and can’t simply double check certain things (Ownership of sports broadcasting is a contentious issue). Obtaining the rights to digitally store broadcasts is important for analytics. Moreover, all sports data is rife with errors. Therefore, ESPN will produce different statistics than, say, Yahoo! Sports. College sports data is particularly rife with errors, and Bennett referred to college sports at the “Wild West” of sports data.
The Q&A session with Bennett and Nash was fascinating for those of us who enjoy the statistics as much as the highlight reel. They know that many teams (like the Boston Red Sox) have admitted using analytics to making business decisions while other teams (like maybe the New England Patriots) are secretive about their use of analytics. Since ESPN is owned by Disney, ESPN is working with the operations research analysts used by Disney to improve ways that they look at sports data. They remained optimistic that statistics and data analysis won’t ruin the fun of sports. Neither one offered an explanation why the Cubs haven’t won the World Series in 100+ years.
ESPN is hosting a Winning Formula contest similar to the Netflix prize for an algorithm to predict who will win sports games. Their pilot contest for college football offers a total number of $100K in prize money.
Operations Research is the science of better, yet few people know about this powerful and influential field. Come and learn about doing good with good OR.
Maintained by Laura McLay.
