Punk Rock Operations Research

How does one even begin to compare point guards to centers to power forwards? The Player Efficiency Rating (PER) developed by John Hollinger to compare basketball players' impacts based on the amount of time they play. The equation "sums up all a player's positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player's performance."

PER accounts for

• the amount of time each player is on the court,


• the team's pace, so players on slow-paced teams aren't penalized by scoring fewer points per minute, for example,


• a league-wide average of 15,


• a number of different ways a player can make an impact, such as points scored, free throws, rebounds, and assists.

What is interesting is that PER can be used to compare players in different positions (e.g., centers to guards), unlike other metrics such as the quarterback rating for football. So it can actually compare apples to oranges! I tip my hat to PER. Hollinger writes:

Bear in mind that this rating is not the final, once-and-for-all answer for a player's accomplishments during the season. This is especially true for players -- such as Bruce Bowen and Jason Collins -- who are defensive specialists but don't get many blocks or steals.

Like any formula for capturing performance, PER doesn't capture the intangibles such as leadership, clutch performance, and the "It factor," but it's nifty nonetheless. And it appears to be much better than alternative ranking systems (that don't try to compare players of different positions).

FYI, the NBA playoffs are underway. Yeah, I didn't notice either.

The AP published a creepy article about who should live and who should die in a pandemic. Although a task force of physicians made the list of recommendations, this is ultimately a resource allocation problem.

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way.

The task force requires hospitals with ICUs be proactive in their preparations for pandemics, which mitigates some of the need to decide who will die (and some of the creepiness factor).

[T]he task force proposes that hospitals with ICUs aim to meet several standards, including the ability to provide sufficient critical care for at least triple their usual ICU capacity and sustain this surge for up to 10 days without external assistance. Suggested surge capacity requirements include stockpiling medical equipment, including mechanical ventilators; optimizing medication; designating auxiliary critical care areas; and augmenting critical care staff.

In a resource allocation problem such as this one, letting physicians make the tough calls is important, but I wouldn't want to be on the task force. We live in a world with no blank checks. Everyone has limited resources. We in the OR community need to engage experts in other domains to work on the relevant problems and explore some of the tough issues in a systematic way. I'm not going to volunteer to tackle this problem, but a lot of people are making a difference by applying OR to catastrophic emergencies.

A colleague of mine lent me a book on mathematical poetry called Uneasy Relations by Michael Bartholomew-Briggs. It includes many operations research poems including "Constraints" and "Steepest Descent." According to the back of the book,

Uneasy Relations is a sequence of poems playing with mathematical ideas. Non-specialists may choose to murmur them as zen-like meditations. For readers of a curious disposition, notes are provided that may be no less informative than those at the end of The Waste Land. The poems also touch on myth and fable, the arts of prediction and preventive maintenance, hill-walking, portfolio theory, sexual politics and the works of Edgar Allen Poe...Poetic ambitions arrived as part of a mid-life crisis and this chapbook is an attempt to bring together the two halves of [Bartholomew-Briggs's] brain.

This is my favorite poem:

Mission Statement

Optimization
means a quest for best answers
with the least trouble.

Optimism means
believing both objectives
are achievable.

M. Bartholomew-Briggs. Uneasy Relations, Hearing Eye, London. ISBN 978-1-905082-31-5

I love coupons! What's not to love -- they are free money for things I buy anyway. Seeing a coupon fulfill its destiny brings me much joy. No one enjoys double coupons and coupon calculus more than me.

When cutting coupons in last Sunday's paper, I found a new kind of coupon. You can get a free box of Post Honey Bunches of Oats if you send Post five cereal coupons for competing cereals. This seems wrong. Usually companies give you coupons in the hope that you will buy their products. I have never seen a company conditionally offer a coupon if you are willing to sacrifice some of your other coupons. It makes me ill just thinking about wasting perfectly good coupons!

This tactic by Post goes against everything I love about coupons. Coupons are free and available to those of us with organization and foresight. Only offering me a coupon by taking some of my coupons away seems to fly in the face of free trade or something. It totally disrespects of the spirit of coupons.

However, I must admit that my technical side appreciates this tactic by Post: giving an incentive for buying their product only if shoppers are willing to give up some of their likelihood of buying competing products. I'm sure those who know more about incentive schemes and marketing have much more to say about whether this is a good approach. Still, I hope it's not a trend.

This is a picture of my Grandma's antique calculator, a TI-1200. Grandma used this calculator for over 30 years! Her TI-1200 was made circa 1975, which isn't as old as I thought, but still pretty old considering that pocket calculators only became popular in the early 1970s. It's so old that there are instructions on the back (see picture below), illustrating how to do basic calculations, and it was assembled in the USA.

We've come a long way since 1975! It's amazing that we put a man on the moon before there were calculators. Now, most software packages for solving OR problems can be run on a desktop, and there open source resources for solving OR problems.

One of my regrets in life was that I never learned how to use a slide rule. My Dad tried to teach me how to do math with his slide rule, but I used the slide rule as a straight edge until it was no longer usable (Sorry, Dad). I promise to keep Grandma's calculator safe.

Talk about local improvement gone amok! I shouldn't have a hybrid car--I'd be too busy optimizing my fuel efficiency to pay attention to the road.

The Washington Post reports about the cool new trend of optimizing fuel efficiency, which also helps the environment. Since hybrid car drivers get instant feedback on their fuel efficiency, they are permanently changing their driving habits to save fuel.

Best of all, this is an opportunity for us OR practitioners to explain what optimization means to people (although most optimization applications are much harder than optimizing fuel efficiency!)

With skyrocketing sales of hybrid cars, reusable cloth grocery bags, and energy-efficient light bulbs, I just haven't been able to figure out why laundry racks and outdoor clotheslines have been hard to find in stores. After all, dryers use an enormous amount of energy. Where I live, using clotheslines is against my subdivision's rules, yet every Saturday, I hang my laundry out to dry in the sun and no one complains. It's effective, environmentally friendly, and free.

The New York Times writes about this very issue--I'm not the only one who's frustrated!

Tumble dryers, like sport utility vehicles, are verging on an image problem: once symbols of economic success, they have morphed into icons of environmental disregard. The gas guzzlers of household appliances, electric dryers use about as much energy as a refrigerator — consuming more than 6 percent of household energy — even though they are used only intermittently. ...

Ontario is among a number of places that is considering striking down the clothesline bans that have been common in North America and parts of Europe, arguing that they are environmentally irresponsible. Laws seeking to overturn clothesline bans are now pending in Connecticut, Vermont and Colorado.

Making outdoor clotheslines illegal is flabbergasting. I'm not a criminal, I'm just frugal. I know clotheslines can be an eyesore when people leave their clothes outside for days, but an outright ban seem like overkill. And a little classist. Can everyone really afford a dryer? I find that hard to believe. I suppose drying clothes indoors is an option, but that doesn't work so well if you have a lot of laundry.

This post turned out to be more of a rant and didn't really have an OR tie-in. Not that I have the right to complain. I always forget to bring my to bring my reusable cloth shopping bags from the car into the grocery store (I have some serious eco-guilt issues). But I try to do my part.

6/2 Update:

No, I could not find a clothesline, but I am happy with the laundry rack I purchased. It was a bargain a bargain after I used a coupon.

Hotels constantly guilt trip us to reuse our towels and sheets to save energy (naturally, it totally works on me). They cite the cost to wash laundry but I have never seen a hotel also include dryer costs. The omission intrigues me. Maybe washing costs dwarf dryer costs? Even so, dryer costs must add up.

AAA announced that Virginia families will spend $246 more on gas this summer. OK, fine. How did they get this amount? It appears that AAA assumed that each vehicle gets 20 mpg and that everyone will drive the same amount as last summer. They compared this summer's average gas price of $3.89 to last summer's gas prices.

My main problems with this:

• Average fuel economy (mpg) increases every year. In 2006, the average car and truck had fuel economies of 22.4 mpg and 18 mpg (up from 22.1 mpg and 17.7 mpg in 2005). (From BTS).

• With gas prices this high, people will drive less. In 2006, the average car traveled 12K miles, compared to 12.1K miles in 2005 and 12.5K miles in 2004 (From BTS).

• Families will likely all pile into a Honda Civic for a family trip rather than the Ford Excursion, so even when families are driving, they may be driving a more fuel-efficient car.

• Gas prices are not static. Gas prices typically increase from Memorial Day to Labor Day each year, and I'm not sure that they increase at the same rate year to year since they are a function of several key outside factors.
  

Comparing apples to apples is ideal, but in the case of fuel consumption, there is a definite system effect. People are changing their driving habits, so comparison to old driving habits is very difficult. Sometimes comparing apples to oranges is the best thing to do. I couldn't find a AAA report out there, so maybe they did a more rigorous analysis, but I'm not holding my breath.

6/5 Update: No sooner did I write this that I read that Americans are indeed driving less. The US Federal Highway Administration reported that Americans drove 4.3% less in March 2008 than they did in March 2007 (about 11 billion fewer miles total).