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Running Farmville through Operations Reseach

Be sure to check out Tallys Yunes’ post on getting rich in Facebook’s Farmville via linear programming (following up on Mark Newheiser’s post). I think I’ll add this to the introductory course we teach our MBAs. Now if only we could cut down on the lonely animals from other’s farms that hang out [...]

Dead words in operations research

Sometime ago, when writing about Stafford Beer, I wrote:
Stafford Beer was one of the founding people in British operational research. He was one of the people who saw operational research in World War II and adapted those methods to work in practice, in his case at United Steel, followed by some consulting companies. He ended [...]

Winston, Sports, Statistics, and Decision Making

Wayne Winston, author of famous textbooks in operations research and a new book on math and sports,  and sports statistics/decision making guru, has a column in the Huffington Post, which certainly catapults him to rock-star status in the operations research world.  The entries are also posted on his personal blog, where he posts additional material.
His [...]

A Belated Happy Birthday to the Blog!

This blog was begun on October 24, 2005, so it had its fourth birthday a couple of weeks ago.  As my family knows, I am not great with birthdays, so I managed to forget it.  But, better late than never, Happy Birthday to Michael Trick’s Operations Research Blog!
Here’s what I wrote last year about the [...]

Questions and answers in operations research?

Yiorgos Adamoploulos (@hakmem on twitter) pointed out StackExchange as a software system/social network system for questions on specialized topics.  He wondered if we need one in operations research. It seems to me that the “web 0.1″ version of this (Usenet groups) are pretty well dead:  the spam has completely taken over comp.constraints and is pretty [...]

Comment Spam

Brian Hayes, author of American Scientist’s computing science column and author of the bit-player blog, has a very nice article on issues with spam in the comments of his blog.  My blog is nowhere near as popular as Brian’s, but I too attract a reasonable amount of spam.  Some spam is easy:  autogenerated, lots of [...]

Models, Information, and Market Rationality

I have come across a couple of items recently involving market rationality and the ability of the market to reflect “unknown” information.  The first came in a conversation with my colleague Bryan Routledge.  Harkening back to the Challenger disaster, Bryan mentioned that “the market” quickly determined the company that caused the failure (all this is [...]

INFORMS Needs Writers

I recently had an exchange on twitter on why the OR community is not more effective on using twitter, facebook, and so on to get the story out. People like Laura McLay, Aurelie Thiele, and many others listed on the sidebar do have blogs and many of us twitter and facebook away, but we [...]

INFORMS Podcasts on Crunching the Numbers

INFORMS (and its Director of Communications, Barry List) has been putting out podcasts on operations research oriented topics every couple of weeks for the past few months.  The title of the series is “Science of Better:  Crunching the Numbers”.  According to the site, this is:
A series of podcasts with unexpected insights into the way that [...]

Careful with Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha is an interesting service. It is not a search engine per se. If you ask it “What is Operations Research” it draws a blank (*) (mimicking most of the world) and if you ask it “Who is Michael Trick” it returns information on two movies “Michael” and “Trick” (*). But [...]