Month: October 2007

Sheldon Jacobson and OR Videos

The October, 2007 issue of OR/MS Today has a short article by Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois on creating videos about the work he and his lab does. There are two videos: one on pediatric vaccines and one on airline security (I love the variety of work you can do in OR!) (they are a little slow-loading). It is too bad that they aren’t YouTube videos, where more people can see them (and the technology allows better incremental loading), but I am extremely impressed with the professionalism that went into the videos. Of course, it is not cheap:

When it comes to video production, you get what you pay for. As a rule, the videos cost $1,000 per minute of the final product. Using a cell phone camera to film yourself speaking about your work will result in predictably poor quality. The professionals in the video production industry — the producer, videographer and editor — have a wealth of experience (and some interesting tricks of the trade) to make you and your work come to life.

Check out Sheldon’s page for more about the impact this work (and others he has done) has had.

Happy Birthday to the Blog

This blog is now two years old. One year ago, I wrote

I’ve had 92 posts (93 counting this one) in that year, which seems like a reasonable number.I’ve had about 8000 visitors to the blog, which seems pretty good. Not up with the big boys (sites like BoingBoing) with millions of visitors, but ahead of lots of sites. The visitors have provided some commentary activity (69 comments, about half from me). I only have eight other blogs linking to me (ranking the blog 316,042 at Technorati) so I need to get the blogrolling thing going better.

It is amazing the amount of spam comments that are generated. My system has protection against such comments (Akismet) and it has caught 2,205 (!) spam comments.

My posting frequency is down a little bit with 83 posts (I’d like to get it up to a consistent twice per week) ; comments are up to 123, again half from me; 20 blogs point to me putting my Technorati ranking down to 415,686.   Average visitors per month has gone from 1000 to 2000.  The big increase: I received 38,000 (!) spam comments. Unbelievable!

The best thing: we are starting to see more blogs on OR. So check out the blogroll and spread the word!

Student finds small Turing machine

I wrote previously about a competition Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) had to show that a particularly small Turing Machine (the “2,3 Turing Machine”) is universal. Sure enough it is, as shown by a University of Birmingham (UK) student, Alex Smith, as reported in Nature. This machine, as shown in a diagram from Wolfram’s blog on the prize has just 2 states and 3 colors. It is certainly surprising that such a simple structure can compute anything any computer can!

I had hoped that operations research might be of help in this, but that does not seem to be the case.

Smith learned about Wolfram’s challenge in an Internet chat room and almost immediately went to work fiddling with the machine. After learning its behaviour, he set about proving that it was computationally equivalent to another type of simple, conceptual computer known as a tag system.

Mathematicians have already shown that tag systems can compute any problem, so proving the two were equivalent effectively proved the power of Wolfram’s machine. Smith’s proof is 44 pages long.

My (what is the word for “person who makes me jealous”? Hmmm… I’ll make up a word: “Jealous Idol”) jidol, Scott Aaronson managed to tear himself away from supermodels to provide a quote (albeit of a “raining on a parade” type):

The solution isn’t hugely relevant to modern computer science, says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Most theoretical computer scientists don’t particularly care about finding the smallest universal Turing machines,” he wrote in an e-mail. “They see it as a recreational pursuit that interested people in the 60s and 70s but is now sort of ‘retro’.”

Thanks to Kathryn Cramer for pointing out the result of this competition. She also has a very nice posting in her blog on visualizing the effect of the Federal Reserve rate cut, relevant to my previous posting on visualization.