Month: November 2009

Time to Improve Operations Research on Wikipedia

The wikipedia article on operations research needs help.  Let’s see how it begins (as of today:  it might change any moment now, given the way wikipedia works):

Operations research (N America) or Operational research (UK/Europe) “is a scientific method of providing executive departments with a quantitative basis for decisions regarding the operations under their control.”[1] Other names for it include:

  • Operational analysis (UK Ministry of Defence from 1962)[2]
  • Quantitative management[3]

“The historical development of Operational Research (OR) is traditionally seen as the succession of several phases: the “heroic times” of the Second World War, the “Golden Age” between the fifties and the sixties during which major theoretical achievements were accompanied by a widespread diffusion of OR techniques in private and public organisations, a “crisis” followed by a “decline” starting with the late sixties, a phase during which OR groups in firms progressively disappeared while academia became less and less concerned with the applicability of the techniques developed.”[4]. In the current phase, the increase in computing power coupled with the birth of related techniques like business intelligence (BI) and business analytics are leading a resurgence of OR.[5]

Oh great, we get a 1947 definition of operations research, as quoted on a 1954 dustcover. It is synonymous with “Quantitative Management” based on a single South African department brochure. It’s main interest is historical, though it might be resurging. By the way, it is the Canadian Operational Research Society and the Mexican Institute of Systems and Operational Research, so even the statement on where the various terms are used is incorrect. And “UK/Europe”? Wikipedia suggests there is a certain redundancy there.

After that, it is 2/3 history and 1/3 lists. This is not the way to introduce people to our field!

I have fought this fight before, and lost. So I do things like the INFORMS Resources Page (for at least a bit longer), this blog with its lists of other OR blogs, my twitter account, OR-Exchange (for questions and answers, and maybe announcements in OR), and other things to make the successes of our field better known (and maybe show an illustrative failure or two). I’m not willing to add wikipedia to my list.

Fortunately, others are willing to do so. Siamak Faridani posted a question on OR-Exchange asking how to improve the wikipedia article.

OR articles on Wikipedia obviously need some attention.

My question is how can we join forces to improve these articles?

I have made a project page on Wikipedia there is a “To do list” on that page in which you can insert the articles that need attention and request new articles. If you would like to help in edits you can also add your user name to the list of contributors and we will ask for your inputs as we work on articles.

Even if you do not like to edit Wikipedia articles please consider helping with populating the to do list and I will try to work on those articles as much as possible

By its nature, the wikipedia article cannot be the responsibility of one person. If you are looking for ways to help the field, I highly recommend (for you, not for me!) spending some time improving the articles on operations research and related topics, either on your own or in conjunction with Siamak.

Stephen Baker, ex-Business Week

Stephen Baker, a senior writer at Business Week, is part of the group that was not offered a job after that magazine was bought by Bloomberg. Steve’s journalism has been a tremendous boon to the world of operations research. His cover story “Math will Rock Your World” pointed out all the ways mathematics is affecting business and even mentioned operations research by name. He attended our conferences, and worked some of our stories into the bestselling book “The Numerati”.

So what is with the new Business Week? If I can quote Steve about trying to sell the world we live in to the mainstream business press:

At the O.R. conference (the association is called INFORMS), there were far too many interesting presentations for one person to cover them all. The people behind operations at Intel, IBM, the Army, Ford and plenty of others provided inside looks. Beat reporters of those companies could have feasted on these lectures. But they weren’t there.

Why? The press covers news, stocks, companies and personalities. But try pitching a cover story on operations. People think it’s … boring.

Baker goes on to explain why it is really not boring and is really important. But the Bloomberg people obviously didn’t read far enough or weren’t creative enough to understand what Baker provides.

I’m pretty darn confident that Steve will end up OK (or better than OK!): he is a fine writer and an intelligent man (if you have a job for him, run and get him: here is his resume). I am much less confident how Business Week will end up.

Journal Impact and Costs

I am a co-editor of a “new” journal Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science published by Elsevier. I’ll write more about that journal and my thoughts about it in another post. I expect to be blasted by some people whose opinions I value about teaming up with a commercial publisher, but I did have my reasons!

I spent time this past weekend in Phoenix at an Elsevier editors conference where there were about 70 editors from a wide variety of fields (lots of medicine and chemistry). During the weekend, there were a number of presentations on things like blogging and electronic paper handling and so on. One session I enjoyed very much was about bibliometrics: measures to determine the impact of a journal. I had kinda known some of this before, but it was interesting to get a synopsis of how these things work.

The standard “impact factor” comes from the different companies that have owned the Science Citation Index and now the ISI Web of Science (Thomson Reuters). Briefly, if you want to calculate the impact factor (IF) of a journal in 2005, you look at the 2005 articles from that journal, add up all the references to those articles published in any ISI journal in 2006 and 2007 (no later), and divide by the number of articles in 2005. There are lots of details to argue over: what is an “article”? What is a “reference”? What journals should be ISI? and so on.

Even the basic structure certainly gives one pause in determining impact. This definition of impact means that all the wonderful citations I get for my old papers on voting in Social Choice and Welfare, a set of papers from the late 80s that are currently in vogue, are never measured for the impact of that journal for any year: they fall outside a two year window. For some very fast moving fields (say, genetics), this two year window might be appropriate. But for others, including operations research I would say, this window seems to measure the wrong things, ignoring the peak for many papers.

Further, there are lots of ways to manipulate this value (I will point out that the Elsevier presenter explicitly stated that journals should not do anything specifically to manipulate any impact factor). I have heard of journals that, upon accepting a paper, provide authors with a list of reference suggestions from that journal within the two year window. “No pressure, mate, but you might consider these references… helps us out a lot, you know!” Pretty slimy in my view, but it is done.

What I found most interesting is that there are other measures of impact, some of which seem to be gaining traction. The most intriguing is a measure that uses the same eigenfactor approach that Google uses in its PageRank. Imagine journals as a network, with edges giving the number of times an article in a journal references the other journal. This gives an influence diagram, and eigenvalues give (in a well defined way) the importance of a node relative to number of references.

It is certainly not clear that number of references is a good proxy for influence, and not every reference is the same. Consider “In the fundamental work of [1], disproving the absurd argument of [2], which built on [3,4,5,6,7,8]”: all those articles are referred to once, but I know which one I would like as my article. But, if you are going to base a measure on counts of references, I would certainly trust an eigenvalue-based approach over a pure counting approach.

The approach, outlined in detail at eigenfactor.com, has the further advantages that it uses a five year window and it ignores journal-level self-citations. The five-year window gives more time for citations to count towards a paper, without giving a huge advantage to older journals. Ignoring self-citations gets rid of the easiest method for a journal editor manipulation. So I like it!

The site eigenfactor.com lets you look at journal eigenfactor and per article influence rankings. There are a couple of different classifications of journals, so let’s look at JCR’s “Operations Research and Management Science” list. The 2007 per article rankings are:

  1. Management Science
  2. Mathematical Programming
  3. Operations Research
  4. Mathematics of OR
  5. Transportation Science

Eigenfactor scores (which measures the overall impact of the journal) moves things around a bit:

  1. European Journal of Operational Research
  2. Management Science
  3. Mathematical Programming
  4. Operations Research
  5. Systems and Control Letters

EJOR is on top since the journal has a good per article impact factor and publishes lots of articles.

INFORMS Journals do pretty well with 4 of the top 5 in the first list and 3 out of five of the second.

What is really neat is to look at the cost to get those eigenfactor values. It would cost $93,408 to subscribe to the 58 journals (this is the individual journal costs: undoubtedly the large publishers bundle their subscriptions, as does INFORMS). Paying the $656 (in 2007) for Management Science is 0.7% of that cost but gets you more than 10% of the total eigenfactor in this field. Subscribing to the top 11 journals in this ranking would cost $5723 (and get you 7 INFORMS journals) and get you more than 1/3 of the total eigenfactor. Adding the 12th would get you European Journal of Operational Research but at $5298 would practically double your cost while increasing your total eigenfactor amount from 37.8% to just 49.4%. Other amazing prices are with Engineering Optimization that costs $4338 for much less than 1% of the field’s eigenfactor and International Journal of Production Research which costs $7684, albeit for 8% of the total eigenfactor.

Now, there are lots of caveats here. Most importantly, while reference numbers are a proxy for impact, they are not equivalent. If you have a paper that applies operations research to a real problem, publishing in Interfaces might have the most impact, even if the journal is ranked 21st by eigenfactor. And when it comes to costs, I am not sure anyone really pays “list price” in this day of aggregation (and prices for individuals are much lower for many journals).

When you are arguing with your librarian on which journals to cut (or, more rarely, add), you might want to look at some of this data. And might I suggest the full suite of INFORMS journals? At $99 for an individual for online access (and under $5000 for institutions), this should give you the recommended daily allowance of eigenfactors at a very affordable price. Makes a great stocking stuffer at Christmas!

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 up founding many aspects of systems science and “cybernetics” (a term I rarely hear these days).

Turns out I was right about “cybernetics”. PhD Comics (a must read for both doctoral students and those who supervise them, live with them, parent them, or otherwise have to interact with them) has a nice graph that shows how often “cybernetic” shows up in academic paper titles (upper right, with “robot”):

Cybernetics didn’t have much of a heyday, and that was long ago. I wonder what other operations research words have come and gone. Anyone up for some hours with ISI Web of Knowledge?

Winston, Sports, Statistics, and Decision Making

winstonWayne 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 recent post is on a controversial decision that the coach, Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots (US football) made yesterday.  With just a couple of minutes left to play, Belichick decided to try for a first down on 4th and 2 deep on his own 28 yard line.  If the Patriots had made the first down, the game would be over with a Patriots win.  If they failed (which they did), the Indianapolis would need to move the ball about 30 yards in two minutes to score and win (which they did).  The alternative would have been to punt, which would then require Indy to move perhaps 60 or 70 yards in that time to score.

The vast majority of coaches in this situation would punt.  Winston suggests Belichick made the right move, given that Indianapolis had a high probability of scoring even from 60 or 70 yards (Indianapolis has the quarterback and team to do so).  The result is pretty clear:  as long as you believe that Indianapolis had at least a 50-50 shot of scoring after the punt (and in many cases with a lower probability than that), you should go for it.  Advanced NFL Stats has a slightly different take on this, with the same conclusion.

I think it is important to note that Winston doesn’t just do statistics.  He combines it with decision making.  Sometimes that decision making is reasonably straightforward but unintuitive (like the above), and sometimes it is more complicated.

Winston has done a lot to bring clarity to the complicated world of basketball statistics and decision making.  I look forward to seeing what he has to say to Huffington’s huge audience.  And maybe have him sneak in the phrase “operations research” once in a while.

A Belated Happy Birthday to the Blog!

FourthBirthdayThis 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 statistics on the blog:

I posted 133 times in the year (up from 83, and well past my goal of 2/week).  I’ve had 237 comments in the last year, up a lot from 69, so you too have been much more active!  I get about 3500 visitors per month (up from 2000), and, new this year, Feedburner tells me about 450 people subscribe through google reader and other rss feeds (that don’t typically hit my server).  Spam is running at about 10/day, but my system catches it, so it is no big deal.

Number of posts in the last year was 134 (my goal was 150, so I fell a bit short).  The blog got 420 comments, so you all are doing your job!  Spam is up to about 35 or so per day, with a peak of 560 on one day in early October.  I’m up to 11,500 visitors per month, with a peak day in October of 5300 visitors (due to a nice posting on reddit).  Feedburner gives me about 850 subscribers through rss feeds.

Thanks to all of you who read the blog and commented on it.  It is encouraging to get feedback about what I write.  And thanks especially to all those writing away in the blog-OR-sphere:  it is great to be part of this community.  Here is to another year of exciting news from the world of operations research!

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 high on sci.op-research (no, we don’t need your stinking solution manuals, thanks).  So where to go?  I get some questions as comments on my blog posts:  I try to respond to them before I delete them but that only gives one person’s views.

Let’s find out if there is an interest.  Have questions (or want to give answers) in operations research?  Check out the OR Exchange! No guarantees on how long this will be up:  if there is no interest, down it goes.  But let’s see!

I’ll probably be fiddling with the format of the system over the next few days (I need better graphics!), but that shouldn’t affect the questions and answers.

Gerry Thompson has Passed Away

Gerry Thompson, a colleague of mine at the Tepper School, has passed away.  Gerry was one of the founders of operations research, having done significant work dating back to the 1950s.  Much of Gerry’s early work was in game theory (particularly work with Kemeny).  Over time, Gerry moved into pure operations research and did a lot of the early work in scheduling and project planning.  I just reread his 1960 paper on production-scheduling problems, and it is full of fascinating results that I would have just put down as folklore.  I particularly liked the computational results section of this paper, where computers were used long before they could do very much.  So Gerry and his coauthor simply generated 200 random schedules for a problem, used their results to convert the schedules into “active” schedules (no left-shifting of jobs) and proposed using the best of those 200.  This is a very good idea that presages many current algorithms based on multiple restarts of metaheuristic approaches.

Gerry was a wonderful colleague to have.  He was quiet and thoughtful but he brought a host of experience to the issues we faced here.  For many years, our MSIA (Masters of Science in Industrial Administration, now called MBA) students learned linear programming on their own with a computer-aided system that Gerry developed.  Gerry received an award for this in 1976:  I think some readers might be surprised that computers were widespread enough at the time to allow for such innovation!

A few years ago, Gerry’s former doctoral students put on a conference for him for his 70th birthday.  There is a volume that came out of that which includes a tremendous appreciation by Bill Cooper.  There are a number of wonderful stories about Gerry.  Let me recount one about Fred Glover (now rightfully one of the most distinguished and honored researchers in operations research):

Only one example is the case of Fred Glover, who is now regarded as an outstanding contributor to areas such as integer programming and combinatorial optimization.  Less well known is that Fred was assigned to me [Cooper] as a research assistant, partly because it was hoped that I could do something for this somewhat lackluster student when he was a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA).  I could therefore witness “up close” the transformation that occurred as Fred “came alive” not because of me but because of the course he took from Gerry  in the then new area of integer programming.  It was almost as though a different person emerged under the same name, as Fred excitedly began to work in integer programming and went o to make numerous contributions in his own right, and then continued to affect otheers as both a teacher and a researcher.  Among those who were thus affected by this transformation I can include myself, as I began to realize how much a teacher could (and should) accomplish with the right “alchemy on any student”.

Gerry had a tremendous career with 13 books and well over 160 articles, along with an extremely impressive set of graduate students he affected.  Without Gerry, it is likely that operations research would not have been embedded in GSIA (now the Tepper School of Business), so my own path would have been quite different.

Gerry kinda-retired a few years ago, but I would still see him in the building once in a while.  While age had slowed him, he still had the grace and kindness that I saw twenty years ago when I was an over-active interviewee for a faculty position here.

I will miss Gerry, and my heart goes out to his wife Dorothea and the rest of his family.

Added November 21

A memorial service for Gerald L. Thompson will be held at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, December 5, 2009, at the First Unitarian Church, corner of Morewood and Ellsworth Avenues in Shadyside, Pittsburgh.

Gerry is survived by his wife Dorothea M. Thompson; his sisters Margery Nagorny and Janet Lundmark; his daughters, Allison, Emily, and Abigail, and seven grandchildren.