Category: Blogs and Web

Operations Research and Wikipedia

As part of my overview talk, I took a look at Operations Research in Wikipedia. Seeing a lack of pointer to this blog (which I think is a pretty good OR blog!), I went to fix it, but decided I had a Conflict of Interest, so reverted. I’ll leave it to others to decide if it should be added.

Anyway, I have mixed feelings about the OR section in Wikipedia. The long section on World War II applications simply reinforces the absolutely incorrect belief that OR may have been useful historically but has been superseded by newer, flashier methods. They are great stories, but they don’t really reflect the reality of OR today. I would much rather have summaries of recent Edelman finalists.

Some of this may be more general problems of describing science on Wikipedia, as this Wired blog entry by Thomas Goetz discusses:

Wikipedia is, by all measures, one of the great accomplishments of the Internet Age. I’m willing to say it stands alongside Google, eBay, GoogleMaps, IMDB and Wired.com as among the greatest resources on the Web (ok, that last one is self-serving).

But boy, does it suck when it comes to science topics.

Of course, there is nothing to stop me from doing some editing of the OR entry(short of COI), but I am trying to cut down on things I am doing. Perhaps someone will take it on as a weekend project. And I think an OR-oriented Wiki would be a great project.

And another OR Blog

I realize have have neglected pointing to one of the oldest OR blogs, “FM Waves” by Francesco Marco-Serrano, which started in February 2005. With the subtitle of “The dark side of an operations researcher. Or how operations research can be a funny subject. Wanna join me?”, this is an eclectic, wide-ranging blog. Fracesco has taken up the Netflix challenge that I wrote about.

Laura McLay Blog

Looks like we are getting a few more operations research blogs. Laura McLay of Virginia Commonwealth has a “Punk Rock Operations Research” blog. I particularly like her post on “Humanitarian Logistics“, based on the work of Dave Goldsman of Georgia Tech. Here is an excerpt:

The talk summarized some of Dr. Goldman’s experiences in applying simulation to problems in health clinic management/flow and the spread of Guinea worms in Africa. Guinea worms are particularly interesting. Guinea worms are parasites that are contracted by drinking contaminated water. Once contracted, they eat their way out of the body and reproduce. Breaking the chain results in extermination. This can be easily accomplished by filtering water. However, because of the civil war in Sudan, many soldiers walk home, contracting Guinea worms along the way. Finding a strategy for targeting resources is important for completely eradicating the Guinea worm. The research was funded by the Carter Center, and apparently, Jimmy Carter’s work has nearly eradicated the Guinea worm already.

There was a series of articles in the New York Times a few months ago on the various parasites that plague the world: the pictures ruined a number of breakfasts at the Trick house. I am glad to see that OR may be helping with this problem.

Good to see the blog, and into the “blogroll” it goes!

Math, Poker, and Perfectly Reasonable Deviations

The Math and Poker blog is one I like to go to periodically (not the least because I am part of his blogroll). The thing I like best is the use of simple probability/queueing/stochastic systems to point out the misconceptions of many gamblers. A little probability goes a long way, but it seems that many gamblers are not willing to even take the first steps in probability theory.

A recent post on that blog pointed me to Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, a blog on “random ramblings on science, technology, and other such stuff”. A recent entry there reviewed the book Convex Optimization by Boyd and Vandenberghe. An excerpt from his review:

It’s a wonderful book! A masterpiece! A joy to read! Quite likely one of the best math books I have ever read.

I agree!

More on Genetic Algorithms

After the last posting on David Goldberg’s lab, I note another genetic algorithms oriented blog in the Genetic Argonaut by Marcelo di Brito. The current post is on optimizing the shape of a lens. The article gives a detailed description of a nice experiment to find the best lens with a variety of genetic algorithm-based approaches. It is a good introduction to some of the newer additions to the basic genetic algorithm. I would love to see how this compares to optimization-based approaches.

Blogs and Labs

Why don’t more research labs have blogs? Most of us are passionate about our fields and our perspective on the world. For instance, I really believe operations research is a great way to view the world, and I trust that comes out through the blog.

David Goldberg of the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois is another with a passionate view of how his lab’s research fits into the world, and it comes through in the lab blog. I even get a mention as “worth a read”. David is, of course, a guru on genetic algorithms, an area I consider part of operations research, though I suspect David disagrees. In any case, we need more discussion and even conflict if our field is to be taken seriously.

Another lab with a blog is at the Missouri Estimation of Distribution Algorithms Lab.  To be honest, I did not know what an “Estimation of Distribution Algorithm” (EDA) was.  I do now, due to the blog.

The BBC and queues

The BBC has an economics editor named Evan Davis who has a blog on understanding the real world using the tool kit of economics. There are two recent entries (here and here) on queueing results. Now the English are famous for their queueing discipline, but Davis is concerned with two examples of “non-obvious” queues: road congestion and waits for health services. In both cases, there are significant costs to queueing and the economic effect is that since people enter the queue only when the benefit of the service outways the cost of queueing, many people end up with very little value (the queue increases to wipe away the consumer surplus). This is a nice example of combining economics with operations research (many OR models have very simple queue entry rules, like “will enter always” or “will enter only if queue size <=12"), but using economics to guide the consumer behavior leads to better insights. Davis shows his economist (not OR!) training in stating the following:

There are three very simple rules about queues.

• 1. They grow longer when the number of people joining at the back of the queue exceeds the rate at which people are being dealt with at the front.

• 2. They grow shorter when the rate at which people are dealt with at the front exceeds the rate at which people join at the back.

• 3. They stay constant when the flow of new arrivals is equal to the flow of people being seen.

It is the last point that is incorrect, assuming there is any variation at all in either service or queue entry. If flow of arrivals equals flow of people being seen, the queue will continue to increase (on average). This point is actually very important. Managers are constantly being told to look for inefficiencies, and having more service than customers looks like an inefficiency, so they work at getting service = customers. The result is long queues (unless there is no variation in service or queue entry). Unless there is slack in the system, the system doesn’t work.

Davis does mention Operations Research (surprisingly: Operational Research would be more “british”):

Queuing theory is in fact, quite a science. It comes up in the discipline of Operations Research, which studies processes, production and organisations using maths, statistics, economics and management science. It’s a fascinating subject.

The “It’s” in the last sentance is unclear. I’ll take it to mean that “Operations Research is a fascinating subject”, which is certainly the case.

Happy Birthday to the Blog!

I started this blog on October 26, 2005. Now, after a year (and a couple of days; Ask my family: this is pretty normal for me!), it’s a good time to take stock. I’ve had 92 posts (93 counting this one) in that year, which seems like a reasonable number. The most common tags I have applied are “Applications”, “INFORMS”, and “OR in the Press” (often on the same posting), which matches up with my view that a primary use of the blog is to bring people’s attention to the usefulness of OR.

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. Without such a system, it is clearly impossible to run a blog with open comments.
Thanks for reading!

Bloggers and OR

I try to keep up with people in OR who are blogging, but even with sites like technorati, I fear I am missing some. So if you are an OR blogger, don’t hesitate to let me know directly!

On that note, Scholarships around the US is offering a $5,000 scholarship for the best student blog. One requirement:

Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about.

Well of course if you are blogging about OR, you are by definition writing about interesting things and you will naturally be passionate! I don’t know anything about this group, but they seem on the up-and-up (the site is certainly 95% useful and 5% ads, rather than the reverse).