Category: Blogs and Web

Are USENET groups irrelevant?

Long before the web, there was Usenet, an internationally distributed discussion system.  Through Usenet, people could discuss topics of interest, with topics  organized in a shallow tree structure.  In the pre-web days, it was exciting to talk to people around the world, back at a time where even having an email address was not to be assumed.  In a world where technical reports were distributed by mail (I remember the excitement when the batch of orange covered reports from the researchers from the University of Maryland arrived, since they sent out their work en masse), the immediacy of Usenet was startling.

Usenet, at the time, had strong self-enforced rules (Usenet has no central server, and no owner):  no commercial postings, no binaries in non-binaries groups (without the web, distributing software was more difficult, though ftp existed for that), no off-topic messages.

In 1993, Mohan Sodhi (then a doctoral student at UCLA) went through the arduous process of creating the newsgroup sci.op-research (see the google archive), which began with the charter:

The Charter:

The main purpose of this group is to act as the umbrella group from which different O.R. interest groups will branch off in the future, as envisioned by the Technology Committee of the ORMS Board.

In the interim, the newsgroup will support the RESEARCH, APPLICATION and TEACHING of operations research through the unmoderated exchange of information through various activities including:

(RESEARCH AND APPLICATION)
— Posting information about accepted papers
— Asking questions and posting summaries of replies
— Posting Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and other lists such as
-Ajay Shah’s list of Free C/C++ programs for numerical methods
-Arthur Geoffrion’s list of mail reflectors relevant to O.R.
-John Gregory’s FAQ on LP
Those interested in a particular area could bring out regular FAQs answering questions or likely questions from those new to their area.
— Posting information about ARCHIVES (e.g. those at Rutgers, Bilkent)
(TEACHING)
— Sharing teaching approaches
— Announcement of new textbooks; Discussion on existing textbooks
(APPLICATION)
— New product announcements
— Users’ impressions of commercial software (No advertisements.)
(OTHER)
— JOB announcements in universities and industry

The newsgroup became reasonably popular, generating 100-200 messages per month, almost all on topic.  I have read the newsgroup since its beginnings, and posted perhaps 10 times per year on average.

Over time, the strength of the unmoderated, free flowing discussion in newsgroups such as sci.op-research became a drawback.  Popular newsgroups attracted spam and cranks.  “Trolls” came, whose sole goal was to start a flame war with outrageous posts.  Usenet, in short, became a seedy backwater of the internet, with its role taken over by blogs, discussion forums, and other more organized structures on the web.

sci.op-research avoided the worst of this, since we were not big enough to attract much attention.  I had my problems with some of the discussion.  Some was uncivil in my view (“How can you possibly be teaching this if you know so little!”) and some was just annoying (“Can you answer this homework question please” or, worse, “The answer to that obvious homework problem is 6”).  But there was enough information there to make it worthwhile both to read and to post the occasional question, answer, or announcement.

When I redesigned this blog, I included a feed for the sci.op-research (and comp.constraints) newsgroups in the right column, doing my little bit to point people to the discussion (it is a sign of my age that I even know what Usenet is:  I think the under 30 crowd has no idea about it).  But I had to take it down:  the newsgroup is currently getting porn ads, two or three per day, which I would prefer not to be posting (my Dad reads this blog!), along with an incessant set of ads for “instructor’s manuals” for courses.

I think sci.op-research still could play a role:  where else do you go to ask a question of a large groups of people (google suggests a readership of 1123)?  But, outside of a few diehards, it doesn’t seem like much of a community, a feel it very much had in the mid-1990s.  With no central structure to do things like get rid of spam, it seems hard to envision a future for it.  Can it survive, or are we looking at the end of one form of interaction?

Much more on the NCAA Tournament

In the hyper-competitive world of operations research blogging, needing to teach a class can put you hopelessly behind.  The Blog-OR-sphere is abuzz with pointers to the CNN article on computer models for predicting success in the upcoming NCAA tournament featuring Joel Sokol (see the video here).  See the blog entry at Punk Rock Operations Research as well as previous entries by me and Laura on LRMC (Logistic Regression/Markov Chain) and Laura’s article on the work of Sheldon Jacobson and Doug King.  We previously saw Sheldon in articles on predicting the US Presidential election.

Getting back to the CNN article, it is a good illustration on how hard it is to write about models:

At their cores, the computer models all operate like question machines, said Jeff Sagarin, who has been doing computer ratings for USA Today since 1985.

Different people come up with different brackets because they’re asking different questions.

Sagarin’s equations ask three questions: “Who did you play, where did you play and what was the result of each specific game?” The computer keeps repeating those questions in an “infinite loop” until it comes up with a solid answer, he said.

Sagarin has arranged the formula as such partly because he thinks home-court advantage is a big deal in college basketball.

Other models ask different questions or give the questions different weights. Sokol, of Georgia Tech, for example, cares more about the win-margin than where the game was played.

Well… kinda.  It is not that Joel has a philosophical belief in win-margin versus home court.  It is simply that his models include win-margin and the resulting predictions are more accurate because they do so.  Joel didn’t go in and say “Win margin is more important than home court”:  it is the accuracy of the resulting predictions that gives that result.  Some of his models don’t include win margin at all!

I also loved the quote:

Dan Shanoff, who blogs on sports at danshanoff.com, said gut feeling is more important than statistics, but taking a look at the numbers can never hurt.

Followup question:  “So how do you know that gut feeling is more important than statistics, Dan?”.  Reponse (presumably): “Well, it is really my gut feeling, you know, since I really haven’t looked at the numbers”. [Followup added:  Dan isn’t sure he really said what he was quoted as saying.]

Be sure to check out Laura and me, and any other OR people twittering the tournament with tag #ncaa-or, starting noon Thursday.

Twitter for Operations Research

There are tons of “Web 2.0” (or 2.1, or whatever) applications out there that I don’t really understand how to use.  I know I have 154 connections on LinkedIn, but I don’t know why.  I have received a flurry of Plaxo requests, but I can’t tell if that is more or less useful than LinkedIn.  I’ve played with wikis and with wikipedia (before deciding I didn’t want to spend my life arguing with non-OR people about the operations research page).  And, of course, I have a blog, and use lots of software to bring together various RSS feeds.  But,except for the last, I am not sure if what I do is useful, or if it is just messing about to no purpose.

One system that intrigues me is Twitter.  Every few months I tell myself that I should use Twitter more, and add a bunch of tweets for a day or so before lapsing back.  Unlike the blog, I never found a voice for Twitter.  I’m trying again, this time putting my tweets in a sidebar on the main page of this blog (the sidebar is getting far too messy but maybe one more thing can fit in!).  But why?  About the most I can say is that this might give some people an idea of what a university professor does and perhaps give an outlet for quicker thoughts about the OR world than the blog does.  I see people like Wil Wheaton and Steve Baker and I see them using Twitter in interesting ways.   Could I find a similar path?

Anyone else want to point the way on how Twitter can improve the world of operations research?

New Life for the Operations Research Resources Page?

I have previously written about my frustration handling the INFORMS OR/MS Resources Page.  I wrote:

As announced last year, it is unclear whether this resource page will continue. On one hand I started this back in 1994, so it is sad to see it go after 15 years. On the other hand, the internet has changed a lot since then. There was no Google back then, so simply finding stuff was hard to do. Now, it seems that the age of “hand edited” links is at an end (if it wasn’t so five years ago). Keeping these pages up to date is ferociously difficult. And the spammers are unrelenting (and I don’t have the heart to change software again to combat them). So, there is every possibility that these pages will go away on April 15, 2009.

Jim Orlin may well have made the suggestion to save the Resources Page.  In short, he suggests combining the strengths of the Resources Page with the strengths of Google.  We can use the URLs within the resources page to seed a specialized google search.  I have tried to do this in the past (in fact, long before google with my own crawlers) but it never worked quite right.  Google seems to have it right now.

I see a number of real advantages of this approach.  For the user, when you want OR/MS pages, they need not be lost in the long google output.  For the Resources page, if you want to show up on the search, you need to keep the URL up to date and accurate.  The searches will be better because the URLs will be verified as OR/MS relevant.  Overall, I think this is the change that could breath new life into the Resources Page.

Want to check out the search?  I’m still working on it, before I put it on the resources page, but here it is in an experimental version:

Constraint Programming Makes the Big Time

The current PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) comic (a comic written around the lives of doctoral and postdoc students:  I fear I see too much of Dr. Smith in me!) revolves around Constraint Programming as applied to wedding planning.  Karin Petrie, a well known constraint programmer, had lunch with the author of PhD, and I expect this is not a coincidence.

Over- versus Under-Planning

My wife and I have been arguing recently about my family’s tendancy to over-plan.  The Trick way does tend to have plans with lots of contingencies, which perhaps a reason operations research appeals to me.  The Weyers (my wife Ilona’s surname) approach is a little more … take it as things come.

The Think-OR blog has a wonderful OR joke that pretty well summarizes how us over-planners work.  I think it is instructive that both Ilona and I think that the story vindicates our chosen position.

End of INFORMS Resources page? No really!

Last year, we had a brief discussion on the value of the INFORMS Resources page.  Since then, things have simply got worse.  Spammers overwhelm the system, keeping things updated is horrendously difficult, and it is unclear if more than a handful of people are interested in it.   As I write on the page:

As announced last year, it is unclear whether this resource page will continue. On one hand I started this back in 1994, so it is sad to see it go after 15 years. On the other hand, the internet has changed a lot since then. There was no Google back then, so simply finding stuff was hard to do. Now, it seems that the age of “hand edited” links is at an end (if it wasn’t so five years ago). Keeping these pages up to date is ferociously difficult. And the spammers are unrelenting (and I don’t have the heart to change software again to combat them). So, there is every possibility that these pages will go away on April 15, 2009. The only thing that can stop this is finding someone to take over the administration of this area with energy and enthusiasm to do something new. If you are interest contact me (Michael Trick) at trick@cmu.edu. And, if you believe in the site, it would be useful to be sure your site is here and is accurate. Even if it is only in place for a few months, it would be useful to have! Further discussion of this on my blog.

If you have submitted a site recently and it is has neither appeared nor have you received an explanation, please resubmit: we had some problems with the system that have now been corrected. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Anyone interested in taking this on?  Or think they can convince me this is a great use of my time?

OR Forum paper on Personal Decisions

There is a new paper and discussion at the OR Forum.  Raph Keeney published  a neat paper entitled “Personal Decisions are the Leading Cause of Death” in Operations Research, where he argues that the choices people make (eating, drinking, etc.) cause more deaths than anything else.  There are some very insightful commentaries about this, and I hope the paper and commentaries lead to an interesting discussion.  Check it out!

This paper was the subject of a Newsweek article, and I suspect it will show up more in the media than most OR papers.

On “On Explaining Operations Research to Others”

Jim Orlin, professor of OR at MIT, and coauthor of one of my favorite books (Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications with Ravi Ahuja and Tom Magnanti), has just started a blog.  It looks like it will be a little more wide-ranging than this one, including education and politics along with operations research. His first OR post is on a great topic:  what do you say when someone asks “So what is Operations Research?”  Most of us go “well, ummm…, its kinda something with computers” and we lose a great opportunity to educate.  So what should we say?

Jim’s preferred definition is “The science of decision making” (I go with something similar:  “The science of better decision making”, showing a certain loyalty to the INFORMS “Science of Better” campaign).  He follows that up, in the best OR tradition, with an algorithm:

Algorithm for describing operations research to a friend or colleague.

Step 1. Find out a system about which the other person is both interested and knowledgeable. (e.g, sports, entertainment, communication, travel, or anything relating to a person’s job.

Step 2. Develop a plausible scenario based on the system in Step 1; e.g., scheduling sports teams, designing wireless phone systems to provide for the best possible reception, or designing queuing systems at Disneyworld. (I have found that it is very useful to give an example that addresses a problem at the other person’s work that he or she just told you was important.)

Step 3. Explain how operations research can be used to find an excellent solution for the scenario in Step 2 or provide very useful information for the scenario in Step 2.

I like his algorithm, and think it is probably more effective than my version, where Step 1 is “Find a system about which I am knowledgeable and interested…”.  My approach tends to lead to a lot of “Oh, look at the time, I must be going!” followed by frantic rushing out of the room.   But Jim’s approach does require a bit more thinking on one’s feet:  “Oh… so you are interested in the novels of Jane Austen.  Well, operations research is, ummm….”

Welcome to the Blog-OR-sphere, Jim!

New OR Forum Paper on Network Science

Dave Alderson of the Naval Postgraduate School has written a very nice article on Network Science and why operations research people should be interested in it.  The paper forms the basis for an “OR Forum” discussion.  Be sure to check it out, and perhaps provide some comments on either the paper or the invited commentary.