Bernie Madoff and Data Visualization

If you are like most people, when you hear of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme ripping off investors to the tune of $50 billion, you might think “Oh those poor investors”, or perhaps “Just the rich ripping off the other rich”.  If you do research in a business school, you might wonder about the institutional controls that allowed for such a long-term scam.  But if you are in operations research, you probably think:  what a great source of data!  I wonder what I can do with that?

A couple of the results of the last question (thanks Bryan!):  GeoCommons (“Visual Analytics through Maps”) have a very cool map of Madoff’s investors.  While the map doesn’t contain any information that is not part of the 162 page listing of investors, the visualization leads to lots of interesting questions:  why so much around Denver?  Why so little in Asia?  If there was one person in Auckland, New Zealand involved, is it surprising it was in Parnell?  And who was that guy in Northern Canada who got ripped off, eh?  (The latter appears to be a misplacement:  there is a Lac Carre outside of Montreal).  Other maps are here and here.

Network from The Network Thinker
Network from The Network Thinker

Even better is the growing analysis of the social network involved in the Madoff scam.  The Network Thinker has a great graph pointing out who invested with whom (there is also an interactive map).  This leads to all sorts of graph theoretic questions:  what is the longest path in the graph?  What do components of the graph (minus Madoff) correspond to?  Are there cliques or near-cliques in the graph?

This is great data that I am sure will be used in countless dissertations over the next years.  It probably wasn’t worth $50 billion to get that data, but we might as well use it now that we have it.

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?

Back at the IMA

I am at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota.  This brings back very fond memories.  I was a postdoc here 21 years ago at the start of my career when they had a Special Year on Applied Combinatorics.  As I recall there were 10 postdocs that year:  nine combinatorialists and me who was trained in operations research.  The combinatorialists were all scary smart and many (including Bernd Sturmfels) went on to sparkling careers.   Doing my two postdocs (in addition to the IMA, I spent a year in Bonn, Germany at Prof. Korte’s Institute) was the best thing I have done in my career.  The postdoctoral time gave me the opportunity to move past my doctoral work and to start new research directions even before I took a permanent position.  And, given I met my wife during my postdoc in Bonn, the social aspects were also wonderful.

I am speaking tonight in the IMA’s Math Matters series.  My topic is “Sports Scheduling and the Practice of Operations Research”.   The talk is open to everyone,  so if you are in the Minneapolis area, feel free to come on by!  There has already been some press on this.

Kindle and Math

Added January 6 2012.  Note that this post refers to the kindle circa 2009.  See this discussion on reddit for more recent (late 2011) information.  Unfortunately I no longer use a Kindle so I cannot provide any updated information.

The new Kindle from Amazon is out, and it is receiving a lot of press.  Aurelie Thiele points out the funny pricing of Amazon.  Of course, none of this is open in any sense of the word:  Amazon wants to keep control here.  I bought a Kindle for a trip I am on, and I really enjoy it so far, but I really bought it for research reasons: for reasons I’ll make clear in an upcoming post, I really need to travel with a large amount of technical material, so I thought this would be a good thing.  But how to get math on the Kindle?  My friend and sometime co-author Stan Zin has been working on this and writes:

I converted a pdf file of a paper with lots of math into a
Kindle-readable azw file (using @free.kindle.com).  It can’t handle the math very well, especially multi-line formulas.  Basically the math is completely garbled in translation.  I also tried to first convert pdf to a graphics file (eg, jpg, gif, png) then convert that to an azw file.  Now it’s unreadable because of scale.  The Kindle version doesn’t seem to be zoomable, and so is also unreadable.  Since Kindle’s azw format will handle Greek letters, as well as subscripts and superscripts, it would seem to have all the necessary components for generating complicated math.  But the conversion step from pdf doesn’t seem to be the way to go.  I was wondering if your OR blog readers might take this as a challenge.  How hard could it be for a hacker to create a LaTex2azw program?  I think there would be a big demand if it worked reasonably well.

What do you think?  Is there a way to get math on the Kindle?

Kurt Spielberg Passing

There is news from Monique Guignard, via a complicated path, that Kurt Spielberg has passed away, struck by a passing car outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Kurt did a lot of work on how to make integer programming and relaxation methods really work in practice.   This work started in the 60s and continued right to the present. I did not know Kurt, but I continually came across his work whenever I thought I had a good idea (particularly when I was working on lagrangian relaxations):  typically Kurt got there decades before I did.

Annals of Operations Research has recently published an article by Kurt on his 40+ years at IBM (my university subscribes, of course, but I did find a copy on the web).  It is a fascinating story!  Kurt was one (the last?) of the “old style” people in operations research who began in physics and simply started solving operations research problems.  What a career Kurt had! He retired from IBM in 1990, but continued to be active in consulting, contract work, and grant support for his remaining years The paper shows his enthusiasm for optimization remained clear to the end.

Viewing Wednesday evening 7 to 9pm and Thursday morning 9 to 10am in the Schetter Funeral Home 304 W. Rt. 70, Cherry Hill, NJ. Mass of Christian Burial Thursday 11am in St. Peter Celestine RC Church, Cherry Hill, NJ. Interment Colestown Cemetery Cherry Hill, NJ.

Have you Registered for INFORMS Practice?

The INFORMS Practice Conference is one of my favorite conferences. It is here that I get most of my stories for my classes and get inspired about the areas I work in. I also get inspired about Operations Research in general: it is a great field, and this conference shows the wonderful things we do.

If you haven’t been to a Practice Conference, it is nothing like the big fall conferences.  The Practice Conference is seen as a “Listener’s Conference”:  unlike the main conference where anyone can present, only invited speakers present at the Practice Conference.  The quality of talks given by invited speakers ranges from good to unbelievably amazing (in contrast with the fall conference where the lower bound is much, much, much lower).  There are very few parallel sessions (no more than 5 or 6) and there are lots of opportunities for interaction, greatly enhancing the social capital of the conference.

Unfortunately, it is not a cheap conference.  Running a conference of the quality of the Practice conference takes money.  So if you are planning to go, be sure to register by February 27 to save yourself $150 or so.

Of course, one highlight of the conference is the  Edelman Competition.

I already have my registration in!

Visual Display of the Stimulus Package

Further to the $787 billion stimulus package (or 78 NSF Stimulus Package, as I like to call it), my finance colleague Bryan Routledge has done a wordle of the summary of the appropriations bill. Here it is (from www.wordle.net):

Stimulus Package Wordl
Stimulus Package Wordle

There is a lot to like in that picture. Certainly “science”, “research”, “grants” and “billion” go together quite nicely.

I want my 78 NSFs!

Three times a day, I trek across campus with a group of colleagues, most of whom are in finance and economics.  Conversation, not surprisingly, has often been on the financial mess the world is in.  How different the world would be if people in operations research ruled the world!  We’d need a little more centralization, of course, since our models tend to work better if we can impose “best” solutions.  And, undoubtedly, we would forget a constraint or two along the way, and perhaps ignore some stochastic elements that are a little hard to handle.  But I think we probably would have avoided the nuttiness that resulted in things like Iceland going bankrupt.

Now we are in the midst of yet another bailout.  This one seems to have a few more rules (as opposed to last year’s bailout that seems to have completely disappeared with no effect).  Among other things, it limits compensation for some of the bankers to a mere $500,000.  Of course, this has the bankers all in a tizzy:  we need multi-million dollar compensation to keep the best people!  Well, yes, given the past success of these people, perhaps we should pay them more just to keep them out of the more important parts of the economy, like food production and the manufacture of real things (though don’t get me started on the auto industry in the US)!

The new stimulus package includes good news that the National Science Foundation received an additional $3 billion, bringing its budget up to about $10 billion.  That number really puts the $787 billion stimulus package in perspective.  Instead of getting 78 NSFs we are getting … what exactly?

Added 6:20PM. As one of my less kind colleagues noted, this is exactly what I need for my proposals “ranked in the bottom 2%”.  Finally summer support!

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:

The Edelmans are here!

The January-February 2009 issue of Interfaces is now online, which means the papers from the 2008 Edelmans have now arrived.  My only disappointment is that my “OR Techniques for Consultants” course was moved up 7 weeks, so this year’s students had to make due with last year’s papers.

The papers include: