{"id":702,"date":"2009-06-07T09:53:14","date_gmt":"2009-06-07T13:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=702"},"modified":"2009-06-07T09:53:14","modified_gmt":"2009-06-07T13:53:14","slug":"advertising-operational-research-but-maybe-a-few-updates-are-in-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/06\/07\/advertising-operational-research-but-maybe-a-few-updates-are-in-order\/","title":{"rendered":"Advertising Operational Research (but maybe a few updates are in order?)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theorsociety.com\">Operational Research Society<\/a> (the U.K. equivalent of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.informs.org\">INFORMS<\/a>) has a website about operational research (the U.K. equivalent of operations research) aimed at students and teachers called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.learnaboutor.co.uk\">Learn about OR<\/a>.  This makes a great adjunct to the INFORMS site, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scienceofbetter.org\">the Science of Better<\/a>, aimed at business.  Lots of good examples and good advice about getting into the field.<\/p>\n<p>For portions, however, the site shows the tone-deafness that we in OR often show.  Some of the examples might be a little more relevant to a 50-year-old rather than a teenager.  Consider the example aimed at 11-14 year olds <a href=\"http:\/\/www.learnaboutor.co.uk\/learn\/do_for_you\/doforyou_holiday.htm\">&#8220;OR Inside Your Holiday Snaps&#8221;<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s highly unlikely that, while you were snapping your holiday photos on the beach, you stopped to think, &#8216;Is there O.R. inside the film in this camera&#8217;? But, in fact, there is!<\/p>\n<p>Photographic film is manufactured in rolls about 6km long by 1m wide, which have to be cut up into complex patterns so as to produce a wide variety of products. The problem of deciding how to cut the rolls is very complicated<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What a great example:  cutting photographic film is a wonderful example leading to column generation approaches and other advanced math programming methods.  Too bad the average twelve year old hasn&#8217;t ever seen photographic film.   I look forward to examples of fitting music onto cassette tape cartridges and optimal horse rotation for mail delivery.<\/p>\n<p>Despite this cavilling, it is a good site, and the sort of site the world needs more of.   There is even a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.learnaboutor.co.uk\/learn\/flash\/flash_video.htm\">introductory video<\/a> that covers the range of OR (with instructions for downloading to an ipod). <\/p>\n<p>Thanks Dawen, of ThinkOR, for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkor.org\/2009\/06\/starting-up-in-operational-research.html\">mentioning the site<\/a> in a somewhat different context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Operational Research Society (the U.K. equivalent of INFORMS) has a website about operational research (the U.K. equivalent of operations research) aimed at students and teachers called Learn about OR. This makes a great adjunct to the INFORMS site, the Science of Better, aimed at business. Lots of good examples and good advice about getting &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/06\/07\/advertising-operational-research-but-maybe-a-few-updates-are-in-order\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Advertising Operational Research (but maybe a few updates are in order?)&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-applications","category-blogs-and-web","category-videos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}