For today, I'd like to highlight how the topics I have planned for our 2012 Financial Operations research align with what you've told us. If your top priorities are improving the visibility and accessibility of financial data,
Operations Research
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Most Topular Stories
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Sneak Preview of 2012 Financial Operations Research | Research ...
"operations research" - Google Blog Search27 Jan 2012 | 2:16 pm -
What My Dogs Taught Me About Business Operations
The Operations Blog8 Dec 2011 | 4:14 amI have learned quite a bit from playing doggie mom to my two, rat terriers, Lexie and Tate. In addition to making me laugh every day and providing unconditional love, they have taught me a lot about running effective business operations. Who knew! Here are my three favorite lessons… 1) What does a 21 year-old clerk know? Ends up, a lot. My eight year old terrier, Lexie, began to suffer from skin allergies when she was about one year old. I spent literally thousands of dollars for doggie dermatologist appointments, shampoos, pills and shots over a period of three years. Eventually, her skin… -
Are Your Operations Success Levers Defined? 6 Steps To Get You Started
The Operations Blog22 Jan 2012 | 6:55 pmHave you recently shared your 2012 goals and objectives with your teams? As business operations leaders, we often describe what we want, but do not do a very good job explaining or defining “the how”. To consistently meet or exceed our objectives, we must understand the business levers, i.e. the most important and specific set of activities that will enable our teams to be successful over the long term. We must coach our teams on the most appropriate, proven set of behaviors that will get us from point A to point B. To define the right set of levers, you should consider these 6… -
OpenOpt Suite 0.37
Maximize Productivity with Industrial Engineer and Operations Research Tools15 Dec 2011 | 10:48 amHi all, I'm glad to inform you about new release 0.37 (2011-Dec-15) of our free software: OpenOpt (numerical optimization): IPOPT initialization time gap (time till first iteration) for FuncDesigner models has been decreased Some improvements and bugfixes for interalg, especially for "search all SNLE solutions" mode (Systems of Non Linear Equations) Eigenvalue problems (EIG) (in both OpenOpt and FuncDesigner) Equality constraints for GLP (global) solver de Some changes for goldenSection ftol stop criterion FuncDesigner: Major sparse Automatic differentiation improvements for badly-vectorized… -
Car Talk and TSP Paths
Michael Trick's Operations Research Blog15 Jan 2012 | 12:54 pmOn the suddenly hot topic of the Traveling Salesman Problem (see here and here), this week’s Car Talk puzzle is a TSP-like problem (though it is really a graph theory problem: the hamiltonian path problem to be exact). The company that Bobo works for just finished a new product. They wanted to promote it across the country. Bobo was asked to travel by car to each of the 48 contiguous U.S. states to promote the product. He was told that he could visit each state in whatever order he chose, but the company wanted him to start in Delaware, at their headquarters. They asked that he visit…
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Michael Trick's Operations Research Blog
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Car Talk and TSP Paths
15 Jan 2012 | 12:54 pmOn the suddenly hot topic of the Traveling Salesman Problem (see here and here), this week’s Car Talk puzzle is a TSP-like problem (though it is really a graph theory problem: the hamiltonian path problem to be exact). The company that Bobo works for just finished a new product. They wanted to promote it across the country. Bobo was asked to travel by car to each of the 48 contiguous U.S. states to promote the product. He was told that he could visit each state in whatever order he chose, but the company wanted him to start in Delaware, at their headquarters. They asked that he visit… -
A Love Letter to the Traveling Salesman Problem
14 Jan 2012 | 3:49 amBill Cook of Georgia Tech has a new book out on the Traveling Salesman Problem entitled “In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman” from Princeton University Press (or from Amazon or B&N). Unlike his previous book (with David Applegate, Bob Bixby and Vašek Chvátal), this book is aimed at a general audience. Bill takes his readers down a beautiful path covering the history, applications, and algorithms associated with the TSP. It is a fascinating story, and one that shows a researcher who truly loves his research area. You would think such a love was common among… -
Death to Data Hogs! Ooops, that’s us!
7 Jan 2012 | 4:44 pmThe New York Times has an article on the concentration of use of mobile airwaves. It seems that 1% of the users consume half the bandwidth: The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour… -
16 Clue Sudokus
6 Jan 2012 | 2:23 pmI am sure everyone has seen Sudoku puzzles: it was quite a fad a few years ago. The puzzle begins with an 9×9 grid, partially filled with numbers from 1 to 9 (the “givens”). The goal is to complete the grid so that that every row, column, and the nine 3×3 subgrids in the corners and center all contain the numbers 1 through 9 with no missing and none repeated. There was a time in my life where I loved Sudoku puzzles. I had to give them up when I started to dream solely in Sudoku. The puzzles can be difficult or easy depending on straightforward it is to deduce… -
Super Exciting News on Super Polynomiality of LP Formulations of the TSP Polytope
5 Jan 2012 | 3:20 pmYears ago, I spent a very pleasant couple of weeks in a group debunking a claimed linear programming formulation of the Traveling Salesman Problem. I wrote on this before, and bewailed the fact that I was not smart enough to figure out there was a general theorem there: Yannakakis showed that no symmetric linear programming formulation of polynomial size can formulate the TSP. The “symmetric” part of the theorem was always bothersome since it seemed an unnecessary addition. You can make a symmetric formulation “unsymmetric” by doing something goofy in adding a…
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Punk Rock Operations Research
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a second look at life expectancy: childbirth and bath tubs
27 Jan 2012 | 10:50 amIn my previous post, I tried to unravel life expectancy curves. The comments on this post were fantastic (thank you, readers!). They were so good that I decided to share some of the readers’ information and reply to a request. First, I was asked if the mortality rates follow a “bath tub” shape. If you have taken a course on reliability, you have seen hazard rates. Many processes and widgets have a “bath tub” curve, meaning that there is some break-in failure (this is what a warranty is for), there is an extended period of time with a low incidence of failure… -
A look at life expectancy over the years
26 Jan 2012 | 2:37 pmI was poking around for some health data for a project I am working on and came across an interesting life expectancy table from the CDC that reports the life expectancy from birth based on birth year back to 1900. Below, I show a plot of life expectancies as a function of birth year according to gender. I found a few things surprising: (1) Women have been outliving men for a long time. I thought this was a relatively new phenomenon. It isn’t. Women had a better life expectancy than men at all ages as far back as 1850 (and perhaps longer–I don’t have the data). This is… -
Who will be the Republican nominee?
23 Jan 2012 | 8:30 pmThe race for the Republican Presidential nomination has changed so much in the past week that it is hard to keep up. I enjoy reading Nate Silver’s NY Times blog when I have a chance. A week ago (Jan 16) he wrote a post entitled “National Polls Suggest Romney is Overwhelming Favorite for GOP Nomination, where he noted that Romney had a 19 point lead in the polls. He wrote Just how safe is a 19-point lead at this point in the campaign? Based on historical precedent, it is enough to all but assure that Mr. Romney will be the Republican nominee. Silver compared the average size of the… -
the license plate game: the raw numbers
20 Jan 2012 | 7:20 amMy last post discussed how one might estimate how many state license plates one would expect to see on a road trip. I made a spreadsheet to compute the probability of seeing each state license plate. Assumptions The probability of seeing a state license plate A in another state B depends on the distance between their state capitals. It is scaled by the number of licensed drivers in state A. (This indirectly means that the probability does not depend on how long we are in a state). Seeing state license plates A, B, etc. are independent from other license plates in a given state D. Seeing… -
the license plate game
19 Jan 2012 | 7:09 amMy family took a lot of road trips when I grew up. To combat boredom, we tried to see how many state license plates we would see on our trip. On a trip to see Mount Rushmore, we found almost all of the states. As an adult and geek, the license plate game has (subtlety?) changed. Now, I combat boredom by talking with my husband about how to come up with a probability distribution for how many state license plates we would expect to see on a road trip from point A to point B. We took two road trips this year: one from Richmond, VA to Chicago, IL over the summer, the second from Richmond, VA to…
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greenOR
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Positions
12 Jan 2012 | 3:58 pmThe number of sustainability-related positions in O.R. is growing, especially in the area of energy. Here are a couple of recent ones: * A faculty opening in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst lists sustainable energy among the desired research areas. More info here (pdf, via the ENRE list). * NICTA (National ICT Australia), which is Australia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence, is looking to fill positions within its Optimisation Research Group. Projects include infrastructure resilience (including… -
Conference Activity: INFORMS, Joint Mathematics Meetings
15 Nov 2011 | 11:48 amINFORMS 2011 is going on right now. I am not there this year to track the sustainability & OR activity but there is plenty listed in the program. In addition, the ENRE cluster chair Ramteen Sioshansi assembled a list of the energy sessions (pdf). You can also check out the twitter feed (hashtag #informs2011). The Joint Mathematics Meetings are coming up on January 4-7, 2012 in Boston. They include sessions on Climate Change and Sustainability, organized by Mary Lou Zeeman and Chris Danforth. Chris is also one of the speakers, and having been in graduate school with Chris I would highly… -
Interesting Opportunities
28 Oct 2011 | 2:11 pmHere are a number of interesting opportunities in green O.R. and related areas that I came across recently through the listservs and other sources: Graduate Fellowships in Wind Energy funded by the National Science Foundation IGERT Program are available at the University of Iowa. Apply at geemap.stat.uiowa.edu. They are part of the “Geoinformatics for Environmental and Energy Modeling and Prediction” program. According to the web site, Geoinformatics: is the science of measuring, storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing phenomena occurring on or near the earth’s surface… -
Energy Insecurity
19 Oct 2011 | 12:46 pmThe following excerpt from last Sunday’s New York Times article “Obama Says Facts Support Accusation of Iranian Plot” hits at the core of what is meant by energy security, or more like insecurity in this case: Even inside the Obama administration, some officials say they fear any crackdown on Iranian oil exports could drive up oil prices when the United States and European economies are weak. As one senior official put it, “You don’t want to tip the U.S. into a downturn just to punish the Iranians.” So weak economies mixed with weak foreign policy (due to reliance on… -
LEED Controversy
13 Oct 2011 | 9:29 pmA law suit accusing the USGBC of false advertising with its LEED green building standard was dismissed. There is a good write-up about this on the CT-based green building blog “buildingCTGreen”. Here is an excerpt: … the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a false advertising suit filed by a group of plaintiffs, led by New York City-based engineer Henry Gifford, against the U.S. Green Building Council. This case was closely watched by many professionals in the building industry because of its potential to be a game changing event for green…
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FM Waves
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OR & Me
21 Jan 2012 | 12:04 pm[View the story "OR & Me" on Storify]Similar Posts: Don’t Sell me Food, Sell me Health House & OR Videos on OR… -
EnviORment [sic]
23 Sep 2011 | 8:32 amDuring these last three years I had the greatful experience of lecturing on the economics of natural resources and the environment. The challenge, besides being an optional subject that alumni normally take because it fits in the schedule , was to introduce the 'FM Waves' way of thinking into the pupils' minds and make them [...] -
Instant Forecast
17 Aug 2011 | 2:12 pmNow that Google has made us used to everything 'instant' (I don't even like instant coffee) we know anyone with a SOA algorithm and piece of hardware/software should be able to instantly predict. And I thought that 'nowcasting' was too shorter term! Not to mention that one shouldn't be confusing speed with accuracy; you can't [...] -
Babies & Operations Resarch
23 May 2011 | 5:40 amI always try to apply OR to my day to day activities, which has sometimes caused me to appear like a freak when you try to explain to people actually OR is all around. However, it was when I explained a colleague I was trying to apply total quality management (TQM) techniques to baby caring [...] -
Lecturing OR
10 Apr 2011 | 5:11 amI have to admit I never though I would be lecturing an operations research related subject. However, it is with great pleasure that last term I was able to lecture Econometrics with computer assistance (we used Gretl, which is open source) to undergraduate level. This term I have started to lecture 'Total Quality Management 'to [...]
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Maximize Productivity with Industrial Engineer and Operations Research Tools
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Should science be open
12 Jan 2012 | 8:13 amTwo interesting articles appeared this week in some blogs I frequent about technology and science. The first is an Op-ed in the New York Times titled Research Bought, Then Paid For and the next is Open Science: why is it so hard? The two articles are a different take on the idea that scientific findings should be open for everyone. Someone who is outside the scientific community might think that statement is silly. Of course science is open. No one has a copyright or a monopoly on scientific or mathematical discoveries. Yet that is not the real issue. … -
IEORTools.com Resources added
2 Jan 2012 | 4:19 pmI've decided to spruce up my personal website IEORTools.com. I want to add some additional resources to it along with the book store. Most of the content will be relevant reference links to Industrial Engineering and Operations Research professionals.The first thing I did was added a Resources side menu. The Resources side menu will link to relevant resource sections. So far I have created the following resourcesOptimizationStatisticsData MiningThese links are a collection of resources that I have accumulated over the years. The links are a great reference and… -
Most popular 2011 IEOR Tools blog articles
30 Dec 2011 | 7:39 amThe most popular IEOR Tools blog articles of 2011. It is time for reflection and I like to do this every year. It gives me perspective about what is being read. It is also an interesting look at our interests. This year seems to be about our thirst for software tools and how to use them. Also books are still big for reference materials.Open Source Replacements for Operations Research and Analytics SoftwareR Tutorial: Add confidence intervals to a dot chartScience of MatchmakingData Mining Books listPhysicist cuts airplane boarding time in halfR again in Google… -
Visualizing categorical data in R
21 Dec 2011 | 9:29 amI came across an interesting SAS macro that was used for visualizing log odds relationships of data. This type of chart is helpful for visualizing the relationship between a binary dependent variable and a continuous independent variable. I don't use SAS on a daily basis as I prefer to use R. So I got to thinking that I could recreate this macro using only R. I thought this would be a good tutorial for R on developing functions, using different plot techniques, and overlapping chart types.The following picture is the result of the logodds function in R. The chart… -
OpenOpt Suite 0.37
15 Dec 2011 | 10:48 amHi all, I'm glad to inform you about new release 0.37 (2011-Dec-15) of our free software: OpenOpt (numerical optimization): IPOPT initialization time gap (time till first iteration) for FuncDesigner models has been decreased Some improvements and bugfixes for interalg, especially for "search all SNLE solutions" mode (Systems of Non Linear Equations) Eigenvalue problems (EIG) (in both OpenOpt and FuncDesigner) Equality constraints for GLP (global) solver de Some changes for goldenSection ftol stop criterion FuncDesigner: Major sparse Automatic differentiation improvements for badly-vectorized…
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RENeW
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One Girl's Romp Through MIT's Male Math Maze -- The Play to be Peformed at Mount Holyoke
26 Jan 2012 | 4:05 pmOn my way home from UMass Amherst today, I spoke with a neighbor of mine, Dr. Margaret Minsky (I am sure that you recognize the surname, especially if you have had some computer science), who, appropriately, has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.Then, coincidentally, when I arrived home, the headline of an article in the Amherst Bulletin immediately caught my attention (and it came with a photo):MATH WHIZ: Play recalls tough days at male-dominated MIT.The article was about a play written by Gioia de Cari. It was the late 1980s when Gioia de Cari was a doctoral student in math at MIT, having… -
A (Humorous) Test for Your Potential as Dean
26 Jan 2012 | 10:23 amI have been invited to apply for certain deanships through contacts by search firms and other networks.I also regularly write about leadership on this blog because, as an academic, I am naturally observant and curious and have had enough war stories both from several years in industry and many more as a female professor to have insights as to how effective organizations are run.The Chronicle of Higher Education has a test for evaluating prospective deans.The Gotcha Quiz was composed by an actual Dean, Dr. Scott Dalrymple.My favorite questions on it are:4. Do you want to be provost or… -
The Global Data Deluge and the World Economic Forum
26 Jan 2012 | 5:46 amMany notables, from corporate leaders to academics to government leaders and humanitarians, are convening in Davos, Switzerland this week at the World Economic Forum.One of the dominant themes that is emerging is that of the Global Data Deluge and what to do about it.As reported in The New York Times Bits technology blog by Nick Bilton: data-related sessions at the World Economic Forum are now prominent with titles such as: "From data to decisions: How are new approaches to data intelligence transforming decision-making?” “Data deluge and citizen science.” “Incidents from digital… -
Most Influential Articles on the Economics of Traffic Congestion and Our Translation of the Braess Paradox Article is Included
22 Jan 2012 | 10:11 amI had not even realized until this past week that the edited volume, The Economics of Traffic Congestion, containingthe most influential articles written over the past eight decades that contribute to an understanding of the economics of traffic congestionhad been published by Edward Elgar Publishing in its series: the International Library of Critical Writings in Economics.When I saw the list of articles that had been reprinted, I was struck by the names of the authors, many of whom I cite very regularly in my papers and books since their works are, indeed, classics in transportation.And… -
United States in Science and Engineering Research and Education -- Stunning 2012 Report from the National Science Board
21 Jan 2012 | 6:44 amThe National Science Board has released its report: Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, which contains a broad base of quantitative information on the U.S. and the international science and engineering enterprise.The report is organized into various chapters with fact-filled findings and stunning, informative graphics and figures.I have been pouring over the report and am especially interested in the higher education chapter and the academic research and development chapter; the latter chapter has interesting data on the average number of papers published per year in different science…
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OR at Work
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Losing weight fact based
4 Jan 2012 | 11:06 amMade any New Year resolutions this year? What’s your #1 on the list? I bet it is losing weight. In the Netherlands it is the number one resolution for 2012 and I expect in many other countries as well. Research from ING Banking & Insurance indicates that about 80% of the Dutch have made New Year resolutions this year. By equating the fulfillment of a resolution to an economic value ING was even able to calculate that on average the Dutch would give €450 to keep their resolution, resulting in a total economic value of €4.5 billion in the Netherlands alone. Given the economic crisis… -
Optimizing the Human Resource Supply Chain
30 Dec 2011 | 1:34 pmReading the various outlooks for the coming year, I came across the Manpower Employment Outlook for 2012. Interesting statement from the report is that although employers are more inclined to hire new personnel there continues to be uncertainty about the market, so they are reluctant to make the investment in a permanent hire. At the same time employers also have trouble filling vacancies for specialist jobs like technicians, sales people, skilled trade workers and engineers, as indicated by another report from the same agency. This makes balancing the demand and supply of human resources a… -
The incredible balancing act of Unsold and OutOfStock
6 Nov 2011 | 9:56 amInventory managementis one of the key factors determining the performance of a supply chain. A smallchange of the inventory policy can lead to a dramatic alteration of the supplychain’s efficiency and responsiveness. Traditionally inventory management ischallenging because it directly impacts both cost and service. Uncertain demandand uncertain supply make it necessary to hold inventory at certain places inthe supply chain to provide adequate service to customers. As a consequence,increasing inventories will increase customer service and revenue, but also increasescost. According to the… -
Deciding on Lean or Green
4 Oct 2011 | 2:29 pmImagine getting into your car, entering your destination into the satellite navigation system and getting not only the two obvious options for the shortest or fastest route, but also the most sustainable one. What would you think of that? Calculating the shortest or fastest route is easy from an Operations Research perspective, just use Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm. How about the most sustainable one? Whether a route is sustainable or not depends on many factors; maximising sustainability therefore is different from minimising travel time or distance. There is however a linear… -
Distinguishing the Good from the Bad
25 Sep 2011 | 12:53 pmIn my work toassist companies in improving their decisions making, adding mathematicalrigour and making it fact based, sooner or later my client remarks that nowthat Operations Research is used the quality of decisions must have improved. It’stempting to confirm that, but that would be too single minded. While usingOperations Research will have a positive influence on decision quality, it isonly one of many factors in high quality decision making. In judging thequality of a decision we typically equate decision quality with the attractivenessof the result. Don’t you feel silly…
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"operations research" - Google Blog Search
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Diagnosis and Treatment of Digestive System Carcinoids: Clinical ...
28 Jan 2012 | 3:17 amOut of the 41 cases distantor lymph node metastasis occured in 9 cases. 18 cases were diagnosisedby endoscope,2 byCT,1 by MRI,1 by type-B ultrasonic guided puncture.19 by operations research. There was no significant -
Sneak Preview of 2012 Financial Operations Research | Research ...
27 Jan 2012 | 2:16 pmFor today, I'd like to highlight how the topics I have planned for our 2012 Financial Operations research align with what you've told us. If your top priorities are improving the visibility and accessibility of financial data, -
Global Health Career Network: Academic / Research jobs, Berkeley ...
26 Jan 2012 | 5:14 pmThe Senior Consultant- Research will assist the Director of Research and Implementation by providing technical expertise in the design of operations research projects and by overseeing the dissemination of research findings -
realaussiejobs — Operations Research/Java Software Engineer ...
26 Jan 2012 | 2:49 pmBrisbane, QLD – Operations Research/Java Software Engineer (Mining Sector – Autonomous Trucks) Work a solution which controls autonomous vehicles Focus on algorithm design/enhancement & software development -
A look at life expectancy over the years « Punk Rock Operations ...
26 Jan 2012 | 2:37 pmpeace, love, and operations research ~*~. Home · About · Data · Podcast · Creative Commons License Punk Rock Operations Research by Laura A. McLay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
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The Operations Blog
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Are Your Operations Success Levers Defined? 6 Steps To Get You Started
22 Jan 2012 | 6:55 pmHave you recently shared your 2012 goals and objectives with your teams? As business operations leaders, we often describe what we want, but do not do a very good job explaining or defining “the how”. To consistently meet or exceed our objectives, we must understand the business levers, i.e. the most important and specific set of activities that will enable our teams to be successful over the long term. We must coach our teams on the most appropriate, proven set of behaviors that will get us from point A to point B. To define the right set of levers, you should consider these 6… -
6 Reasons Processes Fail – Cartoon
30 Dec 2011 | 6:04 pmWhen business processes don’t work the way that we expect them to, we often blame the employees who are responsible for the process. We assume that they aren’t working hard enough or need more training. However, we are often wrong – and there are six others reasons that processes fail, which inspired today’s cartoon. Enjoy! (Click on the image to view a full screen version.) -
KPI Trends For 2012 – Why We Should Expect Less
19 Dec 2011 | 6:47 pmGuest Blog by Bernie Smith, KPI Expert, United Kingdom What are going to be the big themes for KPIs in 2012? We can get some clues from the world of consumer IT and software. In the consumer-computing world overwhelming change in the last 2 years has been in two areas, user expectation and usability. For years consumers were prepared to put up with some ridiculous behaviour from their computers, frequent unexplained pauses, regular user-driven updates, software that just didn’t work or that had a very steep learning curve. You wouldn’t expect your TV to take 5 minutes to switch… -
12 Operations Experts Share Their Key Learnings From 2011
12 Dec 2011 | 4:00 amTo close out 2011, I surveyed top operations experts across the globe and asked them to share their most impactful learning or most important piece of advice for The Operations Blog’s audience. Read on for interesting commentary on service operations, sales operations, leadership and operational excellence. Please add your own advice in the comments section. 1) Developing Leadership Skills Must Be Intentional “This past year I’ve learned the value of continuous learning for the development of leadership skills. Far too may business executives believe leadership skills stem from… -
What My Dogs Taught Me About Business Operations
8 Dec 2011 | 4:14 amI have learned quite a bit from playing doggie mom to my two, rat terriers, Lexie and Tate. In addition to making me laugh every day and providing unconditional love, they have taught me a lot about running effective business operations. Who knew! Here are my three favorite lessons… 1) What does a 21 year-old clerk know? Ends up, a lot. My eight year old terrier, Lexie, began to suffer from skin allergies when she was about one year old. I spent literally thousands of dollars for doggie dermatologist appointments, shampoos, pills and shots over a period of three years. Eventually, her skin…
