O.R. IN THE NEWS

Compiled by Barry List

The INFORMS archive of podcasts continues to offer provocative conversation with leading O.R. practitioners and thinkers. It includes recent interviews with Carnegie Mellon’s Alessandro Acquisti about privacy and e-commerce, Maj. Gen. (Retired) Richard O’Lear’s discussion of two Pentagon reports dealing with O.R. and ISR Editor-in-Chief Ritu Agarwal’s observations about bias in the way that consumers rate physicians on online services. Visit www.scienceofbetter.org and www.informs.org, to download the latest selections.

Remember to share your news making research with the INFORMS Communications Department. Contact INFORMS Communications Director Barry List at barry.list@informs.org or 1-800-4INFORMs.

And now, O.R. in the news:

Top drivers behind the growing use of business analytics

“As the world gets more instrumented, with a variety of devices collecting enormous volumes of data, companies are finding they need sophisticated business analytics to make sense of the data. The reason: business analytics lets companies know what is happening now, what is likely to happen next and what actions should be taken to get optimal results. Not surprisingly, the use of business analytics correlates with success.”

- eWeek, June 24

Online ad placement

“After discovering that the second paid search ad tends to get more eye time than the highest listed one, I stumbled upon another interesting paid search study, this time a group effort by McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management and the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and just published in Information Systems Research, the journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Information Systems Research (Yes, INFORMS).

“Studying the click-through rates of paid search ads, the academics discovered that people clicking on the top-listed paid search link tended to be more interested in the quality of a product while those clicking on the lower-ranked ads are more concerned about price. Ranking in search results could be used as a targeting mechanism.”

- ADOTAS, May 23

9/11 memorial and the knapsack problem

“In 2004, Afghanistan had a new constitution, bin Laden had a new videotape and the 9/11 memorial had a new architect, Michael Arad, whose winning design, ‘Reflecting Absence,” consisted of two cascading pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, and, ringing these pools, a parapet of bronze panels inscribed with the names of the dead ...

“ ‘It was a computer-science problem, but it was also a big, crazy typography problem,’ Barton said last week. As a spatial puzzle, it also owed a little bit to the so-called ‘knapsack problem’ in mathematics, which involves trying to optimize the fit of irregularly shaped or weighted objects in a backpack. Their solution was really a combination of algorithms, which they called the Names Arrangement. A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else of the total absence of one.”

- The New Yorker, May 16

Is it better to hire for cultural fit over experience?

“Cultural fit can cover a variety of characteristics, but ultimately, Rothbard and others say, the question hiring managers should be looking to answer is, does this candidate’s values align with those of the company, be they work-life balance, corporate mission or how to handle a customer phone call.

“Rothbard and two co-authors published a paper, ‘Unpacking Prior Experience: How Career History Affects Job Performance,’ in Organization Science in 2009 that examined the hiring practices at an insurance firm.”

- Fortune, April 28

ManSci student earns degree 14 years after car injury

“It was a college graduation that was years in the making – far longer than the standard four years of college and years of K-12 education. At 39, Ellen Sykes earned her bachelor’s degree in business administration at MTSU’s May 7 commencement exercises. In order to receive her diploma, she maneuvered her electric scooter up one ramp and across the stage.”

- Daily News Journal, May 16

SMS data report

“According to a Management Science Report, “An Empirical Analysis of Mobile Voice Service and SMS: A Structural Model,” the elasticity of voice calls is -0.08, which means that if the price of voice calls increases by 10 percent, the volume of voice calls would go down by 0.8 percent. SMS has an elasticity of -0.03, so if the price of SMS goes up by 10 percent the volume of messages would only go down by 0.3 percent.

“The relatively low elasticity of both voice and SMS indicates that consumers regard both services as indispensible, giving operators no reason to drop rates.”

Tech Leader, May 12

Barry List (barry.list@informs.org) is the director of communications at INFORMS.