News Room

It’s almost impossible for humans to draw unbiased maps, even when they’re trying. A new mathematical method developed by Cornell researchers can inject fairness into the fraught process of political redistricting – and proves that it takes more than good intent to create a fair and representative district. The two-step method, described in the paper, “Fairmandering: A Column Generation Heuristic for Fairness Optimized Political Districting,” first creates billions of potential electoral maps for each state, and then algorithmically identifies a range of possibilities meeting the desired criteria for fairness.

During JD's fourth annual tech summit JD Discovery (JDD) held on November 25^th in Beijing, JD has shared plans to build a digital and intelligent supply chain. JD-Y, JD's supply chain R&D unit (focused on supply chain innovation) shared a relevant breakthrough and application regarding its self-built industry-leading end-to-end replenishment model (E2E model).

In developing COVID-19 policies and managing supply chains the constant drumbeat is “data-driven decisions” where the new high priests are data scientists. Data by itself is not sufficient, the missing critical success factor is “models” to project the impact of decisions. One critical area for COVID-19 public policy is understanding the impact of different group sizes on the spread of COVID-19. This blog will provide a few examples of being “COVID-19 data adrift without operations management” and illustrate that a simple model that can be coded in a few hours provides more insight than is possible with just data for the group size question.

With COVID infections surging across the U.S. and Thanksgiving celebrations expected to have given the coronavirus more opportunities to spread, experts fear the country will soon experience a record number of deaths from the disease—something equivalent to the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 per day—by Christmas. In the past week alone, 10,288 people died of COVID in the U.S., with the current death toll of 267,302, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control website that was updated Tuesday. On average in the past week, 1,469 people died of COVID each day.

Temperatures are dropping, nights are growing longer, the holidays are nearing, and the science is clear: The pandemic is far from over. A long, dark winter awaits. The number of new coronavirus cases in the United States each day has ballooned from fewer than 40,000 in early September to more than 100,000 in early November. The U.S. now confirms more cases in a single day than China has reported altogether since the pandemic began.