Brazil vs. North Korea and Celtics vs. Lakers

********Update to the first story*************

Brazil beat North Korea 2-1 in the World Cup today, which is probably a score that few would have predicted. The announcer stated that the red garbed "North Korean" fans in the stands were actually paid Chinese "actors."

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**********And to the second********************

The Celtics lost to the Lakers last night and will play against them tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2010 in LA.


Professors are very "active" individuals with their teaching, research, and service.

Every once in a while, though, there comes a day, when just being a spectator, and the associated anticipation, bring special delights.

I have been following the World Cup, beginning with the first matches while I was in Argentina and since returning to Amherst, MA (where even high schoolers missing school to watch the World Cup games at restaurants made the front page of the local newspaper, much to the chagrin of their parents, I am sure. Plus, I was told that little work has been done in the local high school since the TVs are on to the World Cup games).

Today, will be a fascinating game between Brazil, the top-ranked team at the World Cup, and North Korea, the polar and very mysterious opposite, at 2:30PM ET. The excitement is palpable in Massachusetts and beyond and, in addition, tonight is the Celtics vs. Lakers basketball game in Los Angeles, with fans in eager anticipation. If the Celtics win tonight, they will have won this year's NBA championship.

So today, besides reviewing proposals and academic articles, and trying to catch some time to do some research, it will not be all "work" but also some spectating for the pure joy of sport!

As a faculty member at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst, I am privileged to be part of a school that also houses one of the top Sports Management departments in the US, so, of course, any sports-related discussions are "work-related."

How to Give a Great Academic Talk

I do a lot of public speaking and I learn much from such experiences. I enjoy interacting with various audiences and the travel to exotic and interesting locations is an added bonus.

With so many conferences taking place in the summer, academics are busy doing research and presenting their work at conferences.

I received a message from one of my colleagues in computational economics, Bill Goffe, whom I last saw at the Computing in Economics and Finance Conference that took place in June 2008, in Paris, France. The message was about the best guide that he had ever seen on giving an academic talk and it is due to a computer science (CS) professor, Jonathan Shewchuk, at the University of California Berkeley.

Professor Shewchuk's advice, which is quite informative and very entertaining can be found at:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/speaking.html . While written for a CS audience, it applies to economic talks and to operations research talks as well (although I do like to see some math and analysis displayed).

One of the many gems: A talk of 30 minutes or less should be an advertisement for the paper, not a replacement. Your goal is to convince your listeners that they must read your paper. While you might disagree with some points, it should make you think about how you make presentations. The link to a PowerPoint version of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (one of the most famous speeches ever given in the U.S.) is priceless according to Bill.

Another one of Shewchuk's suggestions:

"Nonverbal communication. An infamous study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” shows that students can predict a teacher's ratings with significant accuracy after watching a 30-second silent video clip of the teacher at work. Resist the urge to attribute this to the superficiality of students' ratings. What is the nonverbal magic that an audience recognizes so quickly?" (Somehow this study also brings to mind the work of Alex Pentland at MIT and his fascinating book, Honest Signals.)

According to Shewchuk: "I believe they are seeing communication uncluttered by extraneous motion, facial expressions, fidgeting, utterances, and other nonverbal behaviors so subtle that the speaker is entirely unaware of doing them. Conversely, a faint, transient facial expression or a brief unconscious twitch of the arm are enough to rob a speaker's words of their force, and even break an audience's attention."

The Greening of the Metropolis

On my flights back from the ALIO-INFORMS in Buenos Aires, Argentina I had the distinct pleasure of reading the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. There was a special segment in it on Clean Energy and an excellent article, "The Greening of the Metropolis." With cities being home to more than half of the world's population and generating more than two thirds of the world's carbon dioxide, greening of our megacities can make a significant difference in improving the environment.

I am hopeful. With the leadership of some of the biggest cities in the world taking proactive, creative steps to reduce emissions, much can be accomplished especially since regions and nations are failing to act.

Kudos to Los Angeles and its mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, for 1,700 miles of bike paths that are to be completed by 2015, complete with showers and bicycle storage areas.

Bravo to the mayor of Toronto, David Miller, who plans on investing over $1 billion in public transport and environmentally-friendly air-conditioning systems for buildings.

In Tokyo, where, amazingly, 68 percent of the trips are by bike, subway, or on foot, in April a cap and trade system was instituted for carbon dioxide that is city-wide. As for Houston, Texas, where an astonishing 95% of the trips are made by car, at least officials are getting electric cars to reduce emissions.

Robert Doyle, the Lord Mayor of one of my favorite cities, Melbourne, in Australia, plans to bar cars from downtown and to offer incentives for green investments.

Copenhagen, in Denmark, is spending over a billion and a half dollars on bike paths, green energy projects, and retrofitting city buildings.

Amsterdam's infrastructure is being improved to the tune of 1 billion dollars, with its 2,400 houseboats being retrofitted to use electricity instead of diesel.

New York City, one of my absolutely favorite cities, since I grew up in Yonkers, is moving forward with its PlaNYC, to make buildings more energy efficient, power plants more environmentally-friendly, and with tax breaks for the use of solar panels.

Having spent over a week recently in another megacity -- Buenos Aires, Argentina, with about 11 million people in the central and surrounding areas, I know that much needs to be done.

The architecture of this city is stunning as are the neighborhoods with unique identities, and the lively, warm people and culture.

However, the traffic is horrendous with the busses running frequently but on diesel and their evident fumes spewing and belching out. Not only do they emit toxic pollutants but the noise that they generate is substantial. As one former Argentine physics colleague of my husband's, dating back to our Brown University days, told us during a lovely 3 hour dinner in Buenos Aires: when the busses go on strike, the people notice how much cleaner the air gets and how much more peaceful the city is even with more cars! Ironically, in parts of the developing world, getting rid of public transit with aging engines may actually improve air quality.

A better approach (and our colleague told us that he expects that this may happen but it will take about 10 years), is for the city of Buenos Aires (where 1/3 of Argentina's population lives) to purchase busses with the latest green technologies and with quieter designs.

Above are photos taken from the 14th floor of the Etoile Hotel in Buenos Aires where we spent last week. In the photos one can see the famous La Recoleta Cemetery where Eva Peron is buried and the Law School with the big columns, where the operations research conference that I attended and spoke at took place.

My talk at the ALIO-INFORMS conference was on "Sustainable Supply Chain Network Design: A Multicriteria Perspective" and it certainly hit "close to home." The paper is available here and the pdf of the presentation is here.

The Dogs and their Walkers in Argentina

Travel is always eye-opening and opens one's eyes as a travel guide never can.

Having returned from a stay in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I attended a professional conference, I continue to be amazed at the number of dogs and their walkers that we encountered.

The above photos were taken in Buenos Aires during the past week.

The last photo above is of a dog named Rubio, who lives in the area of Buenos Aires known as La Recoleta, where we stayed at the Etoile hotel. The restaurant goers and waiters at the numerous outdoor cafes keep Rubio well-fed and quite content.

We have been told that the dogwalkers can walk up to 12 dogs at a time. As in North America, the golden retrievers and the chocolate labs love to play with tennis balls.

The World Cup has begun and Argentina

Yesterday, I was still in Buenos Aires, Argentina, spending 1 day touring after the ALIO-INFORMS conference. The city was filled with the Argentine flag and numerous decorations to commemorate the first day of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. While dining and getting ready to head for the airport to catch a flight back to Dulles and then to Bradley, I caught glimpses of the South Africa vs. Mexico game (score 1-1) and the France vs. Uruguay game (score 0-0) plus some of the opening ceremonies prior.

There are numerous large TV screens in Buenos Aires so that people can watch the World Cup soccer matches.

After a very comfortable flight on United from Buenos Aires to Dulles of about 10 and a half hours but a less than comfortable processing at immigration and security at Dulles with long queues and some sort of strange call for a meeting at 7:00AM for the customs and immigration workers, we just made it to our last flight from Dulles early this morning.

While unpacking, back in Amherst, we caught parts of the Argentina vs. Nigeria game in which Argentina won 1-0 with Maradona as its soccer team's coach.

Above are some photos taken in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the past week marking the World Cup festivities. I am sure that the country is celebrating with its victory in the World Cup today.

The sport of football/fusbol/soccer brings the world together during the World Cup, which takes place this year from June 11-July 11, 2010, in a terrific display of athleticism, cameraderie, appreciation of other cultures, and just pure fun!

At the ALIO-INFORMS conference in Buenos Aires, I very much enjoyed Dr. Celso Ribeiro's plenary talk on how his research was applied to construct the schedules for Brazil's soccer teams, with great success. I especially enjoyed listening to the importance of "fairness" in the schedule and how such constraints were incorporated into the optimization model.

Faces at INFORMS Conference in Buenos Aires

Today was the first day that I could catch my breath since arriving in Buenos Aires, Argentina last Saturday to attend the ALIO-INFORMS conference. The conference was a whirlwind experience with about 1,000 conferees in attendance and just over 100 from the US. Giving a talk, taking part in a panel on international collaborations, plus attending an editorial board meeting, and giving a tutorial on Fragile Networks, still left me some time to attend both plenary talks and keynote talks as well as another tutorial (besides my own).

What a colleague said to me yesterday, I agree with -- in addition to the scientific exchanges that take place at an international conference, what makes such events so special is the people that you meet from colleagues from around the world that you get to see again and to reconnect with to new friends that are made.

Above are some photos taken at some of the above conference events that I mentioned earlier.

More photos and reflections can be found in several of my earlier blogposts.

The atmosphere in Buenos Aires, with the beautiful pale blue sky and the fascinating architecture and boulevards, plus the fantastic food and elegant people (and numerous dogs and dogwalkers), all make for a truly unique and special conference venue.

The Magic of Buenos Aires

The ALIO INFORMS conference that attracted operations researchers from around the world has come to an end. The organizers should be congratulated for an excellent conference. I will be writing additional blog posts about the conference but, in the meantime, in addition to the previously posted photos on this blog from Buenos Aires, Argentina I share some addtional ones with you above.