Holiday Cookie Logistics from Baking to Delivery

It is snowing hard here in western Massachusetts and the landscape is beautiful but the temps are not. 

It is frigid outside so what could be better, after having graded final exams (appropriately for a course in Logistics & Transportation) as well as paper projects on topics as varied as Cape Cod traffic improvements to transportation in Buenos Aires to the rotary in Haiti to cement logistics, to name just a few, to do something also very creative -- bake holiday cookies!

Baking and distributing holiday cookies has been a tradition in my family for several years and we have gotten quite skilled at it. Nice that we practice what we preach is terms of efficiency, as well!

Every year it seems that we get busier and busier both professionally and personally but one keeps traditions alive for neighbors and family and finds time to do what needs to be done.


The logistics involve planning, purchasing ingredients, scheduling the baking and decorating,  doing the baking and decorating, and, of course, outsourcing the dishwashing tasks and cleanup. 

Then it is time to do the packaging, the writing of the cards, and the deliverying. Timing of delivery is very important since we want to make sure that the recipients are at home.

As an operations researcher, whether by education (or lifeskills or osmosis as is the case with some of my family members, whose assistance I rely upon in this megaproject), I am well-versed in project planning (especially in network-based techniques), scheduling, finding the best route through the supermarket, and the best routes for cookie plate deliveries.

As for this year's holiday cookie "menu," for now, we have made the following cookies:

• rum balls with walnuts (coincidentally, one of my former undergrad Operations Management majors at the Isenberg School emailed me that he made a batch for his office party this year and they were loved -- special to have students stay in touch even after graduation),
• pecan sandies with powdered sugar,
• Swedish jam-filled cookies from my Administrative Assistant's recipe at the School of Business, Economics an Law in Gothenburg that I spent the major part of my sabbatical at last year (thank you, Wivvian!),
• cherry-filled almond cookies,
• a variety of colored wreaths and candy-cane cookies, and
• mitten butter cookies decorated with M&M's.

To be welcomed by warm smiles as the doors open and we deliver the plates of cookies is truly in the spirit of this season.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

Photos from Another GREAT UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Party

It has been the tradition of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter to host an end of the semester party every semester and we have been doing it since Fall 2003! This is an event that should not be missed and even though this week is final exams week and many of us are extremely busy there is something special about this tradition.

Today is the 12th day of the 12th month and the party was in the Isenberg School of Management Room 112 -- math lovers will appreciate this.

Students divided themselves into 3 groups, each with a driver, to do the logistics of procuring the food (both cold and hot) and today the temps were in the teens plus one student was in a car accident but we are good at disruption management.

I managed to bring Slavic food  - two types of varenyky/pierogies which were warm and kielbasa plus nut rolls and cookies and we feasted on Indian cuisine, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Italian (pizza), and more. There were students from many departments in the Isenberg School as well as from the College of Engineering (Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering) and even students from Polymer Science and a postdoc from Food Science!

The below photos tell it all -- great food and great cameraderie. (Some had to leave before the group photo was taken, but thanks so much for coming to support the students, including the Isenberg School PhD Director, Professor George Milne).

Congrats to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter for another very special event and thanks for the memories! As the Faculty Advisor I could not be prouder of how these students work together and support one another.

Thanks to everyone for the support of this chapter's activities!

Building Community - Great Reindeer Seminar at the Isenberg School

Today UMass Amherst, because of the ice, did not open until noon and final exams had to be rescheduled, some of which will start at 8:45 PM tonight.

Somehow some of us still managed this morning to make it to a faculty candidate seminar over in Engineering and the presentation was worth it!

During this time of the year, we are reminded of the communities that we belong to -- from our neighborhoods to various professional societies to the places that we work at and the organizations that we support.

On November 25, I took part at TEDx UMass in its Professor Speaker Showcase and I have written several posts since then about the event and some of the speakers.

Dr. Pierre Rouzier's presentation at TEDx UMass continues to resonate with me. He is the Team Physician at UMass Amherst and has volunteered at 5 Boston Marathons, including last year's one on April 15, at which the horrific bombings took place. The New York Times recently had an article on how it may be advisable for medical professionals to go in early at points of attack and, as many ran away, Dr. Rouzier ran towards the victims of the marathon bombings.The Daily Hampshire Gazette had a moving article on Dr. Rouzier's heroism.

He stated in his TEDx talk that "UMass is his Community." And he has traveled far and wide not only with UMass sports teams that he avidly supports, treats, and heals, but also to Haiti.

Today, we had our Reindeer Seminar, which is an end of the Fall semester celebration that takes place in our lovely Isenberg School of Management atrium. We celebrated with great food and cameraderie plus the giving out of staff awards. I took the photos below, beginning, of course, with the dessert table.

A fabulous time was had by all and we received great fortification for the final exams and subsequent grading this week.Such special events bring us together and help to build communities.

For the Love of Networks

When the invitation came from Dr. Adilson Motter to speak at the 2013 Network Frontier Workshop that he was organizing at Northwestern University I was very intrigued, even though the workshop was to take place in early December. Since I live (most of the time) in Massachusetts, I have experience with cold weather but, for some reason, that cold on Lake Michigan is quite unique.

But, since I love researching networks and teaching about the subject and find it one of the most powerful of scientific topics in bridging disciplines, of course, I said "yes!"

This workshop, which was a huge success, and I am still savoring the talks and discussions as well as the people that I met, was a three-day event, that took place last week, December 4-6, highlighting leading-edge research on complex networks. According to the workshop website: Participants working on innovative aspects of complex systems will communicate recent results and ideas relevant to fields as diverse as brain, climate, and socio-technological research. Sessions will include theory and applications of nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics in the context of synchronization, cascades, transportation, control, and failure recovery in complex dynamical systems.

The program, which featured talks on applications ranging from climate science to brain physiology and envisioning the future Internet (my topic) can be downloaded here.  The list of invited speakers can be viewed here.  Invited speakers were from the US, Europe, and Asia, and one industrialist told me that he flew in from China just to hear me speak. I hope that I did not disappoint.

I loved the applications described as well as the methodologies, which included innovations in dynamical systems and control theory applied to networks.

Thanks to Dr. Motter  and his team at the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems (NICO) for putting this great workshop together. You succeeded in bringing researchers, practitioners, and students together to Evanston in December for the love of networks!

Below are some photos that I managed to take even though, honestly, my digital camera seemed to freeze (although I had charged it before flying out to Chicago).

The lunches and refreshments were delicious!

And, today, UMass Amherst has delayed its opening until noon because of the inclement weather but since we are interviewing a candidate for a faculty position, I will be going in. This afternoon, we are having our annual Isenberg Reindeer Seminar in the Isenberg School of Management atrium, which is a holiday party but first there will be a Personnel Committee meeting to attend. Never a dull moment in academia!

Environmental Applications and Computational Management Science

The special issue of the journal Computational Management Science on Environmental Applications is now published. It is volume 10, issue 4, December 2013. Thanks to the Editors, Professors Breton and Zaccour,  for putting together this great volume. We are honored to have our latest work on supply chains, freight, and sustainability in it.  Additional information on the full issue can be found at: http://link.springer.com/journal/10287/10/4/page/1

Preface

Michèle Breton & Georges Zaccour

Dynamic decentralization of harvesting constraints in the management of tychastic evolution of renewable resources

Jean-Pierre Aubin, Luxi Chen & Marie-Hélène Durand

A robust meta-game for climate negotiations

Frédéric Babonneau, Alain Haurie & Marc Vielle

Spatial control of invasive species in conservation landscapes

Christopher M. Baker & Michael Bode

Ecological-economic modelling for the sustainable management of biodiversity

L. Doyen, A. Cissé, S. Gourguet, L. Mouysset, P.-Y. Hardy, C. Béné, F. Blanchard, F. Jiguet, J.-C. Pereau & O. Thébaud

Computation of viability kernels: a case study of by-catch fisheries

Jacek B. Krawczyk, Alastair Pharo, Oana S. Serea & Stewart Sinclair

Supply chain network sustainability under competition and frequencies of activities from production to distribution

Anna Nagurney, Min Yu & Jonas Floden

Shallow lake economics run deep: nonlinear aspects of an economic-ecological interest conflict

Florian Wagener

Being Thanked in a Book - A Great Compliment

I love writing books and also reading books.

Every once in a while these two are connected as in the book recently written by Dr. Christian Mullon, "Network Economics of Marine Ecosystems and their Exploitation," and published by CRC Press.

Dr. Mullon in the book's Preface writes: The origin of the idea of applying network economics to ecological problems has been the reading of Anna Nagurney's book: Network Economics, A Variational Inequality Approach. I have found there the level of abstraction, the level of complexity, the mathemtical tools I was seeking for several years to model real marine systems. I acknowledge this influence and I thank her for the collaboration we have initiated since.

Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, was the first book that I ever wrote and it also appeared in a second edition.

I have read Dr. Mullon's book and will continue to go back to it many times as one always does with great books.  It demonstrates, as the first paragraph of the first chapter states, and I fully agree: This book shows how to apply the principles and tools of network economics, such as variational inequalities and complementarity problems, to study large exploited natural systems, especially the marine systems, at a global, continental or regional level. These systems are exposed to both climate change and economic globalization, a phenomenon referred to as "double exposure."

I met Dr. Mullon and his lovely wife in Paris after I spoke at the NetGCoop conference there in October 2011. We had already started our collaboration but had never before then met face to face.

The elegance of his research, which combines theoretical and computational tools with important ecological applications and data, continues to inspire me and I have written about our related work on predator prey networks, which blends economics, operations research, and ecology, as nature's supply chains.

I would like to return the thanks and compliment to Dr. Christian Mullon on his fabulous new book and congratulate him!

How to End a Course + 10,000 Letters of Recommendation

How do you end your course?

Do you write the final equation  on the board, show your last slide, and walk out?

Or do you have a tradition?

Last Monday (hard to believe it was just one week ago), at UMass Amherst,  we had the pleasure of taking part in the TEDx Professor Speaker Showcase, which I blogged about and the Isenberg School posted a nice summary of its 3 faculty who presented at it (out of the 8 presenters).

I am still digesting (not only the Thanksgiving food) but also the advice and wisdom shared last Monday at this great event (thanks to the student organizers, including Stephen, Henry, Cara, Shannon, and so any others).

With the end of the semester upon us and this being the last week of classes on many campuses, I would like to highlight what one of the speakers shared with us last week.

Dr. Brian O'Connor, a biologist, who retired only last Spring after 45 years teaching at UMass Amherst (and he told us that his last class was in the same classroom that he had interviewed in decades before so some things really do not change at UMass), told us about what he did at every last class at every course he ever taught.

Students who graduated and became very successful scientists, medical doctors, and dentists would tell him that maybe they did not remember all the material in his courses but they certainly remembered his last class and the poem that he always read to them.

The poem is Desiderata, written in 1927 by Max Ehrmann,  and I have reprinted it below, thanks to Wikipedia.

It is very appropriate, given this busy holiday season,  and any season, actually.

UMass Magazine had a marvelous article about Dr. O'Connor entitled, "Scientist, Advisor, Mentor, Friend" which highlighted his great influence. In his TEDx talk he admitted writing about 10,000 letters of recommendation for students who were applying to medical school or dental school and he still, although retired, helps his wife (5 days a week) since she works at UMass as an advisor for premed students.

Interestingly, he shared a story with us how, just about 2 weeks ago, his wife fell and broke her wrist, so off to the Emergency Room (ER) at a local hospital in western MA they went. There  they waited for 6 hours before, luckily, a doctor came out and saw Dr. O'Connor and immediately recognized his former professor. Mrs. O'Connor was then treated. I wrote about my own experiences in the ER there a while back.    As he told us, if you are breathing and not having a heart attack get ready to wait.

Another favorite story, as retold in the UMass Magazine article, is:  "A few years ago, W. Brian O’Connor’s father was admitted to a hospital in the family’s native Brattleboro. As he rushed to his father’s bedside, O’Connor caught sight of four familiar faces—those of two nurses and two physicians—and knew his father was in good hands and would make a full recovery."

What an amazing impact a single professor, named Dr. Brian O'Connor, has made and continues to make through the thousands that he has guided into the medical professions!