Debt-Free U, Zac Bissonnette, and the Today Show

Zac Bissonnette, who is a senior at UMass Amherst, was interviewed by Ann Curry on the Today Show. The interview is worth watching for several reasons:

1. Zac does a wonderful job answering her questions (and she certainly seems to have taken copious notes on his book, featured above);

2. Zac is an exemplar of a student whose ambition and hard work have already resulted in a published book plus amazing experiences and contacts, and

3. Zac makes excellent points regarding some of the advantages of getting an education at a public university, such as UMass Amherst, where I teach.

You can read about other amazing things that Zac accomplished even as a sophomore at UMass Amherst (including how he got his book deal) on the UMass Amherst College of Social and of Behavioral Sciences website page here. In that interview, he also extols the great education that he is getting at UMass Amherst.

I do believe that his book with the full title: Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off my Parents will be a best-seller.

We wish him much continuing success.

Investing in the Nation's Infrastructure but Doing it Right

In an interesting Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, Dr. Laura Tyson of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and a member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is calling for a new stimulus package to invest in the nation's infrastructure.

My colleagues and I at the Supernetworks Center have been writing a lot on how to identify not only the costs of infrastructure degradation from our roads and bridges and even the Internet, from an economic and performance standpoint, but also on how to identify the effects of enhancement and investments by taking into consideration the behavior of those who will ultimately be using the infrastructure. In addition, it is imperative that the investments are made with cognizance of climate change and how best to adapt our infrastructure investments accordingly from transportation networks to supply chains and electric power generation and distribution networks.

Our paper, which contains highlights from our research and major findings, but in a more condensed fashion than found in our Fragile Networks book is entitled: "Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age,"and it is in press in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research.

I just hope that if a new stimulus does get passed and even an Infrastructure Bank established, that economists, engineers, operations researchers and management scientists, and even environmental scientists, all work together so that what gets built, renovated, expanded, enhanced, and where, can have the greatest positive impact economically not only in the short-term but also in the long-term.

Fashion Supply Chain Management, School Ties, and the Preppy Handbook

Our paper, "Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Time Minimization from a Network Perspective," is now available online on the Supernetworks Center website.

This invited paper was co-authored with one of my doctoral students, Min Yu, for an edited volume on fashion supply chains.

As the abstract states: In this paper, we consider fashion supply chain management through cost and time minimization, from a network perspective and in the case of multiple fashion products. We develop a multicriteria decision-making optimization model subject to multimarket demand satisfaction, and provide its equivalent variational inequality formulation. The model allows for the determination of the optimal multiproduct fashion flows associated with the supply chain network activities, in the form of: manufacturing, storage, and distribution, and identifies the minimal total operational cost and total time consumption.The model allows the decision-maker to weight the total time minimization objective of the supply chain network for the time-sensitive fashion products, as appropriate. Furthermore, we discuss potential applications to fashion supply chain management through a series of numerical examples.

We very much enjoyed conducting the research on which this paper is based.

Working with students on research can take one on intellectual journeys that yield discoveries in terms of new analytical methodologies as well as conceptual frameworks and exciting new applications, that one may not have pursued individually. Collaborations are key to successful research and, when they work well, yield intellectual, professional, and personal rewards.

Building networks through collaborations, beginning at one's educational institutions, may yield life-long partnerships. This is something that I aim to support as the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks. This is an exciting time of the year when we begin to welcome new students and associates. Our newest Student Center Associate is Mr. Nathan Kollett, who has matriculated into our doctoral program in Management Science at the Isenberg School and who for the past two years has worked at State Street Corporation in Boston.

Speaking of "school ties," the latest issue of Vanity Fair has several articles featuring my fellow alums from Brown University with one article on Steve Rattner, Obama's "Car Czar," who was the former editor of the Brown Daily Herald, and another on the revised "Preppy Handbook," True Prep, by Lisa Birnbach, another Brown alum, with Chip Kidd. True Prep will be released on September 7 and I am sure that it will be very entertaining reading.

I am a product of an inner city high school, Yonkers High School, which had outstanding teachers and I received four degrees from Brown University, including my PhD. The excerpt from True Prep states that a preppy always has a navy blazer, a fashion piece that is part of my frequent flier uniform, so I guess that aspect of my academic ambience ultimately did rub off on me or perhaps I just subconsciously adopted the uniform of the male execs in business class.

US Approves Merger of Continental and United Airlines

The New York Times is reporting that the proposed merger of Continental and United Airlines has been approved. It is expected that the deal will now move forward quickly and result in the world's largest airline.

According to The Times: In a statement posted on its Web site, the Justice Department said it had “closed its investigation” into the proposed merger after United and Continental agreed to give take-and landing slots to Southwest Airlines at Newark Liberty International Airport.

“United and Continental entered into the arrangement with Southwest in response to the department’s principal concerns regarding the competitive effects of the proposed United/Continental merger,” the Justice Department said in its statement.

This news I find especially exciting since we have been conducting a lot of research on mergers and acquisitions from a network perspective in both competitive, such as oligopolistic, settings, which is the industrial structure of many airlines, and in cooperative environments, such as in humanitarian logistics and operations where there may be teaming for disaster relief.

My paper, "Formulation and Analysis of Horizontal Mergers Among Oligopolistic Firms with Insights Into the Merger Paradox: A Supply Chain Network Perspective," has now been published online in the journal Computational Management Science and according to a message that I received yesterday from the publisher of this journal, Springer, it should be appearing in the hardcopy issue soon.

Another more personal connection is that my college room-mate from Brown University, Teresa Davila, is a United Airlines stewardess and language specialist. I hope that the corporate cultures of these two airlines mesh well so that the employees are comfortable when it ultimately takes place. I am a former Premier flier on United and my recent long distance flights on this airline were to/from spectacular Honolulu and to/from Buenos Aires, Argentina!

The Worst Traffic Jam Ever -- 10 Days and 60 Miles!

I am getting ready to teach two courses this Fall, including my Transportation & Logistics course, to which I always bring material and news items from the real-world.

Just in time for my first class, is the news, as both The Guardian and The New York Times report, of what is being reported as the worst traffic jam ever, which occurred on a highway west of Beijing, which is part of the Beijing-Tibet highway, and lasted 10 days and 60 miles! The drivers behaved quite well during this logjam and you can view some of the photos of the gridlock here.

One of the reasons for this surreal traffic jam was that construction had started on this major thoroughfare, thus reducing its capacity. Plus, this is a major highway for the transportation not only of passenger vehicles but also of trucks carrying freight and especially coal.

Room for Debate in The New York Times has interesting takes on this mega traffic jam, with one debater stating that such a monumental traffic jam would never happen in the US. Interestingly, as well, many of the truck drivers in order to avoid tolls (and being weighed) would rather choose a longer route, as happened in this case, in China. Tolls in which there is the money vs. time issue is another topic that I will be teaching in my course.

In our Fragile Networks book we discuss how the transportation network design and the reduction of capacity can affect traffic flows, both major issues in the worst traffic jam ever. Also, we quantify the effects of enhancements of network capacity, such as the increase in road capacity. Clearly, to have effective transportation and logistics systems, one must construct the appropriate critical infrastructure, in the form of roads, bridges, and even rails, sea and air routes, to support the flows!

The subject of Transportation & Logistics is always fascinating!

News on the Supernetworks Center at the Isenberg School

With Fall around the corner, and students starting to arrive at colleges around the country, the 2010-2011 academic year will soon begin. There is always a lot of excitement and anticipation from the new and returning students, their families, as well as from the professors who will be teaching the courses that the students will be taking.

A new academic year brings new challenges, opportunities, experiences and adventures, friendships, and discoveries.

As Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, I edit the Supernetwork Sentinel, which is our newsletter, and which gets published in Fall, Spring, and Summer editions.

The Fall 2010 Supernetwork Sentinel is now online and I hope that you enjoy reading about our professional activities that, this past summer alone, took us to Argentina, China, Austria, and Ukraine! The research that the Center Associates are involved in include such timely topics as supply chain network design of critical needs products from pharmaceuticals to vaccines to sustainable supply chains and even fashion supply chain management (in which time vs. cost is also a big issue)!

We study network fragility and vulnerability in transportation, logistics (including humanitarian operations), the Internet, electric power and energy networks, and even in finance and model how human behavior affects such systems. We also construct metrics that can assess the performance of networks and identify potential synergies with applications as varied as corporate mergers and acquisitions and the teaming of organizations for disaster relief. We quantify, through advanced analytics, cooperative vs. competitive behavior and identify and explain where paradoxes such as the Braess paradox can (and cannot) occur.

Since supernetworks are networks of networks, their applications are very exciting and vast!

The methodologies that our researchers use to capture essential components of complex networks include: game theory, network optimization, nonlinear programming, multicriteria decision-making, risk management, variational inequalities, and projected dynamical systems.

We have been very busy this summer and are looking forward to a very special, productive, and fascinating new academic year!

All of our newsletters can be accessed here.

Fragile Train Travel in NYC and Commuter Chaos vs. a Glorious Train Ride Through the Adirondacks

While my family and I were enjoying the beauty and serenity of the Adirondacks while spending several days in Lake Placid, there were several major transportation disruptions in the NYC area that affected train travel (the LIRR, New Jersey Transit, and even Amtrak) over two days.

Fascinatingly, as The New York Times article, "Amtrak Adds to Commuter Chaos in Region," reports:

The electrical travel chaos on the Long Island Rail Road on Monday offered a frustrating reminder of the fragility of a rail network still dependent on antiquated equipment.

Embedded along the railroad tracks by Jamaica Station, and soaked by rain from the night before, two or more cables shorted out around 11 a.m., the authorities said, sending a pulse of electricity into a nearby train control tower and setting fire to the century-old equipment inside.

It seems improbable that a piece of ancient machinery, a contraption of levers and pulleys designed in 1913, would be critical to the successful operation of one of the nation’s largest commuter railroads.

But the machinery, which remained on fire for about an hour, controls the 155 track switches at a crucial choke point: Jamaica Station, which 10 of the railroad’s 11 branches must travel through to get in and out of New York City.

With no way to direct trains onto their proper routes, railroad workers scrambled onto the tracks, spikes and mallets in hand, to lock the switches into place manually so that trains could travel by, a practice known in railroad parlance as “block and spike.”

For several hours, nearly the entire railroad ground to a halt.

The fragility of networks, from transportation to the Internet, and even supply chains and financial networks, was explored in our book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World.

Above I feature photos taken at the spectacular station in Lake Saranac in upstate New York, where, in contrast, the Adirondack Scenic Railroad was working beautifully and ferrying tourists between Lake Place and Lake Saranac. The station is simply gorgeous and we felt as though we were transported to another era (which we were). My husband is a huge train buff but we all enjoyed the experience a lot from seeing the station outside and inside to viewing the turning around of the engine to reading the historic boards inside the station and even talking to the pleasant gift shop operator.

As for train travel from NYC, we were told that, in the late 1800s, one would leave NYC at midnight and then arrive in Lake Saranac at 4PM the next day. This Adirondack area was known for its restorative benefits for those with lung ailments and for "cures" for tuberculosis. There were even trains that ferried sick passengers. A notable resident of the area, who lived there for 7 months (and whose residence we also toured), was Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among other works. He was born in Scotland and was very sickly (and a chain smoker). His wife credited the 7 months that they stayed at Lake Saranac as giving him 7 more years of life.