Furious that Google Scholar Removed my Most Highly Cited Work - My Book: Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach

I have no idea what is up with Google Scholar lately.

It is infuriating that, this past week, Google Scholar removed my most highly cited publication - my book: Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach for my Google Scholar page.

Below is a snapshot of the book from its first edition in 1993.

As one can see from the snapshot below, which was taken a while back, my book, which was published in 1993 and then the second edition in 1999, followed by the e-book in 2013 (the latter two by Springer and the first edition by Kluwer Academic Publishers), my book had almost 3,000 citations.

There is no form one can use to complain but I did, based on info I found online, "add it manually" and it appears towards the bottom of my Google Scholar page with 0 citations.

Below I include a link to my book (second edition in 1999) on the Springer website:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3005-0

Frankly, this feels like an assault against a female scholar.

If this is something AI is up to then good luck to all of us.

***********************AN UPDATE************************************************

Today, almost a week after I caught that Google Scholar had removed my most highly cited publication, my book above, it looks like Google Scholar has "brought back" my book, with almost 2,500 citations: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ecFsBp0AAAAJ&hl=en

I had manually enterred the book information and a link to Springer on my Google Scholar page about a week ago, after researching online what one could possibly do (not much, it seems). I also posted my dissatisfaction on social media and wrote the blogpost above.

I am relieved that my book has returned to Google Scholar, along with its citations. This book I worked very hard on and I am proud of it. No idea why it had been removed!

Honored to be a Highly Ranked Scholar, Thanks ScholarGPS

I was delighted to be notified during the holiday season  in an emailed message from ScholarGPS that: Your prolific publication record, the high impact of your work, and the outstanding quality of your scholarly contributions have placed you in the top 0.05% of all scholars worldwide according to the most recent 2025 ScholarGPS.

The notification provided additional information that can also be found on the ScholarGPS website: https://scholargps.com/

ScholarGPS provided me with both my Lifetime ranking - #7 in Supply Chains, #14 in Network Model, and #83 in Business and Management (and also Highly Ranked Scholar in All Fields of Scholarly Endeavor).  I was thrilled to hear that I am  #4 in Game Theory over the past 5 years, a methodological framework that I utilize in much of my supply chain modeling work.

I enjoy doing research tremendously (and publishing both journal articles as well as books plus also OpEds, etc.) and aim to make my research, with great students and collaborators,  relevant to pressing global issues.

Nice to have the following certificates from ScholarGPS:

Deeply Honored to Receive the INFORMS President's Award

On the evening of October 26, 2025, the lovely INFORMS Awards Ceremony took place at its Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

I was deeply honored and humbled to be recognized with the INFORMS President's Award: 

I received the good news via a phone call from the 2025 INFORMS President David Hunt, and did not share the news publicly until INFORMS issued the press release below in October.

https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/Awards-Releases/Anna-Nagurney-Honored-with-2025-INFORMS-President-s-Award

The award ceremony was elegant and what made it extra special for me was to have, in the audience,  my PhD students (present and former ones), colleagues, friends, INFORMS staff, and also my husband. I am grateful to David Hunt and to Past Presidents Laura Albert and Julie Swan (both of whom served on the committee) for this very meaningful honor. I appreciate the leadership of the INFORMS Executive Director Elena Gerstmann. Pelin Pekgun was wonderful in making many warm announcements.

Below, I share a photo of the award plaque, which my husband kindly carried back to Amherst yesterday, and other photos. Many thanks to former President's Award recipient, Pinar Keskinocak, for sending me the photo of the two of us!

And INFORMS, so efficiently, put up the video recording of my award acceptance speech on its YouTube channel, which is very thoughtful and kind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=-2GAGCgnaGE I had had a rehearsal for my speech earlier that Sunday, which speaks to the professionalism of INFORMS!

Thank you, David Hunt, and thank you, INFORMS, for the support, the leadership, and also for the incredible community that is INFORMS! Let's continue to devote our efforts so that everyone can realize their full potential.

Thrilled to be Ranked #6 in Supply Chains Globally by ScholarGPS

 A while back, I received the following letter from ScholarGPS:

I had been seeing posts on social media, including on LinkedIn, celebrating notifications by ScholarGPS, which uses a combination of metrics to achieve their rankings. I had also heard that one of my former PhD students, now an Associate Professor - Jose M. Cruz of UConn's Business School, was ranked #94. Given that there are many notable contributors to supply chains, I was thrilled to see my ranking as being #6 since I have been working very hard (but loving the work) on supply chains for over two decades. 

I know quite a few of the scholars in the top 20 in supply chains - the list can be viewed here

https://scholargps.com/highly-ranked-scholars?ranking_duration=LIFETIME&specialty=Supply+chain&p=1#6

and am honored and delighted to be included.  Quite amazing to also be #26 in MIS and #76 in Business and Management since there are so many scholars in different areas in Business: https://scholargps.com/scholars/90395641764625/anna-nagurney

Back to finishing up presentations for the upcoming EURO conference at the University of Leeds in the UK.

An Incredible Blackett Lecture Experience at the Royal Society in London

We returned yesterday from London, in time for me to teach my last Transportation and Logistics class of the Fall 2024 semester this morning.

It was a whirlwind week. My husband and I flew from Boston Logan on December 3 (after I taught my class), and, after a few hours of sleep, we had the pleasure of taking part in an Isenberg School get together hosted by my former PhD student, Dr. Stavros Siokos, the co-founder of Astarte Capital. It was a lovely event with Dean Anne P. Massey taking part as well as Senior Associate Dean Bill Brown, plus several Isenberg School development folks, alums and friends.

And, on December 5, it was time for my Blackett Lecture and the annual awards given out by The Operational Research (OR) Society of the United Kingdom. 

The venue was The Royal Society. This society is the oldest scientific society, dating back to 1660. The event was lovely - beautifully organized with the awards taking place first, followed by my one hour Blackett Lecture, a cocktail hour, and then a delicious dinner. The OR Society will be posting a video of my lecture on its youtube channel soon as well as professional photographs on its Flickr.

I was incredibly honored to have the opportunity to deliver my Blackett Lecture, "NetwORks and Policies: OR to the Rescue," at the beautiful venue and to an audience of amazing colleagues, academics and practitioners, as well as friends and invited guests. I would like to acknowledge the President of The OR Society Gilbert Owusu for the warm introduction and for so expertly handling the Q&A, and Gavin Blackett, Carol McLaughlin, Sarah Davies, and Caitlin Griffin of  The OR Society for the hospitality. Special thanks to Graham Rand, Edmund Burke, and Robert Fildes for the conversations and welcome. It's not every day that one gets to be in a photograph next to an oil painting of the Nobel laureate and Founder of OR in the UK - Patrick Blackett! 

It was an honor to have the Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst Dean Anne P. Massey and Senior Associate Dean William Brown in attendance as well as Diane Isenberg and University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD alumnus Stavros Siokos. Recognizing so many in the audience because of professional interactions over the years, made for a very enjoyable experience - thank you all! The slide deck of my presentation has been posted: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/BlackettLecture-Nagurney-2024.pdf

Some additional background on becoming the 2024 Blackett Lecturer can be found here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/11/deeply-honored-to-have-been-selected-to.html

Congratulations to all the award recipients recognized at this very memorable event. The impact of our great discipline is humbling and inspiring. Working together we can continue to make positive change. 

Having Your Operations Research INFORM Policy

One of my favorite quotes on Operations Research is by INFORMS President-Elect Ed Kaplan of Yale University. It appears in  a paper that he wrote that was published in Omega, "Adventures in Policy Modeling! Operations Research in the Community and Beyond,"and says: Modeling need not be “off the shelf”—rather, modeling with OR techniques should be a celebration of creativity.

His paper is a very provocative and stimulating read  and shuts down naysayers.

The paper also is filled with examples as to how Operations Research has informed policy and associated decision-making. The article is focused on community-based policies.  Examples are drawn from urban applications (Dick Larson's research and practical applications), AIDS modeling and needle exchanges (work done by Kaplan), drug control (Jonathan Caulkins), and even homicides and gun availability (Al Blumstein's many contributions), to start, and, of course, security.  Some great work in this area has been done by, I note, among others, Ed Kaplan, Larry Wein, Sheldon Jacobson, and Laura McLay.

Operations Research has been instrumental in informing policies in other settings, as well, from transportation and logistics to the environment and even medical decision-making, and humanitarian operations.

I work on network systems with many associated applications and it is very gratifying when research that you do also informs policy.

A few years ago, in research conducted with Patrick Qiang, who was my doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management, and with whom I wrote the Fragile Networks book, we introduced a network performance measure, which  allows for the identification and ranking of nodes and links in various network systems operating under decentralized behavior (think of urban transportation networks, certain supply chains, financial networks, and even the Internet). (Patrick is now a tenured Associate Professor at Penn State Great Valley, as of Fall 2015, so more congrats are in order!)

The results of this research appeared in various journals, including Operations Research ones, and even physics, since we wanted to disseminate the work broadly for maximum impact.  A high level overview of our results with some applications appears in: Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age, Anna Nagurney and Qiang Qiang, International Transactions in Operational Research 19: (2012) pp 123-160.

The Nagurney-Qiang performance measure has been used in Indonesia to assess new shipping routes in a study financed in part, by the World Bank.   A nice overview of the approach is in a presentation on Prezi.

Our performance measure has also been used by researchers in Greece, led by Mitsakis and collaborators,  to conduct  network performance and components’ criticality analyses to assess the effects of the immense 2007 fires in Peloponnesus on vehicular traffic and the overall transport network.  See also recent work by some of the same researchers on climate change and our measure. 

In addition, it has been leveraged in an insightful report, "Guidebook for Enhancing Resilience of European Road Transport in Extreme Weather Events."

Schulz used our network performance measure to assess the importance of roadways in a part of Germany.  

It was also applied in Ireland to assess new Dublin metro lines. 

It has been utilized to assess the potential impact of earthquakes on critical infrastructure and is now even being applied outside the policy arena in physiological settings (yes, networks are everywhere and that is one reason why I love them!).

As for my work on paradoxes, including environmental ones, in 2007, one of my papers was featured in the New Zealand parliament; info here. 

Operations Researchers work on tough problems with solutions having broad and fascinating impacts!

Sir Alan Wilson, Regional Science, Operations Research, and the Future of Cities

I returned last night from Europe where I spent the last 3 weeks at 3 different conferences and transiting between them. During this period I was privy not only to major current events but also history in the making since I was in Greece during the financial crisis (and ultimate bailout)  and even in Vienna where US Secretary of State John Kerry helped in the successful Iran nuclear negotiations.

This past week, I had the pleasure of taking part in the EURO 2015 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, which I have blogged about, and, on Tuesday, I was privileged to hear Professor Alan Wilson  of the University College London deliver his keynote talk on the Future of Cities in the beautiful Barony Hall, which was packed. He is the Professor of Urban Regional Systems. His extensive, wide-ranging contributions are both in research as well as in administration.

Sir Wilson began his talk by stating that "he secretly thought that he always was an Operations Researcher," and then stated that he is an Operations Researcher.

Coincidentally,  I know of his work through Regional Science and both Sir Alan Wilson and I were elected Fellows of the RSAI (Regional Science Association International) in the same year - in 2007!

Sir Wilson's passion is cities, since he is concerned with the biggest of big problems.

I so much enjoyed his plenary talk in which in emphasized nonlinearities, complex systems, and the high level of interdependencies in cities (just think of population and infrastructure, for example). He also emphasized the importance of transportation and networks and how infrastructur ties issues of population with the economics of cities.

He stated that his view as a math modeler is "to explore different futures for cities."

In his plenary, he also mentioned the role of engineers in transportation planning in the US so I have to note again the recent book by Professors David Boyce (who is both an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow) and Huw Williams, Forecasting Urban Travel, which I have written about on this blog.  You can view Professor Boyce's presentation on 60 years of travel demand forecasting in which he notes the work of Alan Wilson here. 

Those of you who were listening closely to Sir Alan Wilson's plenary lecture, may have heard him mention Professor Suzanne Evans. Back in 2003, at a Regional Science conference, Suzanne Evans, joined me, Professor David Boyce, and Hani S. Mahmassani (well-known in transportation science and OR ) on a panel to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of the network classic, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, by Beckmann (who was on my dissertation committee at Brown University), McGuire, and Winsten. You can see photos and presentation if you scroll down on this page.

Sir Wilson, in his ketnte, emphasized 6 challenges of cities in the United Kingdom, and stated that the challenges also apply to other cities and I agree. Specifically, he noted the challenges as being: people (demography), city economcs, the environment and sustainability, urban form (land use and green belts, which I am so passionate about), infrastructure, and governance.  He noted that the UK is very centralized and cities are pushing for more decentralization and autonomy.

As a math modeller, Wilson emphasized the high dimensionality of the problems associated with cities and discussed various scenarios for the future of London with powerful graphical displays. One scenario was what would happen if  "we killed off the car." Since I have done a lot of work on projected dynamical systems, I enjoyed hearing him speak about Lotka-Volterra dynamics (and relationships even to retail and hospitals), path dependence on initial conditions, forecasting challenges, and the importance of capturing uncertainty in dynamics.

And, since I had been in London, just a few days before travelinng to Edinburgh and then Glasgow, I have to include in this post one of my favorite green spaces in a city - Hyde Park in London.

Many thanks to the organizers of the great EURO conference in Glasgow for bringing to us such outstanding plenary speakers and many other presenters. It was an honor and delight to take part in it!

Travel Disrupted but Talk Will Take Place

Yesterday, the East Coast was feeling the aftereffects of the horrific tornadoes and storms that struck the South, especially Alabama, with estimates of as many as 300 deaths.

I was at Bradley airport, waiting for my flight to Philly, with a connection to Ithaca, where I was to attend and speak at the Walter Isard Symposium. Then the notice went up that my flight was delayed, but the estimated time for departure made it still feasible for me to catch my connecting flight. You can guess what happened -- after several hours at the airport my flight was cancelled (and the flight from Philly to Ithaca later that day, which I had been told was sold out, was also). Flights were being cancelled to Dulles, DC, Chicago, Newark, Philly, etc. and the gate agent told me of planes that were hours behind schedule. He said that traveling would not be a pleasant experience given all the storms even if you could get on a flight (which I couldn't).

I felt like Steve Martin in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles."

I was terribly disappointed since I so much wanted to pay tribute to the founder of regional science and to see colleagues and friends who were coming for the memorial service and symposium.Professor Isard died last Fall at the age of 91.

Times like these call for resiliency. I contacted Professor June Dong, my collaborator, who was going to the symposium and who lives only about an hour away by car from Cornell and she agreed to give my presentation -- so the talk will go on. Appropriately, she is even in a photo that I had put into the presentation in which she is seated right next to Professor Isard, who came to the talk that I gave at Cornell on April 1, 2009.

I have been told that both the memorial service and the symposium will be videotaped, and posted, which is wonderful.

As Professor David Boyce emailed me this morning, "The weather has been a major problem for this event."

As for two of my doctoral students, they made it to the POMS conference in Reno, Nevada, and are giving their presentations now.

Diversity, and a Company (Ernst & Young) and Student Who Care

I returned from two weeks of heavy travel in Europe to speak at conferences to find alot of mail waiting for me in the mailroom at the Isenberg School. There were several packages, which, I suspected, might be tenure or promotion files to evaluate. After two days of processing and catching up with email plus reconnecting with my family I decided to tackle all the other mail.

My conferences in Vienna, Austria and in Yalta, Ukraine (see my earlier blogposts) required 8 different flights so in my travels I got to meet new people, enjoyed the two conferences immensely and experienced also a part of the world where my parents had come from (Ukraine) that I had previously never been to. The experiences were intense and vivid and I returned to Amherst, Massachusetts truly happy.

It certainly didn't hurt that when I opened my mailer at 3AM the next morning I had a message from an editor of a journal accepting a paper I had worked on for months this past year plus the weather had cooled in the Northeast and Amherst was verdant and lovely.

And an article in yesterday's New York Times by Stephanie Bloom, "But Will It Make You Happy?" further reinforced recent studies by psychologists that it is better to take a vacation than engage in just purchasing "more stuff." Although I would not call extensive professional travel over a relatively short time period a "vacation."

I opened a FedEx package from Secaucus, New Jersey to find a letter from Mr. Ken Bouyer of Enst & Young, the renowened accounting firm. The letter was accompanied by a beautiful standing frame from MoMA (the Museum of Moden Art) in NYC and one of my favorite destinations with the above placard.

In an email message, a former student of mine at the Isenberg School, who had just graduated in May with his degree in Operations Management, informed me that he had submitted my nomination for this award.

I was stunned by the kindness and thoughtfulness of this student who took the time to recognize the promotion of diversity and inclusiveness. I might add that he is a white male (not that it matters).

Kudos also to Ernst & Young for valuing diversity and inclusiveness and the promotion thereof in the global workplace. Two years ago, the Isenberg School had received a grant from Ernst & Young.

Clearly, an essential part of "happiness" is not only those special experiences but the strength of relationships and ties that we build over time wherever our work or our travels take us.

Video of the Traffic Panel at the World Science Festival

A video of the Traffic panel: !@#$% Traffic: From Insects to Interstates that took place at the World Science Festival in NYC last June is now available.

The panel was moderated by Robert Krulwich of NPR and ABC with the panelists that joined me being: Dr. Iain Couzin of Princeton University and Dr. Mitchell Joachim of Columbia University. We were on stage at the Kimmel Center at NYU with over 400 in the audience.

The video is not of the entire panel discussions, and the accompanying Q&A with the audience, which I enjoyed very much, as well, but you can view the segment here and you can get a sense of how fascinating traffic and transportation are! It contains a discussion of the Braess paradox and the closing of Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets.

You can find other video segments from the World Science Festival (even on Avian Einsteins and Pioneers in Science) on that same link.

Transportation Network and Supply Chain Design Talks are Now Online!

Talks, in pdf format, on transportation network design and supply chain network design, given at the Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics, at Northwestern University last month, in honor of the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann, are now online.

Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, the Director of the Transportation Center at Northwestern University, and Professor David E. Boyce organized this symposium, which was very successful and generated numerous discussions and research ideas.

The below presentations, given at the Symposium, are available for download from the Transportation Center's site:

• Anna Nagurney:
  Supply chain network design under profit maximization and oligopolistic competition
• David Boyce:
  A road network design methods revisited: expressway spacing and economic evaluation
• John McDonald:
  Approaches to mitigating traffic congestion: A very short survey
• Yanfeng Ouyang:
  Reliable facility location: from supply chain network design to traffic sensor deployment
• T. John Kim:
  Transportation, information and communication technologies, and future cities
• Dirk Brockmann:
  Multi-scale human mobility - what complex network theory can reveal
• Yu (Marco) Nie:
  Pricing-refunding in general transportation networks: when it works and how
• Diego Klabjan:
  Carbon Footprint in Logistics

Professor Ouyang's talk and my talk focused on supply chain network design. My presentation was based on the paper with the same name as my presentation, which was just published in 2010 in the journal, Transportation Research E.

Professor Boyce gave a fascinating historical perspective on road network design with applications to the Chicago area (and beyond).

Professor McDonald spoke on different means of traffic mitigation, whereas Professor Nie discussed pricing and refunding in transportation networks (both very hot topics now).

Professor Kim discussed, from his unique, international perspective, how ICT (information, communication, and transportation) technologies can assist in the problems that cities are facing.

Professor Brockmann gave a physicist's perspective on human mobility and complex network theory (a topic also of great interest to me).

Professor Klabjan spoke on the work that he is interested in regarding modeling the carbon footprint in logistics and the challenges faced by the trucking industry in determining what part of the load contributes what amount to emissions (and who, hence, should pay).

Many thanks to the symposium organizers for putting up these presentations so that anyone interested may benefit from them!

Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics

On January 29, 2010, the Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics will take place at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. This symposium has been organized by Professors David E. Boyce and Hani S. Mahmassani to honor and celebrate the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann to Northwestern. The symposium program is now available.

Professor Beckmann is the only living author of the classic book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, published in 1956 by Yale University Press, and co-authored with Bart McGuire and Chris Winsten. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of this classic book, in 2005, we organized several sessions at the San Francisco INFORMS meeting and both Beckmann, and McGuire (who died two months after), came to the sessions and took part in the festivities. Please click here for those talks and many photos as well as for a link to the classic book, which is now available online.

Professor Beckmann was on my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University, which was chaired by Professor Stella Dafermos, and I remember so well the question that he asked after my defense plus the party that I gave in Barus and Holley (that well-known engineering and physics building at Brown) afterwards. Beckmann, a true cosmopolitan and lover of travel and terrific food, especially enjoyed the European tortes that I had prepared for the occasion (although we were quite poor grad students at that time and did not have all the right utensils for slicing). He took advantage of a plastic spatula to do the job.

Professor Beckmann, I hear, will be traveling by train to Northwestern, from Providence, Rhode Island, and the day before the symposium, will be speaking on his reflections of the classic book (BMW).

Boyce, Mahmassani, and I wrote a journal article on the impacts of BMW, which was published in Papers in Regional Science in 2005 .

At Northwestern, I will be speaking on some of my latest work and will be delivering the paper, Supply Chain Network Design Under Profit Maximization and Oligopolistic Competition.

I am very much looking forward to this symposium, which will honor the work of a truly great scholar and human being.

For those who would like to see additional photos of Professor Beckmann, who, as Professor Boyce, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science, please click here. These photos were taken in various locations around the globe, including Australia and Sweden.

Podcast and Reconnecting

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Barry List, the Communications Director of INFORMS, while at the INFORMS Annual Conference in San Diego last month for a podcast on transportation networks and beyond and the podcast is now available here.

Getting feedback and messages regarding the podcast has been quite interesting and fun. Today, for example, I received an email from a student who is now getting his Masters in Operations Research at the London School of Economics (LSE) who had enjoyed my podcast. While an undergrad at a college in Boston he had attended the Brown University SUMS (Symposium for Undergraduates in the Mathematical Sciences) in March 2007 when I was the featured speaker representing operations research. I spoke on Operations Research and the Captivating Study of Networks. He had enjoyed the topic so much that he visited me at UMass Amherst the following fall to discuss his interests in this discipline.

Needless to say, I was delighted to hear from him today and to learn that he had matriculated as a graduate student in Operations Research at LSE!

Traffic and Pedestrians

Today is the last day of the NET2009 conference in Rome, Italy. It has been a fascinating conference and the conferees are from Switzerland, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, Argentina, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Germany, Spain, Italy, with me representing the United States. I have heard talks by physicists on finance, on economics, on evolutionary game theory. The theme here is definitely interdisciplinarity. My plenary talk on Thursday focused on supply chains and oligopolies and how we could assess the possible gains from mergers and acquisitions with insights into the merger paradox. My field is operations research and management science so I am interested in mathematical modeling, analysis, and effective algorithms for problem solution as well as managerial insights.

The venue at La Sapienza is a big room and we are offered Italian treats during coffee breaks. My hotel is the hotel for aviators (translated roughly from the Italian) so I am surrounded by men in uniform. Navigating the streets and crosswalks of Rome has been quite the experience. Even with a green light, I cross, only to get mopeds and cars literally almost clipping my heels. Several times I thought that I would not make it across the street, even while trying to cross with a group of Italians, but somehow, miraculously, the traffic stops and I look into the eyes of the drivers.

As for parking, I have seen cars parked on crosswalks, on sidewalks, and almost on top of one another as in those fabulous children books by Richard Scarry with the characters Huckle and Lowly.

I continue to be impressed by the elegance of the people here and how they greet each other so warmly and courteously. My hotel has the most delicious food but the rooms do not have carpets (but lovely hardwood floors) so noise travels plus one needs to lock oneself into the room with a big key. In case of fire I do not think that anyone would be able to unlock the doors to escape (in addition there are metal grates on the room windows). The rooms are clean but spartan. The beds are tiny and one gets one sheet as a cover. I must have gotten accommodations for a private rather than for an officer.

Travel always opens up one's eyes and strengthens one's survival skills and sense of adventure.