Volume 32, Number 5, October 2005

Like so many others all the way up to President Bush, INFORMS Director of Meetings Terry Cryan thought New Orleans had dodged a bullet when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city on Aug. 29. Winds from the powerful hurricane certainly made a mess of things, but initial reports indicated that it could have been much, much worse. Cryan breathed a sigh of relief, confident that the Big Easy would be in fine shape by Nov. 13 when INFORMS and as many as 3,500 attendees were due to blow into town for the Institute’s fall annual meeting.

• Peter Horner

THE TERRORIST EVENTS ON SEPT. 11, 2001, WILL FOREVER ALTER THE WAY OUR NATION VIEWS AVIATION SECURITY. The article by Barnett (2001) in OR/MS Today highlighted numerous important questions and issues surrounding the events of that day and how air travel has been and will continue to be affected. Four years later, aviation security systems have undergone significant changes, though the analysis of such systems continues to lag well behind their actual operation. Operations research provides a unique set of methodologies and tools for designing and analyzing aviation security systems, since the foundation of operations research is based on applying analytical methods to optimally allocate and use scarce assets in making better informed decisions.

• Laura McLay
• John Kobza

ST. JOSEPH CENTER IS A CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION – a 501(C)(3) in tax parlance – providing assistance to working poor and homeless families and individuals on the west side of Los Angeles. Two incongruent items appeared on the agenda of a recent meeting of the center’s board (on which I serve). The first regarded the enormous amount of time and effort the center’s legal advisors had provided without charge as part of a pro bono program; the second regarded the fees due the center’s auditors. Naively, I wondered whether accountants and auditors provide services without charge to charitable 501(C)(3) organizations. Essentially, the answer is “no.”

• Kevin McCardle

EARLIER THIS YEAR, AFRICA HELD ITS FIRST CONTINENT-WIDE CONFERENCE ON O.R. PRACTICE (ORPA-1) with partial funding support from INFORMS as well as EURO, IFORS, KPMG and other sponsors. ORPA-1 crowns five years of exciting developments, including the creation of two new Sub-Saharan African O.R. societies. This may signal a new era of O.R. activity in a region which had been the subject of many O.R. papers but which had not yet seen the impact of widespread application of O.R. methods.

• Jonathan Caulkins
• Emily Eelman
• Minoli Ratnatunga
• David Schaarsmith

O.R. RESEARCHERS HAVE LONG lacked a centralized, peer-reviewed forum where they can study and share source code and other computational tools (“software”), data and underlying theoretical models. COIN-OR was designed following the open-source model to provide a much needed repository for O.R. technology. Just as refereed journals archive developments in O.R. theory, COIN-OR is intended to be an archive of developments in O.R. technology. The goals of COIN-OR include the following:

• Robin Lougee

SOME YEARS AGO, I WITNESSED A SOCIAL SCIENCE Ph.D. student trying to determine whether the political campaign by the Labour Party in the 1997 British election imitated the Clinton campaign in the U.S. presidential election the year before. She counted the frequency and the co-occurrence of such words as “compassion”and “charisma” to describe leadership attributes by all the election TV advertisements for both Blair and Clinton. I was struck by the rigor of the analysis of such a vast amount of textual data

• Byung-Gak Son