My most recent trip is the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) conference in Montreal (a big thanks to Pierre L’Ecuyer for inviting me to visit during CORS and for organizing a terrific one-day workshop on Call Center Research immediately following).
Volume 33, Number 3, June 2006
FEATURE ARTICLES
DIGITAL EDITION
DEPARTMENTS 
Inside Story
Oh What a Night!
Any time you walk into a ballroom and the first person you see is “Science of Better” champion Irv Lustig wearing a black top hat (and tux) right out of the Fred Astaire Collection instead of his trademark white fedora, you know something special is going on.
President's Desk
A Great Night for the Profession
“John, may I have the committee’s decision, please.” Even veteran Edelman competitors and observers had a heightened sense of anticipation as John Milne, chair of the 2006 Edelman competition, handed an envelope to Russ Labe, INFORMS vice president of practice activities, with the name of the winning team.
INFORMS Online
Class Warfare on the Internet
The Internet has long had a reputation as a “Wild West,” where rules are relatively few and businesses compete on a level playing field. Success in Internet commerce has depended on a content producer’s ability to generate an audience. (I almost wrote “quality of the content,”but anyone spending any significant amount of time on the Net knows that quality is not necessarily correlated with ability to build an audience.) But recent developments may disrupt this balance. The controversy centers on proposals by Internet service providers (ISPs) to charge differential fees for guaranteed service quality.
Was It Something I Said
Class Warfare on the Internet
The Internet has long had a reputation as a “Wild West,” where rules are relatively few and businesses compete on a level playing field. Success in Internet commerce has depended on a content producer’s ability to generate an audience. (I almost wrote “quality of the content,”but anyone spending any significant amount of time on the Net knows that quality is not necessarily correlated with ability to build an audience.) But recent developments may disrupt this balance. The controversy centers on proposals by Internet service providers (ISPs) to charge differential fees for guaranteed service quality.
Cyberspace
Ain’t It All Operations?
One of the most enigmatic characters in English literature is Joe Christmas in William Faulkner’s “Light in August” (1932). Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. He “passes for white”in a small Southern town but seems to both cherish and abhor his “blackness” in a “white” society. He is unable to settle down anywhere. Unable or unwilling to communicate with most other people, he lets them define him (see Wikipedia or www.sparknotes.com, for instance).
ORacle
The Programmer’s Parable
“I just don’t get it, Rob,” the frustrated OR analyst sighed.“I’ve been over this computer code a few dozen times. I’ve inserted print messages to track when key values get changed. I can see it’s going through the logic pretty much as I expected, but I’m still getting weird results.”