Volume 33, Number 5, October 2006

I was pleased to see E. Andrew Boyd’s essay in the August issue of OR/MS Today (“The Box that Changed Our Lives,” page 72). I read it several times, looking for some indication of the importance of the role played by operations research in the design and development of containers and container systems. Members of INFORMS and other readers of the magazine would be interested in learning about that role.

ONE OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING things about a negotiation is that each party has private information that is central to a sound agreement, but it can at the same time be folly for either party to share that information directly with the other party. A simple example is a sales transaction. The seller should not start by telling his prospect the lowest price he is prepared to accept, nor should the buyer start by telling the seller the highest price he is prepared to pay. Clearly, if there is, in fact, room for a deal, whoever first conveys this information is conceding the entire room to the other party.

• John Kettelle

So here you are,starting your last school year. Perhaps you’re finishing a B.S. in operations research, with a double minor in something utterly practical, like computer science and accounting, and an unholy fascination with the left nullspace of a certain type of sparse matrix. Or perhaps you’re polishing off a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, while managing to take as many Italian art classes as you can for free while you’re still a full-time student. Or perchance you’re an undergrad majoring in applied mathematics because your school doesn’t offer a full-blown OR/MS major, and while you can program a little and learned to order another cappuccino in Italian while in Rome last summer, you have spent the vast majority of the past few years working your way up to being president of your sorority, a position which now quite frankly consumes more of your time than your senior thesis.

• Carrie Beam

ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO, INFORMS launched its “Science of Better” program to market the profession. This ambitious program potentially benefits every single person who works in fields embraced by the INFORMS umbrella. The time seems right to review why the program was undertaken, what progress has been made, and how members of the profession who wish to do so can actively participate as we forge ahead.

The newest INFORMS publication is the book series “TutORials in Operations Research,” which is published each year based on the tutorials offered at the Institute’s annual meeting. John D.C. Little long told us that the primary role of a professional society such as INFORMS is to disseminate knowledge among its members. Tutorials are a part of the lifeblood of our professional society. They stimulate people to examine problems they did not think about before. They tell members about developments in their own field about which they previously knew little. They help people tune to the state of the art and to what problems are not yet solved. No wonder tutorials are one of the major activities at the INFORMS annual meetings.

• Paul Gray

QUANTITATIVE METHODS SOFTWARE VERSION 1.1 (QMS) is a comprehensive collection of software modules that covers nearly every topic that could be included in an introductory quantitative methods or operations research course. QMS was introduced in 2004 by QuantMethods (www.quantmethods.com) in response to the need for a lower cost, greater ease-of-use and deployment flexibility software package. The authors have extensive experience in academics, technology and business.

• Clarence Martin
• Ken Cutright