Several months after the 9/11 attacks, the New York Times ran an article about a mysterious new Department of Defense program, soon to be known as “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) [1]. The ostensible purpose of the program was to capture vast amounts of electronic data and conduct data mining on it to find potential terrorist activity. The program became extremely controversial – its vision of analyzing large amounts of data on individuals’ activities and transactions raised major privacy concerns – and was soon cancelled by Congress [2]. However, the dream of using data mining techniques to detect “patterns of data”and flag would-be terrorists has lived on for obvious reasons, given the horrific consequences of the 9/11 attacks. The National Research Council (NRC) has recently released a major report examining the use of data mining for counterterrorism purposes [3], making this a natural time to examine the questions – can you actually find terrorists with data mining? If not, why not, and what can be done instead?
Volume 36, Number 1, February 2009
FEATURE ARTICLES
DIGITAL EDITION
DEPARTMENTS 
Inside Story
And the survey says …
From a pure manpower point of view, the most labor-intensive editorial projects we undertake on a regular basis on behalf of OR/MS Today are software surveys. The process begins about three months before publication when we update the survey questionnaire based on input from the author of the article that introduces that particular software survey. (We update almost all of our software surveys on a biennial basis, so we generally start with the previous questionnaire and go from there.)
President's Desk
After the Meltdown …
Over the past year,we have seen extraordinary economic turmoil – the most dramatic such events in many decades. An apparent correction in an over-inflated U.S. housing market combined with the collapse of a small corner of the mortgage market – subprime loans – led to a cascading chain of events,culminating in a world-wide crisis of confidence among lenders, who withdrew their funds at an unprecedented pace. Disruption in global credit markets led to financial distress and failure of major banks and financial service firms, sudden shortages of cash for businesses of all types and major declines in world stock markets. By the end of the year, it was clear that these events were triggering economic downturns in the United States and around the world.And,as we look at our year-end investment statements and listen to news reports of tight budgets, job cutbacks and disappointing corporate earnings, we might be justified in giving more than a little bit of thought to our personal financial security.
Issues in Education
The Clicker System
In the October 2008 “Issues in Education” column, professors Leon, Przasnyski and Seal highlighted the importance of calibrating our pedagogical techniques to the learning styles of our current students, who they dub “Net-Gens.” They suggest that using different forms of instructional technology may help instructors connect with their students in the classroom. I have been utilizing one of these types of devices – personal response systems (often known as “clickers”) – in my undergraduate classes for the past four semesters; and I thought sharing my positive and negative experiences might be helpful for other instructors who are contemplating the use of these systems.
INFORMS in the News
Poor Personal Choices & Depoliticizing Politics
Operations researchers have often prided themselves in their ability to make manufacturing and supply chains work more smoothly. Now, our science with a thousand applications is showing us how our mistakes can cost us our lives. In the November/December 2008 issue of Operations Research, veteran decision scientist Ralph Keeney demonstrated that individuals’ poor decisions increasingly lead to premature death. Read below to learn how Newsweek described his research.
Was It Something I Said
Customer (Dis)Service Leads to Loyalty
As usual, I have put off my preparation for spring semester until it is (almost) too late. Today, I find myself scrambling to prepare my syllabus for a course on “Quality Management.”
PuzzlOR
Supply and Demand
Moving resources efficiently from supplier to consumer is a challenging problem that can be solved using O.R. techniques. Figure 1 shows a map of blue factories that supply food to orange towns. The numbers below the factories and towns indicate how much food (in kg) each supplies and demands, respectively. Any factory can supply any amount of food to one or several towns. A new factory is being built that can supply 1,000 kg of food but the location of the factory has not yet been determined. The distance between adjacent cells on the map is 1 km. The cost to transport 1 kg of food 1 km is $10.
ORacle
The Race Question
“How many of you watched the presidential inauguration?” the OR/MS professor asked his class as they settled into the lecture.“Did any of you go to Washington to be part of it?”