All Annual Meeting attendees receive exclusive early access to the 2010 TutORials online book concurrently with the Meeting. Entitled "Risk and Optimization in an Uncertain World," the 2010 volume is the perfect complement to the series of talks. All INFORMS 2011 members receive access on January 1, 2011. For access, go to www.informs.org/tutorialsonline and enter your INFORMS member username and password. If you do not know your username or password, you may request it at that link. You can order the 2010 book or CDs of previous volumes (2005-2009) through the TutORials website http://www.informs.org/Journal/Tutorials-in-OR. For more information, visit INFORMS Booth #46.

9am-1pm, Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 3
Last chance to visit over 50 exhibitors. Name badges must be worn for admittance to the Exhibit Hall. Free Internet WiFi in Exhibits area and E-mail Center.

Stop by the INFORMS booth in Exhibit Hall 3 (Booth #46) to receive valuable products and information:

• Speakers Book Store - over 30 titles on display!
• 50% off INFORMS books sale
• Free sample journals
• Free 2009 Edelman DVD - just ask!
• Information on volunteering
• Free Community newsletters
• Membership information (what's changing in 2011)
• Renewal assistance
• Presidents slide show
• 25+ Year Ribbons

9am-3pm, Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 3
Last chance to meet up with employers and job seekers for in-person, prearranged interviews. Good luck to all.

If you missed the Wagner Prize presentations, no problem! In just a few weeks, INFORMS will offer meeting attendees and all members a chance to see these presentations on demand via the Web. Watch for our announcement or check the INFORMS Video Learning Center. A short log-in is required.

Gerald Brown made an impassioned plea for help solving operations research problems related to homeland security and defense in his Tuesday keynote address. After calling on some famous examples of O.R. applications in defense, Brown seemed to express disappointment at the recent commitment of O.R. professionals at large to problems related to the security of what he referred to as "critical infrastructure."

Saying that he was "disappointed to see so little so late coming from O.R.," Brown then provided some of his ideas about the important unanswered questions in the area while imploring O.R. professionals and academics to take action. According to Brown, improving the resiliency of infrastructure should be prioritized over trying to predict and prevent specific malevolent acts. At the heart of this view is his feeling that trying to predict risk of various targets to use as inputs to a model is too complicated by the transparency of the modern security apparatus, and the fact that intelligent adversaries will change their targets in response to obvious hardening of a particular target. By focusing on resiliency, he argued, systems can be made more robust in the inevitable event of an attack or natural disaster, which will ultimately act as an incentive for adversaries to look elsewhere, hopefully places with a less costly impact.

Without naming any targets as being especially vulnerable, Brown did suggest that there are some critical infrastructure systems that are vulnerable.That frightening possibility is clearly behind his plea for O.R. professionals and academics to get involved through research, political channels, corporate decisions, and curriculum design.

In 1991, the Institute of Medicine released the report "To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System" where it claimed that healthcare in the United States is not as safe as it should be. It supported that statement with the statistics that "at least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented." According to Professor Matthew Liberatore, that was the wake-up call for healthcare managers to pay more attention to quality control within the healthcare industry. Liberatore has been studying the implementation of quality management measures in the healthcare industry for more than 10 years, following the industry's adoption of total quality management, business process reengineering, six sigma, and lean management. One of the insights that he has gleaned over the last decade is that these quality management measures are effective tools only when they are used in a motivated fashion by the right people. His advice to operation researchers interested in the healthcare field is to talk to the healthcare practitioners in order to understand their situation and concerns before embarking on the modeling, and to consider the involvement and motivation of the practitioners in effecting and sustaining the change. The important thing, he pointed out, is for the practitioners to be willing to examine how they are doing things, to be involved with the analysis, and to participate and be creative in solving the identified challenges.

On Tuesday, the official Honors Society of INFORMS, Omega Rho, inducted John R. Birge as their 44th honorary member. Following the induction, Birge gave the annual Omega Rho Distinguished Lecture on the role operations research and management sciences play in the management of risk with recent current affairs.

AIG's financial crisis, British Petroleum's oil disaster, and Iceland's volcanic eruption were the main focuses of Birge's lecture. For all three cases, he showed the critical steps that led up to the inevitable crises, for example, BP's decision to install only one blowout preventer (BOP) versus two in the well line. A BOP is a blind shear ram installed to shear and seal a pipe in the event of a leak. Birge presented a simple decision tree showing that a second BOP should have been installed, even at an expense of a million dollars and a delay to the project, to minimize the risk of a catastrophic event. In contrast, he presented the same decision tree from the perspective of the managing executives. The latter tree highlighted that there was little downside for the executives compared to the upside of a monetary incentive for finishing the project on time.

Birge argues that as operation research analysts, we are not doing anything wrong in practice, but rather we have to be cognizant of who is utilizing our findings in their decision making. Instead of rewarding decision makers for a timely completion of an oil well, we should design payoffs to provide incentives for effective risk management throughout the organization.

The role of ocean container transport in the global supply chain is becoming more important as a result of globalization and increased offshore outsourcing. Professor Chung-Yee Lee of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology pointed out that previous operations research of the container supply chain has predominantly focused on the container terminal operations, leaving the ocean container transport understudied. Lee therefore proposes a number of research issues in this area that were identified through reviewing the literature and consulting practitioners in this field. The first issue is that 70% of the containers from Asia to North America and 60% of the containers from Asia to Europe return empty to Asia. The second is that the antitrust immunity for ocean carriers was repealed by the EU in 2008, and it is likely to be followed by similar actions in other parts of the world. The practice of slow steaming utilized by the ocean liners during and after the recent recession and its impact on the sustainability of the global supply chain is the third issue. The fourth issue is that not all parties that have an operational relationship in the container supply chain have a contractual relationship with one another. The fifth issue is that of significant schedule unreliability of the container ocean transport, and the sixth is the fierce competition between ports and terminals in the container supply chain. And finally, the seventh issue is the increase of security requirements on operational processes at the ports of shipment. After presenting the numerous challenges and potential research issues in ocean container transport, Lee extended an invitation for more operation researchers to join him in this endeavor to contribute toward the sustainability of the global supply chain.

In a newly carbon-conscious world, wind power is a hot new technology. Peering behind the curtain, however, reveals that this power source may come with some weaknesses that won't allow it to be the answer to all of our energy woes. On Tuesday, researchers at INFORMS presented work intended to better understand the limitations and potential for wind power.

The fundamental challenge of wind power is the fickle and hard-to-predict nature of the wind, and all of the presenters sought to deal with this challenge. Jianhui Wang of Argonne National Laboratory presented his work on wind power forecasting uncertainty, utilizing both a stochastic and deterministic approach. Aidan Tuohy of University College Dublin couldn't attend, but his work on the cost effectiveness of storage associated with wind power was graciously presented by a colleague. John MacCormack of the University of Calgary presented some results on the time dependence of the variance of wind power generation and electrical demand. Jorge Valenzuela of Auburn University presented an analytically tractable model for estimating wind farm revenues.

The session was well attended by students and other researchers in the field. Although all INFORMS events have a global flair, this particular event seemed especially well traveled, with data from Canadian and Irish wind power systems and at least one attendee from New Zealand reflecting the emphasis placed on this topic worldwide.

The Mathematics INstruction using Decision Science and Engineering Tools (MINDSET) is entering its fourth year. The National Science Foundation provided $3 million worth of funding for Project MINDSET. The main goals of the project are to improve student's multiple-step problem-solving skills, to improve attitudes toward mathematics, to make mathematics more appealing to women and other underrepresented populations in STEM fields, and to demonstrate that I.E./O.R. tools are vehicles to teach mathematics.

In the first three years, two complete texts for both teachers and students were composed, an online call system to aid teachers in the implementation of the project was built, and a test was designed to compare each student's performance versus standard methods of education. Kenneth Chelst, Dave Goldsman, and Andrés Weintraub were in attendance to provide an update and plan for future expansion of the project.

Currently, the program is being used by approximately 1000-1200 students in 30 different high schools, with the majority of schools in Michigan and North Carolina. There are two exciting advancements of the program: the Georgia Board of Education is rolling out a course in their high schools called "Mathematical Decision Making in Government and Business," and a full translation of course texts and adaptation of the program in is being made available in Chile.

With 25 states passing new regulations on required courses for high school students, the MINDSET program is poised to take a major step toward showcasing how I.E./O.R. techniques are a viable way to teach students through real-world applications of the fundamentals of mathematical ideas. The panel emphasized that they are always looking to expand to other states or regions. If interested, please contact them via www.mindsetproject.org.

"Immigration Policy Limits Innovation," by Mary Crissey
Even though you might not have the BLOGGER name badge on - you are welcome to comment on an entry - or suggest a new topic for an article title. After observing so many international attendees at our annual meeting come by the job fair, one suggestion given to me was a blog topic citing the topic of citizenship, sponsorship or green cards rulings vs the  necessity to  becoming gainfully employed. Read more.