Last pictures from Florence

Here are some pictures we took from the top of the Campenile. My family has finally arrived, so the last two pictures are of me with my favorite person (not one of you guys, sorry), but the other pictures show most of the main highlights of Florence.
Have a safe trip home, and relax a little back in the states. See you in the fall.

End of the session

The class is almost over. I will check the wiki on Thursday and Friday and assign grades after that. If you have any questions, please send me an email and I will get back to you.
Thanks for all your cooperation during the trips and in the classroom. I hope you had a great time and please feel free to stop by and say hi when we're all back in Storrs.

Last class

We will wrap things up starting at 10:00 on Wednesday in the classrooms for each group (Santa Maria Novella for UConn, Classroom #3 for PSU). See you then.

The longest day

It was long and it was hot, but it was worth it because we saw the production lines for Ducati, Pagani and Lamborghini. There are no pictures allowed in the factories, but here are pictures from the showrooms there. Some happy students with big Italian supercars.

More details for Monday

Caterina gave me the itinerary for the trip on Monday:

• Depart 7:30 from Firenze SMN at the regular bus stop
• Meet the tour guides at Ducati factory at 9:15
• Factory, museum and gift shop at Ducati
• Lamborghini factory tour, Excellence centre (museum) and gift shop
• Pagani showroom, factory and gift shop
• Leave from Bologna at 18:00.
• That should put us back in Florence at 19:30 (depends on traffic).

Sometime during the day (maybe between Ducati and Lamborghini) we will stop at a shopping center where there is a food court (variety of places, including McDonald's). We will probably stop there for about an hour.

You might plan to bring water and maybe some snacks for the day. We can also probably stop at one of the highway rest stops on the way back to Florence for people to grab something to eat or drink.

It will be a long day, but I think everyone will enjoy it. See you Monday morning.

Grade Reports and Monday

I am going through the site, and I will post more comments on your journals and the company visits, but I've read through everything enough to have a "rough" grade estimate for everyone. Those emails will be going out shortly, and if you have any questions you can reply to my email. In addition, I will be around Palazzo Rucellai this afternoon, so you can catch me after your art history class if you want.

Please note that the estimate assumes that you are on the bus and engaged in the tour on Monday. Remember, this is a long day (but I hope it will be worth it), and the bus leaves SMN train station at the usual place at 7:30. Set an extra alarm if you are worried, or arrange for someone in another apartment to call you in the morning. Missing the day will change the grade estimate, and not in a positive direction...

Also note that I have put some videos up on the company visit page for the OPIM students, and on the Family Business page that will show you the kinds of products we will see assembled on Monday.

There really is class on Wednesday

Sorry. :-)

9:00-12:00, in our room back in the corner (Santa Maria Novella) for the UConn students, and in Classroom #3 in the "Library" side of the building for Penn State students.

Not an Italian car

I put some videos about the cars we will see next week (on the wiki). This is not one of them.

News for the weekend and next week

First, have a good (safe) time on your travels this weekend. I'll most likely be here in Florence, having a gelato (or two) at Grom (pistacchio, stracciatella, fragola, mmm).

For next week, the schedule will be as follows. On Monday, it will be an optional class meeting day, starting in the classroom you are assigned to, UConn in Santa Maria Novella (back in the corner) and PSU in room #3 in the Library side of the building. We will be around from 10-12 to talk to you about how the class is going and to provide help with your wiki entries. For those of you that have not done any work on your journal, this might be a good time to get some help to get that started.

On Wednesday, we'll have regular class time at Palazzo Rucellai, 9am until noon. We will talk about some of the company visits and do some work to set up our last trip to Bologna/Modena. There are some videos on the wiki (look at the vehicle production page under company visits) to introduce you to the products we will see assembled on Monday. In addition, we are very likely to visit showrooms at each company where you'll be able to purchase gifts from the company (I have a nice Lamborghini tie, for example).

I am working with GE to see about setting up a visit for Wednesday afternoon for those that were not able to go this past week. Sorry about the mixup. When I have the details, I will let you know, but it will be a quick train ride out, the tour and a ride back. Both of us will be on the tour, and may be able to help in explaining some of the things you'll see.

Reminder for GE trip on Wednesday

We will meet at the usual place on Wednesday at 1:00pm (13:00 Italian time). Instead of a bus, we will take a train from Firenze SMN to the next stop, Firenze Rifredi. From there it is about a 15-20 minute walk to the Florence Learning Center that is adjacent to the Nuovo Pignone plant.

The training center is business casual, and the plant will require closed shoes (you will be asked to stand outside and wait if your shoes are not "safe"). This visit is a courtesy extended to us by GE, and this is probably the visit to look your most "professional" -- no shorts or ball caps. There will not be a bus where you could leave alternate clothes. The plant is huge, so comfortable walking shoes are okay (sneakers).

We will have a lecture about the MIS systems for managing the production of these complex products (I have some material on the website that you can look at before we go) and then a tour of the plant. Each will be about ninety minutes, so we should be able to get a train back to Firenze SMN by 6pm. Let me know if you have any questions.

Making wine in Fonterutoli

We had one of our best weather days so far, and had a great trip into Chianti to visit a winery in a little village called Fonterutoli. The winery has been owned by the Mazzei family since 1435 (the current managers are part of the 24th generation). Here are pictures from the day.

I heard there were some camera problems, so if anyone wants copies of pictures, please let me know. The pictures can also be downloaded by saving images, and the resolution on those pictures should be good enough to print.

Monday trip reminder

Monday we will visit a winery in Chianti, owned by the Mazzei family. We will meet at SMN Stazione, in the usual place at 8:30. The roads in Chianti are not straight for more than a few meters, so if you think you might need some motion sickness medicine, plan ahead. There will be a bit of walking, so comfortable shoes (not flip-flops, sorry) would be a good idea as well.
I have added some links to the wiki for this visit, for the GE trip, and for the vehicle production day. You can find them on the company visit page, and I also put links on the syllabus page.

Website posts

I have appended a long comment to each of the first three company visits for each class (PSU and UConn). Take a look some time and think about adding some more analysis or comments to each page.
I have also started looking at all the Journals. If you haven't done much on them yet, remember that six weeks disappears very quickly. What I will (officially) do is have an open class time on Monday June 16 to be in our classroom to talk one-on-one with anyone who wants help with their journal. We will have class at Palazzo Rucellai on June 18. For the Penn State students, Prof. Chelko will be here that week and may want to meet with you on both Monday and Wednesday. He will post something on the class wiki to confirm.

Remember that the Winery Tour on Monday will start at the train station at 8:30. We will have a meeting with the head of the winery in the afternoon, and so we will be back in Florence probably by 6:00.
On Wednesday we will go to Nuovo Pignone in the afternoon and meet at the train station around 1pm. We have a presentation from GE at 2pm, and then a tour of the plant starting around 3:45. The plant is in Florence, and the tour should finish around 5:30, so you'll be 'free' around 6:00.
Let me know if you have any questions. Have a great weekend.

Wednesday Trip Reminder

On Wednesday, June 4th, we will meet at the usual place at SMN Train Station at 9:00 (you get to sleep an extra hour and a half!). We will make a short trip to Prato, which we passed when we drove to Pietrasanta and Carrara.
There are two companies there that we will visit, and so half of the UConn students will go to one, the other half to the other (similar for PSU students). Alan will accompany one group, I will go with the other. On the website, there will be comments from each half of the class and some discussion of the differences between the two companies.
The tours should finish by noon, so we will be back in Florence in time for (Italian) lunch.
Next week: Wine and industrial machines.

Pictures in and around Fiesole

Fiesole is a small town up a high hill looking out over Florence. The student orientation was held there on our first Saturday, and students got to see the wonderful views of Florence and the Arno River valley. I went up for a quiet day of reading, eating and picture taking. Here are some of the pictures.

Italian trains and strikes

On Sunday, many of the students were off to other parts of Italy and Europe (Venice, Rome, Prague among others), but those still in Florence who were trying to visit cities in the area discovered that Italian trains have a habit of going on strike. The strikes are often announced, and last a specified period and I'm not sure what exactly they accomplish. Usually a few trains run so that people are delayed but not completely stranded.
Here are some pictures of the train station in Florence, called Santa Maria Novella, and the many travellers trying to find a way to get to their destinations.

Carrara Marmotec -- International Trade Show for the Marble Industry

Here are pictures from the trade show, Marmotec. There are large machines for use in the quarries (to cut blocks), and then machines for transforming the blocks into other products. The trade show also has samples of marble from different parts of the world. Pure white marble comes from Carrara, but other colors and qualities are also located in particular parts of the world.

Marble Quarry in Carrara

We went from the trade show, Carrara Marmotec, up the mountain to where they excavate large blocks of marble (the small ones are ten tons). This year we went to a different cava than in previous years, and the owner of the site was able to talk with us about their operations. The weather was rainy, so we did not drive to the other quarry, but here are pictures from last year, when we had a bright sunny day.

Marble, Bronze and Mosaic

We visited Barsanti, a family business in Pietrasanta that produces art pieces in marble, bronze and mosaics. Some are done at the direction of artists and others are commissions from customers who want artwork for their buildings (or for cruise ships).

After the visit we stopped and had lunch in Viareggio, which is one of the beaches that is easiest to reach from Florence. It is mostly a boardwalk and you pay to "rent" the place you sit, but we were able to see the Mediterranean and have a relaxing lunch.

Nuclear power in the Italian news

Here's an article from the NYTimes about a possible return to using nuclear power in Italy. An opponent of the plan said the following:

Emma Bonino, an opposition politician who is vice president of the Italian Senate, said that it made no economic sense to build nuclear plants because they would not be ready for 2o years or longer.

Think about the "production process" to build a nuclear power plant. That would clearly be set up as a "project," but do you really think the throughput time would be twenty years? What would likely be some of the longest tasks? The bottleneck(s)? Could you arrange tasks in parallel to make the throughput time less than twenty years?

This is something you could research and talk about on your journal page, if you're interested in this topic.

Olive oil production in Italy

We visited a small but very high quality olive oil company, Frantoio di Santa Tea. It has been a Gonnelli family business since 1585. We toured the production facility and had an oil tasting. Because of the way they organize production, they can produce oil from green olives, or from black olives, or from a mixture. Each has a different taste. Here are some pictures from the day.

Next up is a company that produces pieces of art from marble, bronze and mosaics.

wiki formatting conventions

I would like you to use the "Edit Page" function instead of the "Comment" button, if possible. I will save the comments for questions or my feedback that will not be part of the "final" version of the page.

When you enter something, start and end your comments with your name, like this:

[jeff]
blah blah blah
[jeff]

You can use colors to (or italics or bold) to set your entry apart, but try to choose 'good' colors. Use the button that has a capital A, and try to avoid the button with the picture of the highlighter. Also try to avoid the really light colors (like yellow).

The right side menu bar has "Company Visits" for each group as a page. There will be a link to a separate page for each company we visit. Put your comments on this page, not the "Company Visits" page. I will move misplaced entries, but it will be easier keep everything straight if you make comments on the right page. Thanks (and sorry for the confusion).

Let me know if you have other questions about this. I can meet you in the computer lounge before/after your M&M class if that would help. Just let me know what time works for you (send me an email).

Friends and Families

Please feel free to give the website address for this blog (jeffrummel.blogspot.com) to your friends and family if you want. I'll post some pictures and update a little about what we're doing in the class.

People who are reading the blog are welcome to leave comments (with questions, for example) and I will try to respond to them as quickly as possible. To minimize the amount of "blog spam" the comments are moderated (by me) and so they will not show up immediately.

Frantoio di Santa Tea

Most everyone seemed to have the idea for the trip, and the tour was pretty quick (small place). I'll post some pictures later. There are now pages under the Company Visits tabs on the website where you can add your observations, analysis and questions about the visit (note that good questions are a positive contribution to the website).

The only potential hassle will be if two people edit the same part of the page at the same time. One of you will get a sort of error message from the website -- just let me know if you do and I'll go in and try to fix it. If you are just adding some text, it is sometimes easier to prepare the text off-line and then cut-and-paste it quickly onto the page. That will minimize the chances of two people saving at the same time.

You can also add comments, but I would prefer you use the Edit Page tool (top of the right menu bar). You can also upload attachments, but try to make sure the files are not too big. If I start to run out of space I may have to delete some files.

I would also like you to use the Edit Page tool for your individual journals -- I will go through and fix some of your pages.

Remember that Wednesday is earlier (7:30 departure) because Pietrasanta is a bit farther away. The tour there may be slightly longer (we will see bronze, marble and mosaic production) and I'm hopeful we'll break into two groups for this trip. We will stop for lunch on the way back at Viareggio, and you are welcome to stay there and get a train back to Florence or to ride back on the bus. I'll see what time we arrive for lunch, but we'll probably have the bus leave Viareggio around 2:30 or 3:00.

Thursday is a full day as well, up to Cararra with another 7:30 departure. You'll be able to snooze a little on the bus if you want.

Long weekend travel plans

We will be going to Cararra on Thursday and there will be no class on Monday, so people are making travel plans to take advantage of the extra day. I hear there are some bus tours that leave Florence on Thursday at 7:30, and I wanted to let you know that we will be leaving the trade show in Cararra at 3:30 (or 15:30 if you prefer), so we should be back in Florence between 5:30 and 6:00 (17:30-18:00). So you will have plenty of time to catch your bus to Capri or Interlaken or wherever.

I will also make Monday June 16 and optional class meeting. For those that would like, I will be available to meet and talk about your journals and company visit contributions. But if you'd prefer to have one extra day for travel that weekend, you do not have to attend class that day.

We will meet at Palazzo Rucellai on Wednesday June 18 for class. Let me know if you have questions.

Classroom at Palazzo Rucellai

While we will spend most of the class "on the road" visiting companies, we do have a classroom at Palazzo Rucellai. It is most likely a bedroom in the old palace, but not the master bedroom (there are better, bigger rooms). To get there, students have to go along a twisty passage way because of the way that the palace was built originally, but also because the palace has been subdivided among the heirs through the years into sets of rooms that are not exactly contiguous.

btw, the fresco pictures on the walls are actually flat walls. The pillars and everything are done with painting the shadows to make it look three dimensional.

Interesting site

There seems to be a lot of information at the English Yellow Pages, including a section on accommodations with reviews. Let me know if you use it and if it works out. Safe travels this weekend (especially to football in Rome).

Strategy Notes

The strategy lecture note is posted on the website on the Syllabus page. This is another link to it. There is also a one page Strategy Checklist available for you to review before the visits.

Have a great weekend and meet me at the Santa Maria Novella train station no later than 8:30 on Monday morning for the trip to Santa Tea. You can come a little early and get a coffee at the train station, or even something from the McDonalds inside the train station.

On Wednesday we will stop for lunch in Viareggio along the beach after visiting the artisans in Pietrasanta (we will see marble, bronze and mosaics). The bus will leave to get us back to Florence around 3pm, but you will be able to stay out at the beach longer (if the weather is good) and ride the train back to Florence in the evening.

I am working to determine the time we will return on Thursday, but right now I am not sure. We should know more on Monday. Let me know if you've arranged travel for Thursday evening and we can make sure that your schedule is feasible with our trip to the marble quarry and trade show.

WSJ article about Italy and immigration

Here's the article if you'd like to read it.

Access to classmates

I would like for you to check one thing for me today: Can people in my class see if they can access the bios/pictures/phone numbers for the family business class student (BADM 2893)? And can the family business students see if they can see the same info for the students in OPIM 4893?

Send me a note or post a comment here. Thanks.

Another way to contact me is to go to one of the pages you can access and leave a comment. I have the website set up to alert me when changes or comments are made, and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Access to journal pages

I noticed some people have already been able to get to their journal pages and make changes. Some others have gone to their page and clicked on the "Add Comment" to leave a comment. That is fine, but I would also like you to click on the "edit page" link (at the top under page tools) and actually add something on the journal page itself, just to get practice doing that.

And thanks to the few of you that fixed your phone numbers on the "Particiapnt" pages. I have added others that were handwritten in class. Let me know as soon as you have a phone number, just in case we need to get in contact with each other.

Read Benihana and National Cranberry for our discussion on Wednesday. Let me know if you have other questions or concerns. You also have the option of leaving a comment here (in addition to comments on the wiki or email to me).

Arrival in Pisa

The Paris-Pisa flight is in and the students are on the bus to Florence, but stuck in rush hour traffic. I will head over to the train station to meet them, probably between 7:30 and 8:00. I hope it is not too much later.

They are in Florence, and here is a group picture of the students, with Santa Maria Novella in the background:

Arrival in Florence

The Rome-Florence flight arrived on time and the students looked tired but fine. The Paris-Pisa flight arrives this afternoon, and I will meet the bus when they arrive in Florence to say hi. Orientation starts on Saturday morning at 8:25, and will be held in a nice place called Fiesole, on the hills overlooking Florence. Sunday, if it doesn't rain, there will be a picnic in one of the parks in Florence (Cascine). Not far from Palazzo Rucellai.

Here are some random pictures from the airport:

Phone contacts

The material you received from Palazzo Rucellai should have included the phone numbers for the school there, in case someone needs to contact you while you're in Italy. After the first day, you will also have an Italian cell phone number that they can call with the appropriate international calling prefixes. As a final back up, people can feel free to contact me on my Italian cell phone. The local number there is 346-626-3146. From the US, the number would be

011-39-346-626-3146.

See you on Friday

It is almost time to finish packing and get to the airport for the Florence summer study abroad program. There are answers to questions on the wiki, but if you have others, let me know. You can post a comment to the blog, a comment on the Question and Answers page on the wiki or email me directly.
I will take pictures of everyone over the weekend and update the participant pages (post your short bio if you haven't already) and get them on the wiki so that we can all get to know each other more quickly.
For class on Monday, we will talk about how the course will operate (we'll go over the blog and wiki a bit more) and we will also analyze (together) a couple of cases. I will post the cases on the wiki for you to read and will talk to the people at Palazzo Rucellai about hard copies. There may be a small charge for the cases and copying, but I'm not sure the exact amount yet. But there will be no book for the class, and the cost should not be very high.

Welcome Penn State students

All of the students that will be joining the program at Palazzo Rucellai should have received an email with instructions for accessing this blog and the class wiki. Contact me if you have not.

I am looking forward to meeting everyone next Friday. We should have a great time together in Italy.

Phones and traveling

I've added some information to the wiki site on the Florence Information page. There is a link to the PicCell Wireless web page for student rentals. (note that if you wait to buy a phone that you can use your US cell phone in "roaming" mode for quick, expensive calls in Europe.

There is also a link to the Italian train company, Trenitalia, and to a site that collects low cost airline route information.

Your assignment is to go to the Participants page for the class you're in and leave a comment with a short biographical introduction for the rest of the class to read. And if you would like to go by a different name than the one I put on the site, let me know and I'll change it.

And please feel free to leave comments on this blog, if you want. Comments are moderated, but I will post them as soon as I read through them. I do it this way because I don't want spammers leaving comments here.

The difference between Italy and Europe

A little YouTube video to help you get ready for the cultural differences between Italy and the rest of Europe.

Meeting update

The business school is "full" on Friday, so the meeting from 2:00-4:00 will be in the Student Union. We can just pull a couple of tables together and talk there. See you there, or on Thursday in the School of Business cafe.

Note: both sessions are informal and you can come whenever you are free and stay as long as you want.

Questions and answers

The Study Abroad Office will have their orientation session for the summer on Monday at 4:00 in the big lecture hall underground between the ITE (engineering) building and the Library. If you have an exam or something, please concentrate on that and contact the Study Abroad office about getting the information you missed.
I will be at the front of the lecture hall starting around 3:30 and would love to say hi to everyone. My picture is on the business school website, if you want to know who to look for.
I will also run two information sessions in the School of Business Cafe later in the week.

Thursday, April 17, 4:00-6:00
Friday April 18, 2:00-4:00

These are not required or anything, since I will try to communicate anything important here and on the wiki. But it will be fun to meet all of you and have a chance to talk about the trip. Come to one if you have the chance.
One other thing: if you think of a question, go to the wiki, go to the Question & Answer page and post a comment on the page. I will keep an eye out, and then copy your question into the page and try to address your question.

Wiki & Blog updates

Keeping track of my new posts on this blog is pretty easy, and if you're used to using an RSS reader, you can subscribe to this blog very easily.
For the wiki, if you click on "preferences" at the bottom, that will take you to a screen where you can change your password, but you can also choose to receive updates when changes are made (hourly, daily, weekly). When something changes, you'll get an email, so I would probably choose the daily, if you want to get notifications.
I will be posting things as I get information (I just added to the Florence page some info about your flights, for example) so keep an eye on both of these sites.

Getting ready for Florence

Welcome to the students who are going on the Business in Florence program. There should be an email for you (sent to your uconn.edu address) with some information about the trip. Please take a look and respond to me so I know we are connected via email. There's also some information about the wiki that we will use for the class.

I choose the BMW

Interesting experiment in fuel economy, pitting a compact hybrid versus a midsize sedan. I don't know about the methodology, so I don't know if the results are scientific (ie, repeatable), but it does indicate that there are many solutions to the problems we face.

What are the costs of settling for what seems to be a good solution quickly, if that leads you to miss an even better solution later on? Modeling business decisions can lead managers to stop looking after they've found the "optimal" solution, too.

New Class for Fall 2008 Semester

I will be teaching a new class, OPIM 4895 Spreadsheet Modeling for Business Decision Making.

The class will focus on the techniques that businesses use to obtain a competitive advantage through analytics. The course will be based in Excel, to learn how the techniques work, and students will be able to translate the skills from the class to special-purpose tools that companies often use for particular problems.

Problem settings will span all of the functional business areas: operations (my background), finance and marketing, and there will be case work involved in the class to look at how analytic modeling fits into the business situation that requires decisions to be made. The right decision is always a function of the business strategy, which is why different companies "solve" problems in different ways (consider that Delta, Southwest and Skybus can all fly you from Hartford, but in very different ways).

Part of the class will focus on "optimization." In these settings, we will try to represent complex decision settings where there are limits on what the decision maker can do. For example, suppose that as marketing manager, you have to allocate the money for a new product campaign across different channels (print, radio, television, web). What is the best use of the limited dollars? Or suppose you are trying to schedule people in a customer service center in such a way that their schedules are "attractive" and that customers get good service but also that the total cost is as low as possible.

We will also look at "decision analysis" where uncertainty about the world is only revealed after you must make your decision. Think about the poor person on Deal or No Deal, with everyone screaming different decisions. Is there a way to think about making "good" decisions? The answer is yes, by the way.

Part of the class will also be devoted to the increasing use of simulation in business. Older techniques use "scenarios" to evaluate a business decision in the face of different possible outcomes (interest rates rise by some amount, decrease by some amount, stay flat). Within a spreadsheet model, it is possible to create models that can sample thousands of possible scenarios and reveal the patterns of how the business works in those different scenarios. In much the same way that a pilot uses a simulator to practice landing in different weather situations, simulation can be used by businesses to "try out" different strategies against possible future scenarios to better understand how to proceed. Risk analysis is quite often done in this way for financial planning.

Please feel free to email me if you have other questions about the class.

Supply and demand

Now, please understand that I am not a geologist and have no expertise about drilling for oil. But I do understand that when the price of something goes up, one of two amazing things happen (or a mixture of the two): demand goes down, or people find a way to supply more.

It hurts to fill up the car with gas these days, but here are two independent stories that are different from the usual gloom and doom we read everyday: oil field development in North Dakota and the Falkland Islands.

Traveling Salesman Problem, part 2

Now for non-geeks, what does the cartoon in part one mean? When thinking about finding the optimal solution to a problem, one question is how "hard" is the problem. If there are only two solutions, then you could probably spend the time to evaluate both and pick the better one. Most problems have many solutions, and so any algorithm to find the best is going to have to evaluate some number of potential solutions in order to find the best.

This leads to the "order" notation, O(n). What this says is the problem is "order n" and that while we might not know the exact time to evaluate each possible solution, we know we are going to have to check about "n" of them.

Now the traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one where we have to visit some number of locations, one after the other. Suppose I sell golf balls and want to visit five different golf courses today. I start at my house, and I go to one of the golf courses. From there I can choose one of the remaining four. From there, I choose one of the three, and so on, until I return home at the end of the day. How many different ways are there to do this? Turns out that this is the number of permutations of the five (and if you count your home, actually six) locations, and the number of permutations is given by n! = n(n-1)(n-2)...(2)(1). One way to solve the problem is to check every solution, all n! of them.

Suppose there are 10 locations to visit, and that your laptop computer can figure out the length of a trip with a certain visiting sequence in one thousandth of a second. You can come back to your computer in about an hour for the solution. What happens if you add two locations to visit. The awful truth about factorials is they grow like crazy, and now your computer needs five days to find the solution. What to solve 15 locations? It will take your computer 40 years. Ouch.

So geeks try to find sneaky ways to evaluate all the "good" solutions, and implicitly check the others without doing any work. Dynamic programming is one of the sneaky methods for evaluating only some of the possible solutions, but still knowing that the best of the ones you find is better than all of the possible n! solutions. The algorithm in the cartoon is O(n^2 x 2^n). So for 10 locations, we can solve the problem in about one second (instead of an hour). Twelve locations takes four seconds, and 15 takes about a minute. Much better than 40 years!

So geeks win? Not so fast. Try thirty locations -- 12 days. Thirty-five locations? A year. Forty locations? 35 years. Don't even think about 100 locations...

What does O(1) mean? The third panel guy can sell to 100 golf courses by doing just one thing. Okay, you need to have a particularly warped sense of humor to find that funny. But such senses of humor do exist (me, unfortunately).

If you've read this far, thanks. But is this problem really important? Do salesmen really do this? Well think about oil delivery trucks or a beer distributor who restocks convenience stores. Lots of locations, lots of choices about who to visit today, and who to visit tomorrow, and the price of gas for your truck keeps going up.

Or think about making printed circuit boards. A robot arm (usually) picks the chips from a storage position (sometimes attached to a tape) and puts them on the board in a particular location. The optimal sequence (the shortest trip to visit the n chip sites on the board) may take a lot less time than a non-optimal one, increasing costs and reducing capacity. Could there be 100 chips on a board? Sure.

Tracking inventory, among other things

We all see barcodes in action at most retail stores, and the increased accuracy that technology allows in collecting sales information opened up all kinds of analysis. A newer technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) takes this one step further by putting a chip on the merchandise that can talk to computers. IBM has a commercial where a truck is lost and it stops at an IBM help desk in the middle of the desert. The drivers ask how the help desk person knew they were lost. She says "the inventory told us." If the RFID tags know they are supposed to be heading east and they start going north, they could send out a "help us" message. Or a supermarket could tag everything, and when you go to the checkout, a computer could read all of the tags in your cart all at once. Cool, huh?

But one interesting part of technology is that the intended use and the actual uses often diverge. Here's a company with an interesting application of RFID. Watch where you walk.

Traveling Salesman Problem

The traveling salesman problem is one of a class of "hard" problems, where even if you have insanely fast computers, the solution cannot be verified for thousands of years.

Of course, if you shift the problem setting slightly, the problem can become much easier.

note: this is a geek comic, and I will post what the notation means, and why it is funny (to a certain set of people) in a later post...

What do we know?

Science depends on statistics to allow us to "know" something. We experiment and show differences and try to show that those differences are not just random, but show some underlying effect.

Sometimes, even statistics are not enough, when enough people in a field are convinced of the current theories -- which are theories because they can never be "proved." An example is the struggle of two scientists who saw the data tell them that ulcers were not caused by what "everyone" knew they were caused by, but rather by a bacteria. Publishing their results was frustrated because the reviewers knew they must be wrong.

Lucky for us they persevered, and eventually on the Nobel Prize.

Business School naming

Most business schools that are ranked among the best in the country have been named after a significant donor. Tuck, Sloan, Wharton, Stern, Fuqua, Simon (my alma mater) among others. Of course there are the exceptions who have enough money to not need someone's name -- Harvard and Stanford, for example. Then there are schools with no name that could find wonderful uses for such a gift. UConn, for example.

Wisconsin has found a way to have it both ways, when a group of alumni got together to give the school $85 million to not allow the name to be changed. So it will be the Wisconsin School of Business, at least for the next twenty years.

update: Why do people give in the first place?

Some Study Abroad Pictures

Here is a small album that I've used for the study abroad fair. Most of the pictures are Italy, but there are a few from Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Barcelona, Denmark and Guatemala. I will put up a more complete set of pictures from the 2007 Florence business program a little later.

Subprime mortgage mess

Ok, you have to be warned that there's a bit of less-than-polite language, but this is an interesting explanation of the subprime mortgage mess. I'm sure there was also some sophisticated modeling involved that, unfortunately, depended on an assumption that gets mentioned in the link. That assumption is not holding, and so the modeling has not played out as expected.

Traffic jams

The same queueing effects we see in operations happens on the road every day -- you can come across a lengthy backup on the Merritt Parkway and find that there was no accident or other "cause" for the delay. This article links to some work in this area. Small amounts of variability have more power to affect things than people realize.

Hal Varian

Hal Varian is a very smart guy who was at UC Berkely and is now at Google. Here's an interview in the NY Times, and an earlier one in the Wall Street Journal. Good reading and some good advice.

Pie Charts

Most pie charts are not very efficient at showing relationships (often you can just write the numbers instead). I finally found a pie chart that does more.

How things are made

Stanford has a wonderful site that has some videos about how different kinds of products are made.

Small Italian firms go global

Story about a small (50 employees) Italian company that makes dresses, but sells them around the world. Going global was the only way for the company to stay in business, because the number of local customers willing to pay for the quality and detail work of their dresses would not have been large enough for the company to stay in business.

Next time you see a website for a company (especially one that does very specialized products), think about how many employees there might be at that "global" company.

Microsoft and Yahoo

Interesting article in the NYTimes about Microsoft's offer for Yahoo. Seems to me that Microsoft is trying to sort out what business it is in in the long run, especially with the advent of open source software and on-line tools (Google docs anyone?). The Yahoo strategy seems to indicate that Microsoft is betting that computing is becoming Web 2.0 enabled (rather than driven by software loaded onto your computer). As a thought exercise, consider the minimum amount of software you would need on your computer to do most (all?) of your work. BTW, is this the market that the Apple Air is targeting? If you have everything on the web, a DVD drive and lots of USB ports aren't as important, eh?

I had not thought about the SAP strategy before reading the article, but that provides a completely different strategy, where in fact Microsoft products (Office, Outlook, etc) continue to be purchased because of their integration with the software that drives enterprises. Individuals use Office-like tools and web based email, but Microsoft stops thinking of them as their customers.

What are the margins in these two businesses? This strikes me as a very interesting case study: the company knows the current business model is not sustainable and has two very viable ways to reinvent itself. Which does it choose and how does it decide?

Wikipedia

How many people actually contribute to wikipedia? Do they contribute a little or a lot? Here is an article about some research into how democratic collaborative sites like wikipedia and digg are.

Housing prices

Here's an interesting set of graphs of the movement of housing prices over the years. Think about what the graphs "say" and the implications of the way they are constructed. What changes could you make to tell a the kind of story that the text argues for?

Economies of scale in marriage

In operations management, we are careful to look at how economies of scale allow for new products and decreasing costs for existing products -- think about how much computing power you can carry around with you that used to take up an entire room (and special air conditioning and a staff of operators). Here's an interesting article that applies the notion of economies of scale to marriage and divorce.

Modeling the effects of global warming

In article in the NY Times, there is some analysis between two alternatives: trying to stop global warming and preserve the current climate versus assuming the worst case for climate change (much warmer earth) and then trying to adapt to that climate.

Blog creation

This blog will post links to readings and information for the classes I teach. Labels will be used to allow you to look for posts for the class you are in. Comments are on, but will be moderated.