Miscellaneous links

A few links that I found interesting:

• An interview with John Graham Cunning, author of the book The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.  Listen to the mp3 interview here (on Focus 580 on WILL 580 AM).  Where does OR come alive?

• A colleague showed me a fascinating video about how Wikipedia evolves.  This evolution is illustrated through a single entry, the heavy metal umlaut.  I must say, this video goes to 11! Ever since I first saw it, I have been thinking about how to illustrate the evolution of computational progress in OR.  Obviously, having readily available visuals makes this possible.

• Mike Trick’s recent post on models, information, and market rationality was very interesting.  He writes that following the 1986 Challenger disaster, the market seemed to know what went wrong and which company was responsible–months before the official investigation concluded that the O-rings were faulty.

• Economists Robert J. Barro and Charles Redlick write that the empirical evidence suggests that stimulus spending doesn’t work.  This is a downer.

• I have been fascinated by the national heath care debate and feel that not enough geeks have voiced their quantitative opinions.  I enjoyed this blog post about health care by industrial engineer Pierce Story.  I hadn’t seen anything written specifically from an IE/OR point of view before this story.  Let me know what I missed by posting a comment.  Pierce Story writes:

“[T]he current reform proposals fail to deal with the true sources of more than 70 percent of the actual costs of healthcare. Rather than doing what is politically painful yet necessary and actually changing the payment system, eliminating waste, demanding personal responsibility, etc., legislators are opting to spread the ever-growing cost across more people through coverage mandates, higher and hidden taxation, and other “levies.”

Have a nice weekend!