Articles
So you’re now a first-year professor at a new university, and you’d like a Cliffs Notes guide to the type of students you will be teaching. Welcome!
I should first state that “surprise” is not quite the right word here: unscheduled, perhaps, is a better term. This inherently sounds like the weakest argument of all. Live wasn’t really that controversial of an argument in some ways: after all, we have live sports and concerts all the time. Limited sounded more controversial, but…
Note: Read past entries about Live Limited Surprise trend in content here. Today’s preferred Internet business model leans towards maximizing eyeballs for content and selling ads against that content, and also properly identifying smaller subgroups with targeting ads. We’ve been hearing about subscription-based models for a long time, but with few legitimate examples. Why would…
Yesterday, I argued that the future of content would be Live, Limited, and Surprise. Arguing that the future of content is Live is both the easiest and most difficult argument of the Live Limited Surprise trio. The problem is that we often see live as unscripted, and think of, say, reality TV as live content.…
Consider the types of content currently popular on the web, Netflix, and TV: music, sports, video games, and celebrity content. I’m predicting that the current model of content creation is a relic of a technologically underpowered era. The enabling technologies and ideologies needed to fuel the live, limited surprise are currently here.
As usual, a disclaimer: there is probably plenty of research in this area that I am completely ignorant of. This is literally a random idea I had 2.5 hours ago while walking along the river. Yes, the .5 is there for pedantic purposes. As I write this blog, Lyft has already gone public, and Uber…
Note: This blog was previously published as part of the 2018 INFORMS Annual Conference. It’s the last day of the conference, the day where often new members make their first INFORMS presentations. Many of us know someone whose training is not in ORMS per se, but whom we’d enjoy seeing at the conference because of…
Note: This blog was first published for the 2018 INFORMS annual conference. When we attend INFORMS, we usually we learn new things about what we already know, or experience new concepts for the first time. But I had an interesting experience in a TIMES session that made me think of another type of learning. Sometimes…
Note: This blog post was originally written for the INFORMS 2018 annual conference. Suppose for a moment, that your favorite sports team has completely adopted analytics. Your (American) football coach stops giving the inefficient running back so many carries. Your mediocre basketball center no longer dominates the ball for post-ups, instead serving as a willing passer…
Originally posted September 2, 2011. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson uses the “long tail” as a statistical property to suggest that businesses can make a lot of money by selling items that only a few people want. Given the ease of selling items online, eventually a near-complete inventory of all a human being desires…
This article was previously published in October 2011. I am moving past blog archives to this site. Recently I watched the movie Moneyball, and thought about what it might mean for quantitatively-minded people. (Note: For the purpose of simplicity, I’ll temporarily pair together quantitatively-minded and operations research, although not everyone in one group would claim…
Why did I even take Economics as a freshman engineering major at Youngstown State? It was a sort of happy accident, but there I was, surrounded by business majors, in Microeconomics*. I remember that the first textbook chapter tried to summarize many key concepts of Economics, doing its best to sell the field to often…
Originally published May 1, 2012. After about a year or two of teaching at the Saunders College of Business, I decided to make a new rule for my class. I banned personal technology (cell phones, tablets, and computers) from my classroom except during approved groupwork sessions. I’ve been in some excellent discussions about this, and wanted…
Originally posted January 22, 2013. When can a researcher detect the end of a trend? The concept of “Web 2.0″, focusing on the web as an interactive space between users rather than the straightforward providing of information, continues to dominate much of Internet thought. Companies have rushed to provide users with many different options to…
(Post originally written April 23, 2013). I woke up this morning to read that Reddit had apologized for some of the blunders made by users searching for the identity of the Boston marathon bombers. Given the scolding given by the FBI to further detective work once the FBI had identified their targets, this proves that…
In innovation, many companies still seem to stick with the first idea they have for a new technology. This keeps happening despite all the research and anecdotes that often, one’s first instinct for a technology is the wrong one. For example, “Chemcor,” developed in the late 50′s for “phone booths, prison windows, and eyeglasses“, was…
I sat in on a fascinating presentation by Sanjiv Erat on creativity and incentives. The setup, as best I remember it, was that students could earn money based on how creative their answer was to a certain prompt. They could have unlimited time or 10 minutes. The reward might be $2 per ratings point (where…