INFORMS 2013: Just Around the Corner

We're within about two weeks of the 2013 INFORMS Annual Meeting in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Thank heavens for Google Maps. The atlas I had as a kid growing up in New York just said "Here Be Dragons" somewhere in the blank space west of Detroit.) I'll be a guest blogger during the meeting (October 6 through October 9), so I may be even less productive than usual on this blog. If you are curious, my first (pre-)conference post is already up (unless someone gets embarrassed and takes it down).

An OM Blog Worth Reading

Since many of the three readers of my blog come from the operations research community, perhaps I should start with a quick bit of terminology. Experts in the various areas will no doubt disagree. Fortunately, none of them read this blog.

"Operations management" (OM, also known in some quarters as either "production management" or "service management") generally refers to planning and managing the process of producing goods and services. "Logistics" generally refers to the process of transporting and distributing products (and services), either on the inbound side (from suppliers) or the outbound side (to customers). "Sourcing", "purchasing" and "procurement" are synonyms for the process of obtaining materials, components and services to support production and distribution. (Never trust an academic discipline that changes its name every few years.) Integrate these three and you have "supply chain management" (SCM).

I've had a somewhat uneasy coexistence with SCM in its various incarnations and manifestations over my academic career. On the one hand, I've taught a few courses in or related to SCM, and I've coauthored (with actual SCM faculty) a few papers in the area. On the other hand, the SCM program at Michigan State University basically crowded management science out of the curriculum, and one of the professional societies to which I belong has migrated from a focus on the decision sciences to dominance by the SCM crowd (with a commensurate shift in its annual conference). Fundamentally, my reaction when I see anything SCM-oriented is almost indistinguishable from my reaction to campaign ads.

Given that, when I recommend reading an operations management blog, you can insert the tag line "man bites dog". Barry Render and Jay Heizer have written a bunch of operations management textbooks that have been well received by the OM/SCM community. They also have a blog (the subject of this post) that ties business news to OM concepts, frequently with teaching tips to help integrate the news with content from their latest book. The blog features occasional guest posts related to teaching; but even if you have no interest in teaching OM (and, trust me, I have no interest in teaching OM ever again), the blog is worth reading for insights it provides into issues of business and global competitiveness. The writing is concise and crystal clear.

As with all blogs (movies, novels, ice cream flavors ...) individual tastes will vary. If you have any interest in manufacturing, logistics or business in general, I think their blog is at least worth a look.

Syntax Highlighting

I just burned about an hour of my life going back and retrofitting syntax highlighting to some of my old posts. The fault lies entirely with Bo Jensen, who first suggested it.  Some of the code to be highlighted (including what triggered the suggestion) is in R, some in Java, a bit in Bash.  (Thank goodness I got over APL decades ago; that would be a font nightmare.)  Obviously, for blogging purposes, I need a highlighter that generates HTML, not just a syntax highlighting code editor.  Given my rather modest output rate, an online highlighter would be just fine (no need to install it locally).  Finally, and this turns out to disqualify several of the available R highlighters, I like having function names highlighted, not just keywords.

So I scrounged around the 'Net a bit and found two very useful sites:

• Quick Highlighter, which handles most of my needs other than R; and
• Pretty R, which does a great job highlighting R code.

Thanks to both sites for making my life easier.

One side note:  This morning, by sheer coincidence, I received a couple of tweets from Hakan Kjellerstrand indicating that he was experimenting with a GPL version of the J programming language.  Curious, I took a look at some code samples on the Jsoftware site and started having flashbacks to APL.  While perusing the Wikipedia page for APL (linked above), I discovered that the flashback was not just random:  Kenneth Iverson, the designer of APL, was also a designer of J.

I need to stare at some FORTRAN for a while to clear my head.

Update (9 March 2011):  It's official -- I'm stupid. On my Windows box, I've been using Notepad++ for some time now (not so much for programming as for general editing of text files).  As it turns out, Notepad++ does syntax highlighting for a variety of languages, including both R and Java, and can export to an HTML file.

Fine, but I do most of work on Linux Mint these days, and Notepad++ is a Windows-only program.  It's based on Scintilla, though, as is SciTE, which I use for similar purposes on my Mint PC and laptop.  (SciTE is also available for Windows, but I'm already using NP++ and, as we say here, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)  SciTE does Java highlighting out of the box, and with a small tweak, it does R syntax highlighting.  It also exports to HTML.  (The tweak: run SciTE via sudo, open the global options file, scroll down near the bottom and uncomment "import r", then save.)

So I'm set for highlighting with tools I'm already using.

Update (13 March 2011):  I discovered a Linux command line utility named (shockingly) highlight.  It converts code files in a variety of languages (including AMPL, which I needed today, but sadly not including R) to a variety of output formats (notably HTML, but also LaTeX). The utility is available from the Ubuntu universe repository, so you can load it via Synaptic without having to add a new source.

Of course, life can't be quite that simple.  The executable is installed as /usr/bin/highlight.  I already have a program of the same name at /usr/local/bin/highlight.  I don't know where it came from or what it does, but it seems to expect input from stdin regardless of any command line switches.  Since it's in the local bin directory, it loads ahead of the one I want (grrr).  Not knowing whether it's part of a larger package, I'm reluctant to nuke it.  So I've added alias highlight=/usr/bin/highlight to my .bashrc file, which gives me a safe (I think) workaround.

Update (10 July 2012): A reader tipped me off that Java code in one of my posts did not show up in Internet Explorer.  When I looked at the blog in IE, I discovered one post where nothing appeared except the title and the footers!  It turns out that in some cases I had inline CSS styles, but when I switched to highlight I was using a <style> tag to provide the style details.  Although this worked fine in Firefox, Chrome and (for all I know) every other browser, it was enough to confuse IE. I couldn't find a way to generate inline styles with highlight, so I switched to Pygments, also available via Synaptic (and recommended by my namesake in the comments below). It provides both a command line program (which I use) and a Python library. The syntax I use looks like

pygmentize -f html -l java -o myfile.html -O noclasses,nobackground,cssstyles="background: #CCFFFF;" myfile.java

where the first option specifies HTML output, the second specifies Java input, the third (lower case "o") specifies the output file, the fourth (upper case "O") specifies options, and the last argument is the source code file to highlight. The noclasses option is the key: it forces inline CSS. The other two options suppress the usual background color in the <div> tag that surrounds the code and replace it with a color of my choosing.

We're an IE Blog!

There are periodic discussions on various forums about how to define operations research, and the even trickier question of how one distinguishes operations research from management science from industrial engineering (or even if such distinctions are meaningful).  So it comes as no surprise to me that the definition of "industrial engineering" may be evolving.  It did come as a bit of a surprise, however, when I was notified today by Rachel Stevenson, co-founder of Engineering Masters, that this blog had made their "Top 50 Industrial Engineering Blogs" list.  (Not as big a shock as when I found myself teaching organizational behavior, though, and considerably more pleasant!)  I was particularly gratified by my #8 ranking ... until I realized it was alphabetical by blog title within groups.

The categories listed in the Engineering Masters blog post tell us something about the range of interests people with IE degrees might have these days.  Besides operations research, they have operations management, project management, financial engineering (where the intent is to make something out of nothing and recent practice, at least, has been to make nothing out of a whole pile of something), machine learning, statistics (which I find interesting since AFAIK the average engineering major takes approximately one statistics course), analytics (another definitional debate in the making), and life-cycle management (who knew that would spawn so many blogs?).

Like any blog roll, there's a reciprocity at work here:  they link my blog (and maybe drive a second reader to it), and I link their blog (and maybe drive my one current reader to it).  I'm okay with that:  it's free (unlike the occasional pitches I get for including me in the who's who of academic bloviators, presumably to get me to buy the book), I'm not embarrassed to point to their site, and I'm pretty sure it generates no money for terrorists, organized crime or political parties.  (Apologies if those last two are redundant.)  If nothing else, I appreciate their efforts compiling the list of blogs because I see a few entries on it that look promising, of which I would otherwise be unaware.