Writing
A chronological list of essays, reviews, and thoughts.
- 2025-08-04
イチロー: An Appreciation
I’m not a big baseball fan, but I am a fan of Ichiro Suzuki. He was inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame last week.
- 2024-10-03
Book Review: Klara and the Sun
We humans are in the center of the three intersecting circles: the intelligent, the conscious, the loving. Is anyone else there with us?
- 2024-09-16
Book Review: Unreasonable Hospitality
"Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara is one of the very few books on leadership I will remember five years from now, and not because I am losing my marbles.
- 2024-08-06
Book Review: Going Infinite
Going Infinite is a profile of convicted crypto lord Sam Bankman Fried, written by Michael Lewis (of "Moneyball" fame).
- 2024-07-08
Book Review: The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
My grandfather used to say “once a job is first begun, never leave it ‘till it’s done. ” Grandpa was a craftsman.
- 2024-06-06
Book Review: Trust by Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama’s Trust is an engaging exploration of the role that habits, customs, and norms play in the formation of sociability, which in turn impacts civil society and
- 2024-05-21
Realigning the NFL: Optimally
If you could reorganize the NFL, how would you do it? What’s the best way to organize the NFL’s 32 teams into 8 divisions?
- 2024-05-03
Review of "Parfit" by David Edmonds
Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality is the story of a philosopher who gambled with his life.
- 2024-04-13
Don Knuth's MIP, 64 years later
In 1960, the famed computer scientist Don Knuth wrote a technical paper in which he considered an integer programming model for minimizing memory access latency of an IBM 650.
- 2024-03-04
Caitlin Clark Would Score More Points than Pete Maravich in the Same Number of Games If She Shoots As Much As He Did, Even Without the Three Point Shot
It's impossible to compare players from different eras. That stops precisely no one from doing so.
- 2024-02-27
A Fight With A Cannon
Ed asked me if I had read Victor Hugo.
- 2024-01-31
Data, Anecdotes, Maps, Territories
Incredibly, I am now N years old.
- 2023-05-05
Stumbling Towards Rightness
There is an Amazon leadership principle called “ Are Right, A Lot ” . It sounds kind of stupid.
- 2021-01-08
Character Heatmaps in Proust's In Search of Lost Time
This post is a continuation of a series where I use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the text of Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time (ISLT).
- 2020-12-31
Names and Places in Proust's In Search of Lost Time
This post is a continuation of a series where I use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the text of Proust's In Search Of Lost Time (ISLT).
- 2020-12-30
Text Analytics on Proust's In Search of Lost Time
Seven years ago I analyzed the text of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time to find the five longest sentences (in English).
- 2020-12-25
A Lazier Way to Solve Knuth's Skeleton Multiplication Puzzle
Last time, I described a solution to the following "skeleton multiplication puzzle" from Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming: N N N (1) x N N N N (2) N N N 7 (3) N N N N
- 2020-12-21
A Skeleton Multiplication Puzzle by Knuth
I want to share with you two ways to solve an interesting puzzle from Don Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming". Here is the first!
- 2020-01-30
How I Create Presentation Content
Over the years, I have developed an approach for building content for presentations where a PowerPoint or Google Slides deck is required. Here it is, in case it is helpful to you.
- 2019-09-23
Creating Equation Haikus using Constraint Programming
s=20 How many such haikus are there?
- 2018-11-27
Optimizing 19th Century Typewriters
The long title for this post is: "Optimizing 19th Century Typewriters using 20th Century Code in the 21st Century".
- 2018-09-13
Overview: Reductionism in Art and Brain Science
The subtitle of Eric Kandel's Reductionism in Art and Brain Science is "Bridging the Two Cultures". Which cultures?
- 2018-09-12
The Origin of CC and BCC
Those born into the computer age unwittingly use metaphors without awareness of their origins. I will explain one such metaphor painfully, and at length: CC.
- 2018-08-20
Chaining Machine Learning and Optimization Models
Rahul Swamy recently wrote about mixed integer programming and machine learning. I encourage you to go and read his article.
- 2018-07-21
Overview: Consciousness and the Brain
Consciousness and the Brain, written by French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, is a fascinating overview of the mechanisms, boundaries, and possibilities of consciousness, from
- 2018-07-01
Other Minds: Consciousness and Evolution
I highly recommend Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey Smith.
- 2018-06-26
Four Things I Learned from Jack Dongarra
Opening the Washington Post today brought me a Proustian moment: encountering the name of Jack Dongarra.
- 2018-03-14
2018 NCAA Tournament Picks
Every year since 2010 I have used data science to predict the results of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
- 2017-11-08
Advice for Underqualified Data Scientists
A talented individual seeking entry level data science roles recently asked me for advice. ” I’ll stick to data science, but much of what I share applies to other roles, too.
- 2017-05-14
Two Frustrations With the Data Science Industry
I saw some serious BS about data science on LinkedIn last night. This is nothing new, but this time I couldn't help myself.
- 2017-04-30
Forecasting iPad Sales using Facebook's Prophet
The past couple of days I've been playing around with Facebook's Prophet, a time series forecasting package.
- 2017-03-28
2017 NCAA Tournament Picks
Every year since 2010 I have used analytics to predict the results of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.
- 2016-08-11
Noise Reduction Methods for Large-Scale Machine Learning
I have two posts remaining in my series on “Optimization Methods for Large Scale Machine Learning” by Bottou, Curtis, and Nocedal. You can find the entire series here.
- 2016-08-04
Analyses of Stochastic Gradient Methods
I am continuing my series on “Optimization Methods for Large Scale Machine Learning” by Bottou, Curtis, and Nocedal. You can find the entire series here.
- 2016-07-30
Stochastic and Batch Methods for Machine Learning
I am continuing my series on “Optimization Methods for Large Scale Machine Learning” by Bottou, Curtis, and Nocedal. You can find the entire series here.
- 2016-07-28
Model Building for Large-Scale Machine Learning
In this post on my series on “Optimization Methods for Large Scale Machine Learning” by Bottou, Curtis, and Nocedal, I want to focus on model building in machine learning.
- 2016-07-26
Optimization Methods for Large-Scale Machine Learning
Hey, so I mostly read a 93 page paper. The topic is a worthy one: optimization methods for large scale machine learning.
- 2016-07-23
Notes on Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center
Here are my notes on the influential paper “Mesos: A Platform for Fine Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center”.
- 2016-06-16
Finding Optimal State Capitol Tours on the Cloud with NEOS
My last article showed you how to find an optimal tour of all 48 continental US state capitols using operations research.
- 2016-06-10
Computing Optimal Road Trips Using Operations Research
Randy Olson recently wrote about an approach for finding a road trip that visits all 48 continental US state capitols.
- 2016-06-05
The Logit and Sigmoid Functions
If you mess around with machine learning for long enough, you’ll eventually run into the logit and sigmoid functions.
- 2016-05-24
Checkpointing and Reusing TensorFlow Models
In my last two posts I introduced TensorFlow and wrote a very simple predictive model. run on Optimization objects.
- 2016-05-23
A Simple Predictive Model in TensorFlow
In my previous post I provided a simple introduction to TensorFlow.
- 2016-05-18
An Introduction To TensorFlow
This post walks through a simple Google TensorFlow example. Getting Started TensorFlow is an open source library for analytics.
- 2016-05-02
2015 NFL Statistics by Player and Team
com, cleaned the data, and saved the data in CSV format. The files are located here.
- 2016-03-17
2016 NCAA Tournament Picks
Every year since 2010 I have used analytics to make my NCAA picks.
- 2016-01-27
Blogs, Research Papers, and Operations Research
There’s an interesting thread on twitter this morning about making Operations Research accessible: Please, ORMS academics take note!
- 2016-01-25
Collaborating via Data Fusion and Analytics
This article was originally published in Chain Store Age. Click here to read it.
- 2015-11-26
Thanksgiving Analytics Reading
Here are a few retail analytics links for your reading enjoyment. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
- 2015-10-12
The Data Types And Sources That Drive Grocery Retail
This article was originally posted at Retail TouchPoints. Click here to read it.
- 2015-10-02
Optimization Using SQL: Not Crazy
My sanity was recently called into question, not for the first time: Yet Another Math Programming Consultant: SQL as optimization language?
- 2015-09-25
SQL as an Optimization Modeling Language
Several years ago, a former (awesome) colleague of mine at Microsoft, Bart de Smet, and I discussed the expressibility of optimization problems using SQL syntax.
- 2015-08-09
Installing TopoJSON and GDAL on Windows
Here are instructions for installing topojson and GDAL binaries for Windows 8. js.
- 2015-07-31
Your Model / Their Model
In data science, building a model means creating a representation of reality using code and equations. g.
- 2015-07-27
The Future of Spreadsheets in Analytics
It’s hard to think of something relied upon so much and loved as little as the spreadsheet, the Comcast of business analytics.
- 2015-07-21
Free Advice on Building Your Data Science Career
This article is for data scientists who have already been in the field for at least a year, and are thinking about their long term aspirations.
- 2015-07-20
A Missing Data Challenge
Be careful with missing values. I have heard advice recently that it’s often okay to just ignore missing values.
- 2015-07-17
Nathan’s Reading List: 7/17/2015
Enjoy. And thank you Pocket.
- 2015-07-07
Nathan’s Reading List: 7/7/2015
Here are a few interesting things I read last week: This link from Microsoft is a chapter from a book on “Scenario Focused Engineering”.
- 2015-07-03
Big Data Hype Yields Real Results in Retail With Advanced Analytics
This article was originally published in Progressive Grocer. Click here to read it.
- 2015-03-20
Hole Hawg: OR’s PR Problem
Analytics is an anonymously collaborative discipline. Raw materials come from blogs, MOOCs, online tutorials, github, stackoverflow.
- 2015-03-02
2014 NFL Statistics by Player and Team in Excel
com, cleaned the data, and saved in Excel and CSV formats. The files are located here.
- 2014-12-18
2014 In Review: Five Data Science Trends
2014 was another transformative, exciting year for data science. Summarizing even one measly year of progress is difficult!
- 2014-10-15
Optimization In Google Sheets
Good news for those of you that use spreadsheets to do analytics: Google recently announced a Linear Optimization add on for Google Sheets, and now Frontline Systems has released
- 2014-10-09
NBA Rosters and Team Changes: 2013-2014
com, and accounted for roster changes (as of Sunday, October 5). Click here to download a CSV file with 2013 2014 NBA rosters.
- 2014-10-09
Predicting the 2014-2015 NBA Season
Over the weekend I created a model in Excel to predict the 2014 2015 NBA season.
- 2014-10-08
Predicting NBA Rookie Performance By Draft Position
Nate Silver (and others) have tracked how NBA draft position relates to total career performance, see for example this article. But what about first year performance?
- 2014-10-04
NBA Game Results: 2013-2014
The NBA preseason is in full swing! For those of you who like to fool around with data, I have prepared a CSV file with game by game results for the 2013 2014 season.
- 2014-09-24
Liberal Arts: Who's Our Champion Now?
”, beginning with Steve Jobs’ iconic description of Apple being at the
- 2014-09-17
The Only Interesting Thing About the Burrito Bracket Challenge
All models are wrong, but some are useful. Even when it comes to burritos.
- 2014-09-11
Confirmation Bias in Data Science
I thought it would be interesting to talk about a few dangers of data science. Here’s one: confirmation bias.
- 2014-09-08
Software Is Not Eating Data Science
I am growing weary of what I will call data science exceptionalism : assuming that anything associated with data science, analytics, and big data are completely new or different.
- 2014-09-04
Programming for Data Scientists - Types of Programming
This post is part of a series that discusses programming for data scientists.
- 2014-09-03
Domain Expertise and the Data Scientist
When it comes to analytics, domain expertise matters.
- 2014-08-31
Programming for Data Scientists - Guidelines
As a data scientist, you are going to have to do a lot of coding, even if you or your supervisor do not think that you will.
- 2014-08-25
Fantasy Football Ratings 2014
I have prepared fantasy football ratings for the 2014 NFL season based on the data from last year’s season. I hope you will find them useful!
- 2014-08-06
It's Not My System
Those of us who build and inhabit systems often forget how arbitrary they are. I am reminded of this every time I go through airport security.
- 2014-07-10
Negative Space and Analytical Models
" Analytical models, borne of math and forged with code, should possess the same properties.
- 2014-07-07
401k Simulation Using Analytic Solver Platform
You can build a pretty decent 401k simulation in a few minutes in Excel using Analytic Solver Platform: Let’s give it a shot! You can download the completed workbook here.
- 2014-07-03
Spark Summit Keynote Notes
Here is a summary of my key impressions from the Day 1 keynotes of the 2014 Spark Summit.
- 2014-07-01
INFORMS Big Data 2014 Conference Notes
Many moons have passed since my last conference report: let’s do this.
- 2014-06-28
Simulating data for a logistic regression model in Excel
Rick Wicklin from SAS recently wrote a very nice article about simulating data for a logistic regression model.
- 2014-06-27
Presenting Analytic Solver Platform 2014-R2
In 2014 Frontline Systems released the newest version of its flagship product, Analytic Solver Platform. You can download a free trial of Analytic Solver Platform here.
- 2014-06-25
Time Series Forecasting using Analytic Solver Platform, Windows Azure Marketplace, and Power Query
In this post, I’ll show you how to use Analytic Solver Platform in Excel 2013 with Power BI to build a time series analysis model using data from the cloud.
- 2014-05-10
Operations Research Education and the Business World
The great Bob Fourer tweeted about an interesting article in Analytics by Prof. co/GFZft9K4o8 — Bob Fourer (@4er) May 9, 2014 Prof.
- 2014-05-08
Why Did AOL Buy Convertro for $100 Million?
Hey, so AOL bought marketing analytics firm Convertro for $100 million. Convertro does something called attribution modeling.
- 2014-05-07
A Case Study in Leadership: Kevin Durant
If you have a minute or two this morning, have a look at basketball star Kevin Durant’s acceptance speech for winning the 2014 NBA Most Valuable Player award.
- 2014-05-02
Things I Wish I Had Learned in School
Here’s a list of subjects of professional relevance I wish I had invested more time in as a starry eyed youngster. Presentation skills .
- 2014-04-26
Planes, Change, and Serotonin
A recent Vox article informed us of something many of my readers already know: the way we board planes makes no sense.
- 2014-03-20
Predicting the NCAA Tournament Using Monte Carlo Simulation
I have created a simulation model in Microsoft Excel using Frontline Systems’ Analytic Solver Platform to predict the 2014 NCAA Tournament using the technique I described in my
- 2014-03-18
NCAA Tournament Analytics Model 2014: Methodology
I revealed my analytics model’s 2014 NCAA Tournament picks in yesterday’s post. Today, I want to describe how the ratings were determined.
- 2014-03-17
NCAA Tournament Analytics Model 2014: Picks
Here are my picks for the 2014 NCAA Tournament, based on the analytics model I described in this post.
- 2014-03-16
Using Analytics to Assess Joel Embiid's Injury and Kansas's Chances
Joel Embiid is the starting center of the Kansas Jayhawks and one of the most talented college basketball players in the country.
- 2014-03-14
Better to Be Right Than Fast
Mae West said that too much of a good thing is wonderful. For we shipbuilders who write numerical code that is certainly true of speed and accuracy.
- 2014-03-13
NCAA Tournament Analytics Model 2014 Preview
My NCAA Tournament Prediction Model posts have traditionally been pretty popular, so I thought I would put in a bit more effort this year.
- 2014-03-11
Beautiful Box Plots in Excel 2013
Box plots are widely used among data scientists and statisticians. They're useful because they show variation both between and within data series.
- 2014-03-08
Build Models To Understand Your Data
I am not at the 2014 INFORMS Optimization Society Conference but good friend and human pyramid obsessive Jeff Linderoth reports the following from Gurobi’s Bob Bixby: "Bixby says"
- 2014-03-01
2013 NFL Statistics by Player and Team in Excel
com, cleaned the data, and saved in Excel format. The files are located here.
- 2013-12-16
Marketing Mix Analytics II – Modeling
In my previous post I discussed the challenges in obtaining data to measure marketing effectiveness in marketing mix models.
- 2013-11-26
Marketing Mix Analytics I - Data Acquisition
At last spring's INFORMS Analytics Conference I was invited to speak about Marketing Mix Analytics at Nielsen.
- 2013-11-16
A distasteful analogy for automated analytics systems
I will probably regret writing this post. So perhaps you have seen these touchless toilets in airports.
- 2013-10-31
The Five Longest Proust Sentences
Previous posts have discussed Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time (best English translation here).
- 2013-10-29
PowerPoint Tips for Analytics Pros
Data scientists often sabotage their own work by doing a crappy job of presenting it.
- 2013-09-13
Generating random unimodular matrices with a column of ones
In an effort to broaden my blog readership, today’s topic is generating random unimodular matrices with a column of ones.
- 2013-09-10
Models are Analogies
My definition(\ ) of analytics is: Analytics is the practice of building models on computers to learn about the world.
- 2013-08-14
NFL Fantasy Football Statistics in CSV Format
You can find commonly used stats for NFL players in CSV format for the 2010, 2011, 2012 NFL seasons at this location . For each season there are seven files: QB: quarterback data.
- 2013-07-18
Testing at Microsoft
The other day I got into a discussion with a colleague (also ex Microsoft) about software testing (or QA, if you like) at Microsoft. Here is a short description of my experiences.
- 2013-07-15
Sentence Lengths in Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"
My last post provided the complete text of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, which I now want to explore a bit using Mathematica.
- 2013-05-09
Text analytics on Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"
This post is the first in a series on text analytics on Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
- 2013-05-06
You're building two things
If you had a look at my calendar you would think that most of my days were the same.
- 2013-04-22
Reflecting on the Public School Experience
I recently received an invitation for an annual fundraising event at my alma mater, the University of Iowa.
- 2013-04-04
John Wooden
I’ve got sports on the brain – perhaps you’ve noticed.
- 2013-03-20
NCAA Tournament Prediction Model 2013
(You might be interested to see the new and improved 2014 model.
- 2013-03-18
NCAA Tournament Prediction Model 2013 Preview
It’s NCAA Tournament selection Sunday! As in past years, I am going to write a program to make my picks following two principles: code it fast and do something reasonable .
- 2013-03-12
How many big data applications are there? [Part II]
I received several insightful replies to my weekend post where I blindly speculated about the number of big data applications.
- 2013-03-09
How many real Big Data applications are there?
I’d like to generate a bit of robust discussion and speculation about the use of analytics in the real world.
- 2013-02-15
Fast Open and Save in Office 2013
A minor annoyance I have in Office 2013 is the file Open and Save experience. You have to go through the following steps to open in a file in a directory on your system: 1.
- 2013-02-11
Adding Error Bars to Charts in Excel 2013
Excel 2013 makes it easier than ever to create error bars. Hooray!
- 2013-02-02
About Tools
This is not an age of craftsmanship. It’s an age of tools: building, coveting, using.
- 2013-01-31
Nate Silver, Chessboxing, and a place at the table
The best chess player in the world is a grandmaster with a computer. Not Deep Blue, or Kasparov, or Anand.
- 2013-01-20
2012 Fantasy Football Prediction Model: Retrospective
Several months ago I laid out a simple model for forecasting fantasy football performance. My post included a table ranking players by value for draft purposes.
- 2013-01-14
2012 NFL Statistics by player and Team in CSV format
com, cleaned the data, and saved in CSV format. The files are located here.
- 2013-01-07
Engineering teams should have an Analyst role
Happy New Year!
- 2012-12-12
Enviable Problems: MIP and Warren Buffett
There’s been some recent talk about just how awesome Warren Buffett actually is. ” Warren Buffett has an enviable problem: how to get superior return on a shit ton of money.
- 2012-12-03
Big Ten Expansion: Virginia and Vanderbilt?
Maryland and Rutgers recently joined the Big Ten Conference, bringing the total number of teams to 14.
- 2012-11-30
Analytics and the Greg Popovich decision
NBA commissioner David Stern is upset with San Antonio Spurs coach Greg Popovich for sending four of his top players home on a plane to rest, instead of playing them in last
- 2012-11-27
Analytics Decathlon: 10 tasks every pro should know
I tried to think of 10 fundamental tasks that every analytics programmer should know how to do.
- 2012-11-27
Yes, it’s an error, but it’s *my* error!
Net optimization component developed by my team. KeyNotFoundException: The given key was not present in the dictionary.
- 2012-11-22
XKCD: Even when he's wrong, he's kinda right
Edward Tufte recently tweeted this xkcd cartoon: It's funny. And it's funny because it's basically true.
- 2012-11-14
Sinofsky’s goodbye email: annotated
Yesterday, head of Windows Steven Sinofsky announced he is leaving Microsoft.
- 2012-10-18
Defining “Better”
) Okay, so what is “better” anyway? I get the sense that for many operations research insiders, “better” is another word for “faster”, but that is wrong, wrong, wrong .
- 2012-10-17
Operations Research Tom Swifties
I apologize in advance, and you’re welcome. Add your Tom Swifties in the comments!
- 2012-10-15
Employee performance reviews done right
Hiring is the most important activity for any organization. That subject has been covered many times in many ways, so I won't.
- 2012-09-28
Detecting the Sources of Model Infeasibility using Gurobi
Today I come to sing the praises of Irreducible Infeasible Sets (IIS). An IIS is a minimal subset of the constraints of an optimization problem that are self contradictory.
- 2012-09-09
Touchdowns are lognormally distributed
well, not exactly. But it’s snappier if I put it that way.
- 2012-09-03
Fantasy Football Player Forecasting in R
sas]") The R code is a bit shorter (120 lines instead of 157), but they are basically the same complexity.
- 2012-08-28
Fantasy Football Player Forecasting in less than 200 lines of SAS
In my last post I provided data for NFL players and teams for the 2011 season. In this post I develop a simple, pretty darn decent forecasting engine in less than 200 lines of SAS.
- 2012-08-27
2011 NFL Statistics by player and team in CSV format
More data, this time for fantasy football junkies! com, cleaned the data, and saved in CSV format.
- 2012-08-11
McDonald’s Nutritional Information, August 2012
This post provides nutritional information for popular McDonald's items for the USA as of August 7, 2012. Here is a link to the information.
- 2012-07-30
The diet problem revisited: McDonald’s nutritional information in 2012
The so called “diet problem” is familiar to many students of optimization.
- 2012-07-18
Team is everything
This is too long for a tweet, so I will make it an extremely brief blog post.
- 2012-06-20
Why don't mapping services use robust optimization?
It sure would be great if mapping services like Google Maps and Bing Maps would make better use of robust optimization.
- 2012-06-18
Yes, Virginia, there is a difference between optimization and prescriptive analytics
Eight year old Virginia O'Dual writes: Dear Blogger: I am eight years old. Some of my little friends tell me that prescriptive analytics is just a fancy way to say optimization.
- 2012-06-01
PhD thesis: Solving Large-Scale Quadratic Assignment Problems
I notice that people are expecting to find my thesis here, so here goes.
- 2012-05-27
Simple SAS Performance Profiling Macros
As the old saying goes, the first rule of performance is to measure.
- 2012-05-26
No more standalone releases of Microsoft Solver Foundation
Microsoft has announced that there will not be further standalone releases of Solver Foundation.
- 2012-04-14
Software Engineering in Large Organizations: Design
) When you work at a big software company, the design choices that you make today will shape your destiny for years to come.
- 2012-04-05
NCAA Tournament Wrapup
Hail to the champions, the University of Kentucky. I only got one of the four Final Four picks correct, but luckily that turned out to be the champion.
- 2012-03-20
Software Engineering in Large Organizations: Requirements
Figuring out what the heck it is you are going to do is the most important part of any project, isn’t it?
- 2012-03-15
NCAA tournament prediction using SAS
I don't watch as much basketball as I used to, so the past few years I have been writing programs to do my picks.
- 2012-03-05
Software Engineering in Large Organizations: Software Lifecycle
) The software lifecycle is the same wherever you go. It’s one of these things that you are taught in school that really is the way it’s described.
- 2012-03-04
Software Engineering in Large Organizations
This afternoon I gave a talk at the University of Iowa ACM conference, where I spoke about software engineering in large organizations.
- 2012-01-16
Newsflash: debugging parallel programs ain't easy
I ran into a situation recently where I was asked to debug a legacy C program that was crashing due to multiple threads trying to write to the same file at the same time.
- 2011-11-27
.Net coding guidelines for operations research
Net, or whatever\ , is a part of operations research for most of us. Net code.
- 2011-09-22
Shipbuilders, Sailors, and Passengers
I sometimes trot out a boat analogy when I am asked about a career in data science, which is tenuous since I grew up in Iowa. Building solvers is like shipbuilding .
- 2011-08-21
Grant’s Pitchfork
The people have spoken. Nobody likes the new Cy Hawk trophy.
- 2011-07-25
O.R. and social networking: A Solver Foundation MIP model to suggest Twitter followers
Please note that Solver Foundation is no longer supported. For this month's INFORMS blog challenge I thought it would be fun to write a simple Solver Foundation Twitter mashup.
- 2011-07-19
Getting solution values using Solver Foundation Services
Please note that Solver Foundation is no longer supported. There was a question on the Solver Foundation forum about iterating through the results in a Decision.
- 2011-07-18
Informs Conference on Analytics 2011
Wayyyyy back in April I attended the Informs Conference on Business Analytics and Research in Chicago.
- 2011-07-10
Summer Reading List
Summer time is a good time for reading… Introduction to Bayesian Statistics by William M. Bolstad A clearly written, enjoyable read that starts from first principles.
- 2011-04-09
2011 INFORMS Conference on Analytics
Recently I have been "heads down" on some new stuff we're working on for Technical Computing.
- 2011-03-12
The Amazingly Wonderful Effectiveness of Operations Research
Hey, have you been reading Sanjay Saigal's posts on Jim Fallows's blog this week?
- 2011-01-23
Mailbag: Contiguity constraints for project scheduling models
Reader BobD asked me the following question over email: Actually, I'm having some trouble understanding the original paper "Event based MILP models for resource constrained
- 2011-01-13
Quadratic Assignment Problems for Bartenders
) So this Guy walks into a bar. Guy was working on his business degree, but he needed a part time job.
- 2011-01-11
Project scheduling and Solver Foundation revisited, Part IV
In previous posts in this series I described a mixed integer programming model for resource constrained project scheduling, introduced some project data structures, and wrote a
- 2011-01-08
Don’t break the build
Writing code as part of a team is very different from writing it alone. Joel Spolsky’s list of things to look for in a software team highlights several differences.
- 2010-12-21
Project scheduling and Solver Foundation revisited, Part III
It’s time to get down to business and write a SchedulingModel class that encapsulates the resource constrained project scheduling model I wrote about in my previous two posts.
- 2010-12-10
Project scheduling and Solver Foundation revisited, Part II
My current series is focused on building a Solver Foundation model for resource constrained project scheduling.
- 2010-11-17
Project scheduling and Solver Foundation revisited, Part I
Recently I was asked by a potential customer whether Solver Foundation could be used to solve project scheduling and resource allocation problems. The answer is yes!
- 2010-09-30
A fun math problem
Here is a question from the Mathematical Association of America's American Mathematics Competitions blog (which I found through this constraint programming blog): Let x and y be
- 2010-09-02
The rumored Big Ten realignment is extremely fair...and I can prove it.
com reports that the Big Ten divisions will be: Division A Division B Iowa Illinois Michigan Indiana Michigan State Ohio State Minnesota Penn State Nebraska
- 2010-09-01
Optimal Big Ten realignment using operations research
Using Solver Foundation I have created several mixed integer programming models which figure out how to realign Big Ten teams as fairly as possible.
- 2010-08-23
Planning office moves with Solver Foundation: Part V
It’s time to finish our mixed integer programming modeling sample for office space allocation problems.
- 2010-08-14
Seminar scheduling with OML
In response to my series on office space allocation models, I received an email from a reader who is trying to adapt the code to solve a related problem.
- 2010-08-14
Using Solver Foundation to get a job at Facebook
Facebook has opened an office in Seattle, check it out.
- 2010-08-13
Planning office moves with Solver Foundation: Part IV
The previous three posts in this series introduced all the components necessary to describe and model office space allocation problems.
- 2010-08-05
Planning office moves with Solver Foundation: Part III
) Let’s build a simple (but complete) model for the office allocation problem. I will encapsulate the Solver Foundation code for the model in a class called OfficeSpaceModel.
- 2010-08-02
Planning office moves with Solver Foundation: Part II
This is the second part in a multi part series on planning office moves using Solver Foundation. Part I introduced the problem and provided a pointer to a solution approach.
- 2010-07-25
Planning office moves with Solver Foundation: Part I
If you work at Microsoft for any significant period of time you will change offices. ).
- 2010-07-22
Converting an Access DB to XML using C#
I recently needed to import an Access database into a C program for a sample that I will be blogging about soon.
- 2010-07-11
Microsoft Solver Foundation: blogs and resources
Updated 10/16/2014 On 5/25/2012, theMicrosoft announcedthat there will be no more standalone releases of the product.
- 2010-06-20
Don’t be a hero when trying to solve set covering problems
Please note that Solver Foundation is no longer supported.
- 2010-06-03
Which is faster: Regex.IsMatch or String.Contains?
Contains() is faster because it likely involves less machinery. Let’s try it and see.
- 2010-06-02
Mixed integer linearizations for QAP using Solver Foundation
I read an interesting paper by Zhang, Beltran Royo and Ma on the excellent Optimization Online site this morning.
- 2010-05-19
Stochastic optimization, kidneys, and ethics
I have been reading about online stochastic optimization problems in response to some internal interest in applying Solver Foundation to solve them.
- 2010-05-07
Solving a Knapsack problem with Solver Foundation and LINQ
Add(new ReservationPrice { NumberOfDays = 7, Price = 4000 }); What I would like to able to do now is: give me the best price from the list based on a number of days.
- 2010-04-26
Traveling Salesman Problems using Solver Foundation: C# code
I was asked to post the complete TSP sample code. In my previous posts the code was spread out and had a couple of typos.
- 2010-03-10
A simple prediction algorithm for the NCAA tournament
A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to participate in an NCAA tournament pool. The twist: you have to write a program to predict the results.
- 2009-12-11
Writing high performance code
During Scott Hanselman's podcast we briefly discussed managed code performance. Here are a few of my thoughts about writing high performance code.
- 2009-09-12
Nash equilibria and 4th down, continued
I left a small cliffhanger in my last post. After a long week I finally had a chance to read through the Adams paper about estimating the value of "going for it" on 4th down.
- 2009-09-08
Dynamic programming, Nash equilibria, and going for it on 4th down
Last weekend marked the first big college football Saturday of the year.
- 2009-08-30
Int'l Symposium on Mathematical Programming 2009, Day 2
Here are my notes from the second day of ISMP.
- 2009-08-26
Int'l Symposium on Mathematical Programming 2009, Day 1
I am attending the ISMP math programming conference in Chicago, representing the Solver Foundation team.
- 2009-07-28
Quadratic Assignment Problems: solution enumeration
In the last few posts we have given code for computing the Gilmore Lawler bound for quadratic assignment problems, and described two different branching techniques.
- 2009-07-19
Quadratic Assignment Problems: strong and weak branching
Let's pick up where we left off last time and write a score based Branch delegate. It will be used as the basis for both of our "real" branching functions.
- 2009-06-13
Quadratic assignment problems: branching
(This is part of a long running series on quadratic assignment problems in C . ) Branching means to divide the search space represented by a node into subnodes.
- 2009-04-28
Solving traveling salesman problems using Solver Foundation
Update : see the comments below for some helpful hints.
- 2009-04-25
Modeling a production planning problem using Solver Foundation
In this post I am going to present two complete C programs for modeling and solving a simple production problem using Solver Foundation.
- 2009-04-02
Resource constrained scheduling; OML tutorials
Two weeks back I posted two articles showing how easy it is to model critical path scheduling using Microsoft Solver Foundation.
- 2009-03-26
Simple matrix, vector, permutation utilities
I am going to be rolling out the rest of my branch and bound algorithm in the next few posts.
- 2009-03-24
Branch-and-bound algorithms for QAP
This is part 4 in a series of posts laying out a simple branch and bound solver for QAP in C . ) I provided a simple bounding procedure for QAP.
- 2008-12-19
Two way data binding using LINQ and Solver Foundation Services
Recently on the Microsoft Solver Foundation discussion boards there was a question about two way data binding and Solver Foundation Services. Net applications.
- 2008-05-06
Quadratic assignment problems: bounds
This is part 3 of what will be a long series about how to solve QAPs using branch and bound. My goal to end up with a simple branch and bound algorithm in C .
- 2008-05-04
Quadratic Assignment Problems: branch and bound
In my last post I introduced quadratic assignment problems. As I explained, the problem is to assign an equal number of facilities to locations, minimizing the transportation cost.
- 2008-04-03
Quadratic Assignment Problems, Part I
In a previous series I talked a bit about linear assignment problems (LAPs) and provided code for a simple LAP solver.
- 2008-01-05
How to fix bugs (and influence people)
I work on a large team with a lot of dependencies and fairly tight deadlines. I wanted to share some of a few techniques for fixing bugs quickly.
- 2007-08-10
Linear assignment problems, part II
In a previous post I talked a bit about the linear assignment problem: finding the minimum cost matching in a bipartite graph.
- 2007-08-10
Linear assignment problems, part III
Here's the code. See the previous posting for background.
- 2007-07-24
What makes a good software developer
A colleague asked me to jot down some thoughts on what makes a good developer at Microsoft.
- 2007-07-03
Linear assignment problems, part I
I'm going to devote a few posts to my thesis topic, the quadratic assignment problem.
- 2007-06-20
Why writing software is like moving
Me and my brother helped my mom move over the weekend. Advice for movers and software developers: Don't move anything you don't actually want or need.
- 2007-05-24
Management advice from Satchel Paige
Actually it's not management advice somehow I doubt Satchel Paige would have much patience for that sort of thing.