Posts
Introducing Minimax : a linear program (LP) and mixed-integer linear program (MILP) solver for the iPhone. I created Minimax for a few reasons. There are a few LP solvers already available on iOS, but I had some thoughts on how to design such an app from the ground up to be optimized (!) for the iPhone. I also wanted to experiment with ideas I’ve had for a while for a simple modelling language. I…
OR-Exchange is a question-and-answer site for Operations Research, along the same lines as Stack Overflow for programming, but smaller and less strict. If you don’t know what Operations Research is, then OR-Exchange won’t be a place you’ll want to visit. If you do, then check it out, it is a useful place to get answers to OR questions and discuss OR topics. I recently downloaded some of the data…
When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get the comment, “but aren’t you a statistician?”. The implication is that only people who are ignorant of probability would play the lottery. I’ve also heard the belief that the lottery is a tax on poor people. I have a different view, that buying lottery tickets is perfectly rational for me. There are a number of…
After recently complaining about the state of academic publishing, I started thinking about what could replace it. Here are my thoughts on features such a service would have. In my previous blog post I identified 6 criteria by which we could judge a good research publishing platform: There should be an efficient way to discover material that is relevant to our interests; There should be a filter…
An interesting conversation on Google+, started by Vincent Knight, has prompted me to think about the academic review process, and the journal industry in general, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole system is ready for a re-think. The world is moving more and more towards a system where there is free and ready access to information, and the journal publishing model just doesn’t support…
I wasn’t going to write an entry for the INFORMS June OR blog challenge: “OR for muggles” because I couldn’t think of anything relevant to say, despite having watched all seven of the Harry Potter movies in the last two weeks in preparation for the final installment. However, this blog post started me thinking and I realised that, actually, there is something that’s been bothering me for a while,…
Instapaper is a web service that allows you to save articles you find on the web for reading later. It stores these in a list maintained on their servers, and allows you to access it from your browser, or to sync the list with an iPhone or iPad app . Part of its magic is that it strips out the text and images of the article, ignoring ads and irrelevant page navigation, and presents the article in…