Reversing Differences

Fellow blogger Håkan Kjellerstrand posted an interesting question on OR Stack Exchange recently. Starting from a list of integers, it is trivial to compute the list of all pairwise absolute differences, but what about going in the other direction? Given the pairwise (absolute) differences, with duplicates removed, can you recover the source list (or a …

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Collections of CPLEX Variables

Recently, someone asked for help online regarding an optimization model they were building using the CPLEX Java API. The underlying problem had some sort of network structure with $$N$$ nodes, and a dynamic aspect (something going on in each of $$T$$ periods, relating to arc flows I think). Forget about solving the problem: the program …

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Generic Callback Changes in CPLEX 12.10

CPLEX 12.10 is out, and there have been a few changes to the new(ish) generic callbacks. Rather than go into them in detail (and likely screw something up), I’ll just point you to the slides for a presentation by Daniel Junglas of IBM at the 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting. I’ve written about half a dozen …

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Greedy Methods Can Be Exact

We generally sort optimization algorithms (as opposed to models) into two or three categories, based on how certain we are that solutions will be either optimal or at least “good”. An answer by Michael Feldmeier to a question I posted on OR Stack Exchange neatly summarizes the categories: exact methods eventually cough up provably optimal …

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1-D Cutting Stock with Overlap

An interesting variation of the 1-D cutting stock problem was posed on OR Stack Exchange. Rather than having a specified demand for various size cut pieces, the requirement is to cut pieces to cover a specified number of units of fixed lengths. Moreover, you can use multiple pieces to cover one target unit, but if …

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Generosity, Humility, Vulnerability

A few conversations in recent days, as well as a bunch of the reading I did during my holiday writing retreat, have led me back to thinking about generosity. One would think I’d have exhausted myself on that concept, but not even close. In the same way that I find myself continually relearning the same …

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Brainpower Matters: The French H-Bomb

Michel Carayol, father of the French H-Bomb. The article below illuminates several mysteries concerning the French development of thermonuclear weapons. Why did it take so long? Did the French really need help from the British? Who had the crucial idea of radiation compression? The original inventors were Ulam and Teller. In the USSR it was Sakharov. The …

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Politics, Tariffs and the Popular Vote

The State of the State Podcast discusses issues, questions, answers, policy and research on the hottest topics on the local, state and national stage. State of the State podcasters Interim IPPSR Director Arnold Weinfeld and Charles Ballard, Director of IPPSR’s State of the State Survey, will talk together and share the air with frequent guests …

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Evaluating Expressions in CPLEX

There’s a feature in the Java API for CPLEX (and in the C++ and C APIs; I’m not sure about the others) that I don’t see mentioned very often, possibly because use cases may not arise all that frequently. It became relevant in a recent email exchange, though, so I thought I’d highlight it. As …

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R v. Python

A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation with someone that touched on the curriculum for a masters program in analytics. One thing that struck me was requirement of one semester each of R and Python programming. On the one hand, I can see a couple of reasons for requiring both: some jobs …

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A Java Container for Parameters

A few days ago, I posted about a Swing class (and supporting stuff) that I developed to facilitate my own computations research, and which I have now made open-source in a Bitbucket repository. I finally got around to cleaning up another Java utility class I wrote, and which I use regularly in experiments. I call …

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A Swing Platform for Computational Experiments

Most of my research involves coding algorithms and running computational experiments with them. It also involves lots of trial-and-error, both with the algorithms themselves and with assorted parameters that govern their functioning. Back in the Dark Ages, I did all this with programs that ran at a command prompt (or, in Linux terms, in a …

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Indicator Constraints v. Big M

Way, way back I did a couple of posts related to how to model “logical indicators” (true/false values that control enforcement of constraints): Logical Indicators in Mathematical Program Indicator Implies Relation The topic ties in to the general issue of “big M” model formulations. Somewhere around version 10, CPLEX introduced what they call indicator constraints, …

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Naming CPLEX Objects

A CPLEX user recently asked the following question on a user forum: “Is there a way to print the constraints as interpreted by CPLEX immediately after adding these constraints using addEq, addLe etc.” The context for a question like this is often an attempt to debug either a model or the code creating the model. …

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How to Crash CPLEX

A question elsewhere on the blog reminded me that some users of the CPLEX programming APIs are not conscious of a “technicality” that, when violated, might cause CPLEX to crash (or at least throw an exception). The bottom line can be stated easily enough: modifying a CPLEX model while solving it is a Bozo no-no. …

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Scholars, It’s Time to Take Control of Your Online Communities

Crossposted from the Humanities Commons Team blog. A couple of years ago, I got a bit fed up with the ways that certain for-profit networks were purporting to provide scholars with opportunities to share their work openly with one another, and I decided that it was time to mouth off about it a bit: about the fact …

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Failures to Listen

One year ago today, Rachael Denhollander addressed the Ingham County court in Michigan, her abuser, and the institutions that failed to protect her and her #SisterSurvivors. Listen again to part of what she said on January 24, 2018: This is what it looks like when institutions create a culture where a predator can flourish unafraid and …

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Guessing Pareto Solutions: A Test

In yesterday’s post, I described a simple multiple-criterion decision problem (binary decisions, no constraints), and suggested a possible way to identify a portion of the Pareto frontier using what amounts to guesswork: randomly generate weights; use them to combine the multiple criteria into a single objective function; optimize that (trivial); repeat ad nauseam. I ran …

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Ghosts and Hybrids: Ancient DNA and Human Origins

Take a break from your holiday Netflix binge and learn something about recent breakthroughs in our understanding of human evolution from ancient DNA. John Hawks (UW Madison) is an excellent speaker and this talk is for non-experts. Get the whole family together to watch — it’s a treat to learn from one of the leading …

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I have a pile of about 10 books I’m wading through, but two are of special note as I write this. As I noted in my last blog of 2017 I have the privilege of reading, and especially of reading books. For the past few years I’ve read on average between 20-30 nonfiction works cover-to-cover per year. …

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Living Values

In the open letter we wrote to the College of Arts & Letters community in January 2018, we promised to look critically at ourselves, recognize our failures, and rebuild the trust that is required of us. This commitment has led to an intense period of critical self-reflection in the Dean’s Office and across the College in …

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Of Typewriters and Permutations (V)

Okay, this is the last post on the subject. I promise! If you’re coming into this movie on the last reel, you may need to skim the last few posts to see what it’s about. I’m trying not to repeat myself too much. To summarize where we are at: Hardmath123 posted a solution (generated by …

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Of Typewriters and Permutations (IV)

I’m continuing the recent theme of solving a quadratic assignment problem that lays out the 26 letters of the English alphabet on a one-dimensional “keyboard” for an 18th century typewriter. I thought this would be the last post, but something new turned up, so there will likely be one more. In the blog post that …

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Of Typewriters and Permutations (III)

This continues the discussion (okay, monologue) from the two previous posts about the problem of laying out a one-dimensional typewriter keyboard. This is not the last post in the series, but I can at least guarantee that the series is converging. In the previous post, I gave a MIP model (named MIP1) that used binary …

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Of Typewriters and Permutations (II)

This continues my previous post about the problem of optimally laying out a one-dimensional typewriter keyboard, where “optimally” is taken to mean minimizing the expected amount of lateral movement to type a few selected books. As I noted there, Nate Brixius correctly characterized the problem as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). I’ll in fact try …

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Of Typewriters and Permutations (I)

This is going to be the first of a few posts on the same problem. My efforts are based on a blog post by Nate Brixius (@natebrix) titled “Optimizing 19th Century Typewriters“, which in turn is based on a post titled “Tuning a Typewriter” by “Hardmath123”. As the image in Hardmath123’s post shows, an old …

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Coordinating Variable Signs

Someone asked me today (or yesterday, depending on whose time zone you go by) how to force a group of variables in an optimization model to take the same sign (all nonpositive or all nonnegative). Assuming that all the variables are bounded, you just need one new binary variable and a few constraints. Assume that …

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Sniffing out pandas’ social secrets

I find I tend to write most of my blog posts from the field – I guess this is what I think readers will find most exciting, which is probably because it’s what I find most exciting. I thought that I was done with fieldwork back in April, but while doing analyses for my dissertation …

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A Few Reflections on the TOME Initiative

WASHINGTON, DC – Today a group of colleagues from the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses met to advance the Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) initiative. It was heartening to see the progress the initiative has made since our first gathering in the summer of 2016. At the time, I was enthusiastic …

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Selecting Box Sizes

Someone posted an interesting question about box sizes on Mathematics Stack Exchange. He (well, his girlfriend to be precise) has a set of historical documents that need to be preserved in boxes (apparently using a separate box for each document). He wants to find a solution that minimizes the total surface area of the boxes …

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Thank you & Farewell #MSUrbanSTEM

On December 18, 2013 Sonya, Punya, Anurag & I took this picture (in the snow, on the roof of Erickson Hall) to celebrate the official signing of the Wipro Urban STEM Fellowship Program at MSU. We knew we were starting something special – but I don’t think we knew just how special. Fast forward 4 1/2 …

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Evolution of a (data) visualization

Last summer, I taught the MAET Year 2 Summer Cohort with Danah Henriksen. After teaching the class, Danah realized she had taught five cohorts of (awesome) students and that we had some information available from pre- and post-course self-reported surveys to understand how students grew in terms of their confidence in using different educational (and …

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Callback Cuts That Repeat

The following post is specific to the CPLEX integer programming solver. I have no idea whether it applies to other solvers, or even which other solver have cut callbacks. Every so often, a user will discover that a callback routine they wrote has “rediscovered” a cut it previously generated. This can be a bit concerning …

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Open Letter to College of Arts & Letters Alumni and Friends

Dear College of Arts & Letters alumni and friends, By now many of you have heard that the university has agreed in principle to a \$500 million global settlement with the survivors of the sexual abuse committed by former Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar. This important moment of accountability comes at the end of a …

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Grouping Rows of a Matrix

I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon doing something I thought would be simple (relatively speaking) in LaTeX. I wanted to group rows of a matrix (actually, in my case, a vector) with right braces, and label the groups. An example of what I wanted is in the image below. This seems to me …

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Big M and Integrality Tolerance

A change I made to an answer I posted on OR-Exchange, based on a comment from a well-informed user of OR-X, might be worth repeating here on the blog. It has to do with issues that can occur when using “big M” type integer programming models, a topic I’ve covered here before. As I mentioned …

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Some ideas about getting started bike commuting

This post includes a few things about getting started bike commuting. The thesis is something like: **If you have a safe route, you can probably commute right away, and then add-on other things (like a rack, fenders, or different tires) over time. The most important thing – a safe route! The most important thing is …

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Time lapse video of Special Collections Conservator making a custom box

Check out this awesome time lapse video of our Special Collections Conservator making a custom box for one of our a rare books. Tweet

Cultivating a Culture of Trust

It has been difficult to write for the public in the months since posting the Open Letter to the College of Arts & Letters in the wake of the survivor impact statements that are transforming Michigan State University.1 Part of the difficulty is what my thoughtful #SpartanDean colleague, Prabu David, emphasized when he wrote that it is challenging to find the right …

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New Kevin Washburn Paper: “Everybody Does Better in Indian Country When Tribes are Empowered”

Posted in SSRN, here. The abstract: Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a blue ribbon panel called the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to examine the causes of urban riots that happened during the summer of 1967. The Kerner Commission, as the group came to be known, produced a report on March 1, 1968, …

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The Ballad of Bedbug Eddie and the Golden Rule

This is a bedtime story I made up for my kids when they were small. See also Isabel and the dwarf king. Once upon a time, there was a tiny bedbug named Eddie, who was no bigger than a sesame seed. Like all bedbugs, Eddie lived by eating the blood of humans. Every night he …

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Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

Roger Penrose writes in the Guardian, providing a scientifically precise summary of Hawking’s accomplishments as a physicist (worth reading in full at the link). Penrose and Hawking collaborated to produce important singularity theorems in general relativity in the late 1960s. Here is a nice BBC feature: A Brief History of Stephen Hawking. The photo above …

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Remembering Stephen Hawking

The passing of the great physicist Stephen Hawking today at the age of 76 fills me with sadness for many different reasons. On the one hand, it was inspiring to witness that, seemingly, the power of will and intellect can hold such a serious illness at bay for so long. On the other hand, I …

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How NSA Tracks You (Bill Binney)

Anyone who is paying attention knows that the Obama FBI/DOJ used massive government surveillance powers against the Trump team during and after the election. A FISA warrant on Carter Page (and Manafort and others?) was likely used to mine stored communications of other Trump team members. Hundreds of “mysterious” unmasking requests by Susan Rice, Samantha …

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National Indian Law Library Bulletin (2/22/2018)

Here: The National Indian Law Library added new content to the Indian Law Bulletins on 2/22/18. U.S. Supreme Court Bulletin http://www.narf.org/nill/bulletins/sct/2017-2018update.html Petition for certiorari was denied in Renteria, et al. v. Superior Court of California, Tulare County, et al. (Indian Child Welfare Act) and in Norton, et al. v. Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, et …

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Documentary Films as Soccer Storytelling

I recently went on a cinematic journey that took me from women’s soccer in Zanzibar to a failed stadium-and-entertainment complex in Buenos Aires. My travel agency, so to speak, was the Football Scholars Forum. On February 23 it held an online discussion of two low-budget, high-return documentary films. (A recording of the event can be found here. …

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State of the State Podcast: The President. The Governor. The Economy.

IPPSR is delighted to launch its first official podcast: State of the State. This is the third edition featuring issues, answers, policy and research on the hottest topics on the local, state and national stage. State of the State podcasters Matt Grossmann, IPPSR’s Director, and Charles Ballard, director of IPPSR’s State of the State Survey …

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Kosen Judo and the origins of MMA

When I was in Japan in the mid-1990s almost no one outside of a small group of MMA fans had ever heard of BJJ or Gracie Jiujitsu. Sometimes when I went to a judo club to practice I would just explain that I was a “newaza specialist” (ground technique specialist) or even that I wanted to do …

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Frank Herbert interview on the origins of Dune (1969)

The interviewer is Willis E. McNelly, a professor of English (specializing in science fiction). Herbert discusses artistic as well as conceptual decisions made in the writing and background world building for Dune. Highly recommended for any fan of the book. See also Dune and The Butlerian Jihad and Darwin Among the Machines. The Bene Gesserit program had as …

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The History of Synth Pop (video documentary)

I had a vague awareness of synth pop groups like Depeche Mode, Joy Division, New Order, Human League, OMD when I was growing up. I loved the music but knew almost nothing about the bands and the context from which they emerged. This documentary locates them in the post-punk, Kraftwerk-influenced UK of the late 1970s …

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