My paper “Linking Delay Announcements, Abandonment, and Staffing: A Behavioral Perspective” has been named a finalist for the Service Science Best Student Paper Award. I will present the paper in a special finalist section on Sunday of INFORMS 2017.
Boston Red Sox Used Apple Watches to Steal Signs Against Yankees. Look… don’t cheat. In sports, in card games, in board games, in school. Just don’t cheat. (Sign stealing WITH YOUR EYES is part of the game. No electronics. No binoculars.)
In fantasy football, teams out of contention cannot just dump their stars on the waiver-wire for playoff teams to pick up. So why can the Pirates?
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*#$
by Mark Manson, 2016
I don’t normally go for books with intentionally catchy or provocative titles, but I had read some decent expositions on Mark Manson’s website. The main point of the book is that you can care about a small number of things in life, so don’t go wasting your effort on unworthy ends. Mark also hates entitled people. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the book, it’s certainly not a “must read”. I listened to the book on tape, which was well-read (by someone other than the author!).
Interesting side note: The book mentions the story of Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activist for female education. About a week after hearing this, Maria told me that Malala was giving a large lecture at DePauw. Interesting coincidence, since I didn’t know about her before.
Would you have to leave your car in the sun to charge all day? And here’s part 2.
The DOE study found cheap natural gas to be the greatest driver of baseload power plant retirements, followed by flat power demand, environmental regulations and the growing penetration of renewables on the grid. Perhaps most notably, the study did not find renewables to be a threat to grid reliability.
Duke Energy having trouble building anything other than renewable power in North Carolina.
More Joey Votto: 5 walks in 5 plate appearances, seeing 43 pitches.
Dusty Baker “throwing caution to the winds”. This is crazy to me:
While pitch counts are crude metrics, only 10 teams have allowed a starting pitcher to exceed 120 pitches this season; only two teams have allowed it to occur on multiple occasions.
So close to epic, Kevin Huber.
What it feels like to get hit by a pitch.
That was Robin Ventura’s hilarious excuse for famously charging the mound after being hit by Nolan Ryan, who got Ventura in a headlock and started pounding away. “He threw so hard, it hurt so much, I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just took off after him because of the pain,” Ventura said. “I got about halfway to the mound, came to my senses and said, ‘What am I doing charging Nolan Ryan?’ But I couldn’t turn back then.”
How inevitable is it that college football will expand their 4 team playoff?
Interesting take on Kyrie Irving deal.
Baseball Is Overrun By Adam Dunns. Okay, here’s why: Analytics has helped defenses. Fielders have much more optimal placement/shift based on hitter tendencies. Pitchers pitch to hitter’s weaknesses and pitch to encourage a ground ball into the shift. Pitch framing catchers are being encouraged and used more often. How has analytics helped the hitter? He still has to hit a 90+ MPH pitch with his personal skill. So, to compensate for less success when the ball is put into play, hitters are going all-or-nothing to hit it out of the park. Hence, fewer balls in play and more “three true outcomes” at bats.
The New Product Bet
by Nils Rudi and Serguei Netessine
This book is a multimedia approach to teaching how to choose order quantities for new, high margin products with long leadtimes. The book is supposed to accompany an app that has videos and other multimedia to reinforce the lessons. My review is only about the book part of the package. The writeup and accompanying illustrations of the newsvendor problem, along with suggested efforts to gather demand information and/or shorten leadtimes, were very good. It would be a great introduction to the topic for a new student or product manager. The length (about 140 pages with lots of illustrations, maybe the equivalent of 50 pages of normal text) was also short enough to be easily digested by its target audience.
I am not sure what stage this book is in. Serguei brought a bunch of unfinished versions to one of his presentations at INFORMS 2016 and left them for the audience. There are still some passages/charts unfinished in my version, and I did not have a password to try out the multimedia sections of the book. In googling, the book does not seem to be for sale yet, and the picture above is my own. I hope it gets published soon.
I don’t understand the MoviePass business model, either. $10/month for 1 movie theater ticket each day.