Science, Global Supply Chains, and Operations Research

 Science, Global Supply Chains, and Operations Research

I was thrilled to see the cover of the recent Science magazine published by AAAS with a feature section on "Rethinking the global supply chain."

In this volume were several themed articles that I especially enjoyed, including "The information highway gets physical," in which ideas from the existing Internet are being promulgated to create a physical Internet for more effective logistics. Personally, and since we are part of a big NSF project to reenvision the existing Internet, I also see many synergies in the reverse direction through appropriate game theory models! In that nice article, written by Jeffrey Mervis, operations researcher Russ Meller was noted, and his co-authored book, "The Physical Internet: The Network of Logistics Networks." I sent Russ a congrats yesterday and he responded en route to the airport for a flight to Europe. I also enjoyed reading quotes from Kevin Gue, who gave a keynote recently at the Physical Internet conference in Quebec City  (and who is moving from Auburn U. to the U. of Louisville). I was already committed to being in Europe in May so I did not attend. The conference was hosted by Benoit Montreuil of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada.

Kevin J. Dooley of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University also had a nice article, "The whole chain," in which he stated that Science is key to holistically managing sustainable supply chains, which I thoroughly agree with and which we have been emphasizing in many of our sustainable supply chain research articles with applications as varied as blood supply chains and even fast fashion!

In the volume there were also several additional articles on sustainable supply chains, and I found it interesting to see the lists of references and journals represented.

In particular, I very much enjoyed the article. "The science of sustainable supply chains," by Dara O'Rourke, who is at UC Berkeley. It was terrific to see cited therein our latest book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products!"

And speaking of supply chains, today we heard the great news that our paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, was accepted for publication in the journal, Transportation Research E! This paper was recently presented at the 18th European Conference on Mathematics for Industry, Taormina, Italy, June 9-13, 2014 and also at the Conference on Optimization, Control and Applications in the Information Age - in honor of the 60th Birthday of Professor Panos M. Pardalos, Chalkidiki, Greece, June 15-20, 2014.



You can read more about our paper in an earlier blogpost.

The above presentation can be downloaded in its entirely here.

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Facebook "emotional contagion" Study: A Roundup of Reactions

 Facebook "emotional contagion" Study: A Roundup of Reactions

In case you missed it, there was a dust-up this weekend around the web because of a social science study involving manipulation of Facebook news feeds of users (which might include you, if you are an English language user). Here are three points of contention (in order of intensity):

    Ethics - Was there informed consent?
    Statistical significance - The effect was small, but the data large, what does this mean?
    Linguistics - How did they define and track "emotion "?

First, the original study itself:

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Kramer et al. PNAS. Synopsis (from PNAS)

    We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.

My two cents: We'll never see the actual language data, so the many questions this study raises are destined to be left unanswered.

The Roundup

In Defense of Facebook: If you can only read one analysis, read Tal Yarkoni's deep dive response to the study and its critics. It's worth a full read (comments too). He makes a lot of important points, including the weakness of the effect, the rather tame facts of the actual experiments, and the normalcy of manipulation (that's how life works) but for me, this take-down of the core assumptions underlying the study is the Money Quote:

    the fact that users in the experimental conditions produced content with very slightly more positive or negative emotional content doesn’t mean that those users actually felt any differently. It’s entirely possible–and I would argue, even probable–that much of the effect was driven by changes in the expression of ideas or feelings that were already on users’ minds. For example, suppose I log onto Facebook intending to write a status update to the effect that I had an “awesome day today at the beach with my besties!” Now imagine that, as soon as I log in, I see in my news feed that an acquaintance’s father just passed away. I might very well think twice about posting my own message–not necessarily because the news has made me feel sad myself, but because it surely seems a bit unseemly to celebrate one’s own good fortune around people who are currently grieving. I would argue that such subtle behavioral changes, while certainly responsive to others’ emotions, shouldn’t really be considered genuine cases of emotional contagion.


the Empire strikes back: Humanities Professor Alan Jacobs counters Yarkoni, using language that at times seemed to verge on unhinged, but hyperbole aside, he takes issue with claims that the experiment was ethical simply because users signed a user agreement (that few of them ever actually read). Money Quote:

    This seems to be missing the point of the complaints about Facebook’s behavior. The complaints are not “Facebook successfully manipulated users’ emotions” but rather “Facebook attempted to manipulate users’ emotions without informing them that they were being experimented on.” That’s where the ethical question lies, not with the degree of the manipulation’s success. “Who cares if that guy was shooting at you? He missed, didn’t he?” — that seems to be Yarkoni’s attitude.


Facebook admits manipulating users' emotions by modifying news feeds: Across the pond, The Guardian got into the kerfuffle. Never one to miss a chance to go full metal Orwell on us, the Guardian gives us this ridiculous Money Quote with not a whiff of counter-argument:

    In a series of Twitter posts, Clay Johnson, the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama's online campaign for the presidency in 2008, said: "The Facebook 'transmission of anger' experiment is terrifying." He asked: "Could the CIA incite revolution in Sudan by pressuring Facebook to promote discontent? Should that be legal? Could Mark Zuckerberg swing an election by promoting Upworthy [a website aggregating viral content] posts two weeks beforehand? Should that be legal?"

This Clay Johnson guy is hilarious, in a dangerously stupid way. How does his bonkers ranting rate two paragraphs in a Guardian story?


Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment: The Atlantic provides a roundup of sorts and a review of the basic facts, and some much needed sanity about the limitations of LIWC (which is a limited, dictionary tool that, except for the evangelical zeal of its creator James Pennebaker, would be little more than a toy for undergrad English majors to play with). Article also provides important quotes from the study's editor, Princeton's Susan Fiske. This also links to a full interview with professor Fiske.

Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods: If you have time to read two and only two analyses of the Facebook study, first read Yarkoni above, then read John Grohol's excellent fisking of the (mis-)use of LIWC as tool for linguistic study. Money Quote:

    much of human communication includes subtleties ... — without even delving into sarcasm, short-hand abbreviations that act as negation words, phrases that negate the previous sentence, emojis, etc. — you can’t even tell how accurate or inaccurate the resulting analysis by these researchers is. Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers.

Analyzing Facebook's PNAS paper on Emotional Contagion: Nitin Madnani provides an NLPers
detailed fisking of the experimental methods, with special attention paid to the flaws of LIWC (with bonus comment from Brendan O'Connor, recent CMU grad and new U Amherst professor). Money Quote:

    Far and away, my biggest complaint is that the Facebook scientists simply used a word list to determine whether a post was positive or negative. As someone who works in natural language processing (including on the task of analyzing sentiment in documents), such a rudimentary system would be treated with extreme skepticism in our conferences and journals. There are just too many problems with the approach, e.g. negation ("I am not very happy today because ..."). From the paper, it doesn't look like the authors tried to address these problems. In short, I am skeptical the whether the experiment actually measures anything useful. One way to address comments such as mine is to actually release the data to the public along with some honest error analysis about how well such a naive approach actually worked.


Facebook’s Unethical Experiment: Tal Yarkoni's article above provides a pretty thorough fisking of this Slate screed. I'll just add that Slate is never the place I'd go to for well reasoned, scientific analysis. A blow-by-blow deep dive into the last episode of Orange Is The New Black? Oh yeah, Slate has that genre down cold.


Anger Builds Over Facebook's Emotion-Manipulation Study: The site that never met a listicle it didn't love, Mashable provides a short article that fails to live up to its title. They provide little evidence that anger is building beyond screen grabs of a whopping four Twitter feeds. Note, they completely ignore the range of people supporting the study (no quotes from the authors, for example). As far as I can tell, there is no hashtag for anti-Facebook study tweets.


Facebook Manipulated User News Feeds To Create Emotional Responses: Forbes wonders aloud about the mis-use of the study by marketers. Money Quote:

    What harm might flow from manipulating user timelines to create emotions?  Well, consider the controversial study published last year (not by Facebook researchers) that said companies should tailor their marketing to women based on how they felt about their appearance.  That marketing study began by examining the days and times when women felt the worst about themselves, finding that women felt most vulnerable on Mondays and felt the best about themselves on Thursdays ... The Facebook study, combined with last year’s marketing study suggests that marketers may not need to wait until Mondays or Thursdays to have an emotional impact, instead  social media companies may be able to manipulate timelines and news feeds to create emotionally fueled marketing opportunities.

You don't have to work hard to convince me that marketing professionals have a habit of half-digesting science they barely understand to try to manipulate consumers. That's par for the course in that field, as far as I can tell. Just don't know what scientists producing the original studies can do about it. Monkey's gonna throw shit. Don't blame the banana they ate.


Creepy Study Shows Facebook Can Tweak Your Moods Through ‘Emotional Contagion’. The Blaze witer Zach Noble summed up the negative reaction this way: a victory for scientific understanding with some really creepy ramifications. But I think it only seems creepy if you mis-understand the actual methods.

Final Thought: It's the bad science that creeps me out more than the questionable ethics. Facebook is data, lets use it wisely.

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Natural News reveals the ICP-MS food research lab - pioneering scientific research for clean food!

 Natural News reveals the ICP-MS food research lab - pioneering scientific research for clean food!

According to Natural News, Mike Adams has published a new video showing more details of the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, including proof that the lab isn't a "video set" but rather a fully-functioning analytical laboratory. This is where he is spearheading the research on heavy metals contamination in foods, superfoods and dietary supplements.

In the video, he explains why they spent so much money to build an ICP-MS lab and describes how some of the instrumentation and how it works. This video is being released in preparation for some groundbreaking new research we are about to reveal later this week on heavy metals contamination in popular health products.

Although some importers and manufacturers have remained in a state of denial over the heavy metals found in their products, the science we are conducting here at Natural News is irrefutable science conducted in the public interest. And as such, it cannot be stopped or silenced.

Now he is running high-tech equipment to reveal food toxins nobody is even regulating, much less talking about and finding on labels. This is huge. These heavy metal toxins can make you lose your mind, lose your immunity and even lose your life early. There is no excuse for not paying attention to this bombshell and doing something about it! If you don't do it for yourself, do it for your family, your kids, grandkids, parents or grandparents if they are still with us enjoying this planet. We are invited inside the spectroscopy lab to see what Mike Adams is working on right now, in May of 2014, and this is cutting edge!

To see some fascinating and interesting clips regarding the truth about the issue of heavy metals contamination in foods and more, one can easily log onto:

http://www.naturalnews.com/045090_Health_Ranger_food_research_laboratory_ICP-MS.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsvjUYkvMLo

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Eat-Cancer-Modern-Prevention/dp/1940192242/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398966083&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=dont+eat+cancjer

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Scientists Warn That a Widely Used Pesticide Could Be Worse for Bees Than DDT

 Scientists Warn That a Widely Used Pesticide Could Be Worse for Bees Than DDT

Todd Woody Takepart.com Yahoo News 24 Jun 14;

The indiscriminate use of DDT in the mid-20th century helped nearly exterminate America’s national symbol, the bald eagle, and the pesticide itself became a symbol of an industrial society at war with nature.

Now, more than 40 years after the United States Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT, thanks in large part to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a class of agricultural pesticides called neonicotinoids (neonics) poses an even more serious threat to bees, other wildlife, and entire ecosystems, according to a preview of a report to be published next week by an international group of scientists.

“In the case of acute effects alone, some neonics are at least 5,000 to 10,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT,” wrote the scientists affiliated with the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides. “The evidence is also clear that neonics pose a serious risk of harm to honey bees and other pollinators.”

Studies have implicated neonics in the mass die-off of bees that pollinate a third of the global food supply. Many scientists believe the pesticide is one of several interrelated factors—including disease, parasites, and poor nutrition—responsible for the apian catastrophe that has unfolded over the past decade.

The task force analyzed more than 800 peer-reviewed studies that investigated the impact of neonics and an insecticide called fipronil on insects like bees, mammals, birds, and reptiles. Neonics and fipronil have become pervasive in the environment over the past two decades and now account for 40 percent of the global pesticide market, according to the report.

Neonics and fipronil belong to a class of so-called systemic pesticides that are absorbed into a plant’s roots, stems, leaves, flowers, pollen, and nectar. Farmers can spray plants with neonics, but seeds are now routinely treated with the chemical, meaning that as the plant grows the pesticide remains part of the flora.

And increasingly the fauna.

“The combination of persistence (over months or years) and solubility in water has led to large scale contamination of, and the potential for accumulation in, soils and sediments, ground and surface water and treated and non-treated vegetation,” the scientists wrote. “The effects of exposure to neonics range from instant and lethal to chronic. Even long term exposure at low (non-lethal) levels can be harmful.”

Neonics are nerve poisons, but the effects extend beyond the pests the pesticide is intended to kill, according to the report, damaging bees’ ability to forage and fly and increasing their susceptibility to disease. They are less harmful to birds and mammals but can have indirect consequences, such as killing off insects those animals eat.

Still, the scientists acknowledged that what they don’t know about neonics far exceeds what they do know. For instance, tests to determine neonics’ toxicity have only been done on four of 25,000 bee species, and few toxicological studies have been carried out on other pollinators, such as butterflies.

And 96 percent of those studies have been performed in the laboratory under controlled conditions. How neonics affect the behavior of bees and other wildlife remains largely unknown.

The full report will be published next week in the journal Environment Science and Pollution Research. But the scientists left no doubt about their conclusions.

“The current extensive use of this group of persistent highly toxic chemicals is affecting global biodiversity,” the report’s authors wrote, urging governments to regulate neonics more strictly and to begin a worldwide phaseout. “Their continued use can only accelerate the global decline of important invertebrates and, as a result, risk reductions in the level, diversity, security and stability of ecosystem services.”

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Oceanic plastic mystery: where's it all going?

 Oceanic plastic mystery: where's it all going?

It certainly isn’t news that the oceans are full of plastics; The news is perhaps how little we know about it.

(Image: plastics collected on the Malaspina Expedition. Credit: CSIC.)

“Our awareness of the significance of plastic pollution in the ocean is relatively recent, and basic questions remain unresolved. Indeed, the quantity of plastic floating in the ocean and its final destination are still unknown,” write scientists who participated in a recent Spanish science expedition.

They found plastics throughout the oceans, and a scientific paper on the results concluded that they’re getting into the marine food chain.

The researchers emphasized how little is known about the impacts of the plastics—and even where some of the plastic goes. A lot of it is unaccounted for: “Resolving the fate of the missing plastic debris is of fundamental importance to determine the nature and significance of the impacts of plastic pollution in the ocean.”

The Malaspina Expedition of 2010, sent out by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), was named after an early Spanish scientific circumnavigation from 1789 to 1794, headed by Alessandro Malaspina and José de Bustamante y Guerra.

They collected plastics in all the world’s oceans. And they found plastic in both the North Pacific and Atlantic, where it was known to occur in large amounts, but they also found large amounts in the southern oceans: the South Pacific, South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

"Ocean currents carry plastic objects which split into smaller and smaller fragments due to solar radiation. Those little pieces of plastic, known as microplastics, can last hundreds of years and were detected in 88% of the ocean surface sampled during the Malaspina Expedition 2010,” said Andrés Cózar, of the University of Cadiz.

"These microplastics have an influence on the behavior and the food chain of marine organisms.

“On one hand, the tiny plastic fragments often accumulate contaminants that, if swallowed, can be passed to organisms during digestion; without forgetting the gastrointestinal obstructions, which are another of the most common problems with this type of waste.

“On the other hand, the abundance of floating plastic fragments allows many small organisms to sail on them and colonize places they could not access to previously. But probably, most of the impacts taking place due to plastic pollution in the oceans are not yet known,” Cózar said.

The amounts of plastic estimated to be in the oceans is stunning. The Malaspina 2010 paper middle estimates are that there are 4.8 thousand tons in the North Pacific, 2.7 in the North Atlantic, 2.2 in the Indian Ocean, 2.6 in the South Atlantic and 2.1 in the South Pacific.

Some of the plastic is at the surface but even if it is buoyant, some is carried down through the water column via the added weight of biofouling, or being contained in the feces of marine life forms that eat the plastic.

And there may be other methods for sinking the plastics.

“Our observations also show that large loads of plastic fragments with sizes from microns to some millimeters are unaccounted for in the surface loads. The pathway and ultimate fate of the missing plastic are as yet unknown. We cannot rule out either of the proposed sink processes or the operation of sink processes yet to be identified,” the paper says.

It could be that the plastic is being broken down into such small pieces that they’re not getting caught in the sampling nets of marine scientists: “Missing micro- plastic may derive from  nano-fragmentation processes, rendering the very small pieces undetectable to convectional sampling nets, and/or may be transferred to the ocean interior.”

The University of Hawai`i’s Dave Karl edited the paper, Plastic debris in the open ocean, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are
Andrés Cózar,  Fidel Echevarría, Ignacio González-Gordillo, Xabier Irigoien, Bárbara Úbeda, Santiago Hernández-León, Álvaro T. Palma, Sandra Navarro, Juan García-de-Lomas, Andrea Ruiz, María L. Fernández-de-Puelles, and Carlos M. Duarte.

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A Comprehensive Scientific Review of 'Chemical-Free' Products

 A Comprehensive Scientific Review of 'Chemical-Free' Products

Popular Science -  Charcoal is mostly made up of carbon, but also contains hydrogen and oxygen. When it burns it yields carbon dioxide.

I never thought anybody took the phrase "chemical-free" seriously, because, obviously everything contains chemicals. But it has become a marketing slogan that a lot of people apparently subscribe to, and indeed some of the top Google search results, for example this site authored by a PhD, no less, pursue this angle without strenuously qualifying that the term is meaningless.

But wait! Now a study has been done on all of the chemical-free products out there. If you like, check out the exhaustive manuscript over at Nature Chemistry. Here's the summary:

Manufacturers of consumer products, in particular edibles and cosmetics, have broadly employed the term 'Chemical free' in marketing campaigns and on product labels. Such characterization is often incorrectly used to imply--and interpreted to mean--that the product in question is healthy, derived from natural sources, or otherwise free from synthetic components. We have examined and subjected to rudimentary analysis an exhaustive number of such products, including but not limited to lotions and cosmetics, herbal supplements, household cleaners, food items, and beverages. Herein are described all those consumer products, to our knowledge, that are appropriately labelled as 'Chemical free'.

(SPOILER WARNING) If you don't have all of the 0 seconds required to read the list of products that are truly chemical-free, I'll ruin it for you: there aren't any.

A funny (fake) study, to be sure; the term "chemical-free" is irritating and blatantly wrong. However, there is an argument to be made for expanded testing of industrial chemicals that have been introduced into humans' lives in increasing quantities in the past few centuries. The phrase "chemical-free," in encouraging uninformed chemophobia, detracts from that more nuanced line of thought, and doesn't help anybody.

Read more: http://ehsmanager.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-comprehensive-scientific-review-of.html#ixzz36RMhMaCo

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What the Sith Jihad wants includes science crime scenes

 What the Sith Jihad wants includes science crime scenes

When I posted ISIS looks like Sith, not Jedi on Facebook, someone called ISIS "The Sith Jihad" in comments.  That's such a good label, I'm using it for them from now on. Unfortunately, the best image is one from the prequel trilogy to "Dune."  The rest are too offensive.  So be it.

I begin with Test Tube's Who Is ISIS And What Do They Want In Iraq?


You heard the presenter right; ISIS prepares quarterly reports.  Here's what Vox had to say about one of them in The surreal infographics ISIS is producing, translated.

    We know that ISIS, the al-Qaeda breakaway group that's gaining more and more ground in Iraq at the moment, is an exceptionally well-trained and disciplined fighting force, with a shockingly sophisticated social media strategy to boot. But did you know that they also produce annual reports with fancy infographics detailing all the operations they carried out over a given period?

    The most recent report, published on March 31, details the group's operations from November 2012 to November 2013. It's a dense, text-heavy 410 pages, with plenty of data tables tallying up various actions the group took. A previous report covered the period from November 2011 to November 2012 over a much more concise 198 pages. Each report begins with a big, splashy infographic counting up various actions undertaken in the previous year.

The infographics at the link show how many bombings, assassinations, prisoner rescues, and other military operations took place during the reporting period.  The latest includes how many cities they've captured.  I don't know whether to be disgusted or impressed.

That's not all ISIS wants.  Apparently they want to create a bunch of science (and culture) crime scenes.  Follow over the jump for the story explaining how and why that I originally included in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Summer Solstice 2014).

USA Today via Pacific Daily News (Guam): In Iraq, echoes of Taliban's cultural purges
Jun. 20, 2014

    ISTANBUL - Ancient statues whispering of civilizations lost. Religious shrines from the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths. Tombs with relics and bones testifying to this region as the Cradle of Civilization - and where, in the city-states of Mesopotamia millennia ago, the world's first written
language was born.

    The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has an estimated half-a-million archaeological sites and countless priceless artifacts. Only recently recovered and restored following the 2003 war in Iraq, they are nonetheless in danger once again, this time from Islamic extremists taking over large swaths of Iraq who deem this rich heritage "un-Islamic."

    As Sunni Muslim insurgents loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant - known as ISIL or ISIS - take cities such as Mosul and Tikrit, and advance toward Baghdad, they have in a published manifesto called on followers to destroy all "infidel" statues, churches, tombs and shrines.

    Reports of church burnings and the destruction of shrines have already emerged from multicultural and ethnically diverse Mosul, which is being held by the insurgents. The city in Nineveh province has Assyrian Christian, Islamic and Jewish heritage and is the site of ancient churches and monasteries dating back to the 13th century.

ISIS is not the least bit tolerant.  They're in "good" company in this regard.

    Islamic extremists have a history of destroying art, architecture and cultural sites deemed "un-Islamic."

    In Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban dynamited two towering Buddha statues carved into a cliff in the country's Bamiyan Valley, to international outcry. Built in the 6th century, the statues were a testament to the country's rich religious history. In 2012, Mali Islamists razed shrines seen as idolatrous in Timbuktu, some of which held the remains of revered Muslim scholars and teachers.

I was wondering if Timbuktu would be mentioned, as I covered the destruction there in Science crime scenes 1 and Science Crime Scenes 2: Timbuktu.  At the time, I made the following observation about the similiaries between Mali and Afghanistan.

    Al Qaeda in Mali is making the same mistake that the Taliban did in Afghanistan when they defaced the Buddha statues, except they're doing it to other members of their own faith. That's the sign of kooks: practice your mistakes; you may get them right.

That seems to be the philosophy of ISIS, The Sith Jihad.  May saner heads prevail, just as they eventually did in Mali.

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