INFORMS member and Yale professor Ed Kaplan, whose 1992 paper in Management Science chronicled the declining success-per-try of in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures, provided key data for the Newsweek article. Kaplan's study indicated the success rate drops from 13 percent on the first IVF to 4.3 percent by the fourth.
"It (the study) suggests that perhaps the policy should be, `Don't encourage people to keep trying,'" Kaplan is quoted in the Newsweek article. "It's like going to a casino. There is always going to be, in any few minutes, a winner. You hear the money clinking down. But what you don't hear are the losers."
The title of Kaplan's Management Science paper: "To Be or Not to Be?... ; That is Conception!"
Historically, the team with the worst record picked first, the team with the second worst record drafted second, and so on. In 1985, in an attempt to guard against teams deliberately tanking (in sports parlance, giving less than your best effort) late season games in order to improve their draft positions, the league initiated a weighted draft lottery. The lottery has been modified a few times since then. The most recent modification was prompted by Orlando winning back-to-back lotteries and using its No. 1 picks to land Shaquille O'Neal, Anfernee Hardaway and a slew of future first-round picks (through a trade with Golden State for the rights to Chris Webber).
The modification was designed to increase the odds of the worst teams receiving the highest picks.
"What happened with Orlando was a rare event," Magazine tells Sports Illustrated. "Lotteries should allow for the possibility of rare events. What they shouldn't allow for is the possibility that weaker teams will have little incentive to win games."
Magazine, Yigal Gerchak and Helmut Mausser are the co-authors of a paper to be published in Interfaces entitled, "The Evolution of Sports Lotteries in Professional Sports: Return to Moral Hazard?" The authors argue that the current lottery system employed by the NBA only undermines the original purpose of the lottery. In other words, the lottery doesn't terminate the temptation to tank.
Writes S.I.: "Three professors of management sciences at the University of Waterloo (Ont.) remind us that the `moral hazard' of losing intentionally still exists in any system strongly weighted in favor of the weakest."
For the record, Mausser is a Ph.D. grad student at the University of Colorado. Professor Magazine recently accepted a position at the University of Cincinnati. And the Golden State Warriors won the 1995 NBA lottery and used the No. 1 pick to draft Joe Smith of the University of Maryland.
- Peter Horner
Despite the fact that more than 96 percent of the software in China and Russia is pirated, the largest number of software piracy incidents occur in three of the world's most advanced nations: America, Germany and Japan.
Some industry observers predict E-mail ads for non-computer related information will eventually die off due to a lack of response. But even if such predictions come to pass, the field will remain open to those companies providing services for the computer, such as software manufacturers. And software companies, including Microsoft, are already developing products for Internet commercial advertising use.
The most apparent way to keep direct sale entrepreneurs from poaching the Internet is to allow them their own terrain. Providing separate channels within the Internet could provide a means of keeping the hard information lines on the Internet free of ad gimmicks.
In a test case for such a system, the General Services Administration (GSA) plans to open up its electronic pathways to commerce and incorporate the World Wide Web and specific product-related information services to include unsolicited contract proposals to the government.
- Marvin Liebstone
The report, "The Future of America's Research-Intensive Industries," was prepared by IFTF working with a task-force panel of senior executives from many of America's leading research-intensive industries. It examines the ability of the nation's "top eight" U.S. research-based industries to continue their innovation track record - identifying both their future incentives and disincentives. According to the report, American R&D has fallen over the last several decades from 3 percent to 2.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Japan and Germany still allocate 3 percent of their GDPs to domestic R&D, observes J. Ian Morrison, Ph.D., president of IFTF.
The "top eight" research-intensive industries examined in the report - aerospace, chemicals, communications equipment, computers and office equipment, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, scientific instruments, software, and semiconductors and electronic components - together pay for 70 percent of all industrial R&D conducted in America. Yet, their combined sales account for only 33 percent of total manufacturing sales.
In addition to the warnings regarding R&D spending issued by the IFTF, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) has issued a resolution from its Committee on Science Policy warning that the recent proposed federal budget cuts for scientific research will seriously damage U.S. science. The Committee called upon Congress to involve the scientific community in its process of determining how to best maintain U.S. scientific strength.
The study found that high income, educated and technology-loaded households comprise 19 percent of U.S. households, and they are high mail volume (HMV) households. That means they receive 10 or more pieces per day, and 60 percent send 20 or more pieces of mail per week. Ninety-three percent of HMV households report receipt of direct mail advertisements such as flyers, catalogs and brochures. In fact, 33 percent of HMV households receive 10 or more catalogs each per month, and they order from these catalogs significantly more than average households.
The study also found that HMV households have a greater interest in placing orders electronically, having a credit card swiper at home, and banking by TV and screenphone, when compared to households with lower mail volumes.
In addition, HMV households spend significantly more than the average household to obtain information. These households spend more on newspapers, magazines, books, newsletters, basic and premium cable TV, on-line services, and their total phone bill. HMV households are also more likely to own camcorders, CD players, cordless and cellular telephones, answering machines, desktop and laptop PCs, and are more likely to be planning the purchase of a stand-alone fax than the average U.S. household.
Additionally, HMV households are more willing to pay for electronic information services, when compared to households receiving lower volumes of mail.
According to Ken Goldberg, Ph.D., the USC School of Engineering robotics specialist who co-directs the project, "Tele-Garden" is part technical demonstration, part art installation and part social experiment. It has already won a prize for excellence at a recent computer exhibition.
Cybervisitors signing on at the installation's electronic address http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/ find themselves at the controls of a robotic arm poised above a large, circular planter box filled with soil and illuminated by full-spectrum grow lights. Anyone can tour this garden site and see the herbs, vegetables and flowering plants growing there.
By filling out an E-mail application, users anywhere in the world can become a member of the Tele-Garden cooperative, where they can plant seeds and then care for their plants by watering them regularly.
No rules apply. There is nothing to prevent one member of the cooperative from planting in the same space as another, from overwatering the plants or even crushing them with the robotic arm. "We expect such things to happen," Dr. Goldberg says. "The Internet is a frontier world where sabotage is common."
Goldberg says the garden will be a living model of small-planet social interactions. "Strangers will rub shoulders with strangers, raising questions of cooperation versus competition in the use of limited resources. We could see a green and blooming oasis, or we could wind up with a barren plot. In planning the project, we deliberately left the garden's future up to its `gardeners.' "
"The thrust of this movement is to promote a core of serious mathematics for every student at the primary and secondary levels, as well as to lay a solid foundation for continuing the study of mathematics at the post-secondary level. The reform efforts seek to improve student learning by building on the strengths of the past, incorporating modern technology, and engaging students actively in the learning process, always keeping in mind the needs and aspirations of students.
"Therefore, these reform efforts deserve support by society at large as well as the mathematics community in particular."