As INFORMS President Tom Cook describes in his column ["President's Desk," page 4], INFORMS is launching a major new initiative to market our profession. INFORMS has just hired the Cambridge, Mass., marketing firm PJA, which specializes in working with technology, life sciences and health care organizations. PJA will develop a strategic marketing plan and recommend steps the association should take this year and in the years ahead.

In the immediate future, the INFORMS Public Relations Department and the Round Table will issue a PowerPoint presentation that OR practitioners can use in their companies to bid on internal projects and explain their OR department's strengths to executives. Find out more at the INFORMS Practice Meeting in Phoenix and in the next issue of OR/MS Today.

Recent articles in the press examined the contributions made by operations researchers in investigation of the Columbia shuttle disaster, breast cancer research and other stories:

From the New York Times, Feb. 5:
Operations Researchers M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell and Paul Fischbeck presented their NASA study, "Risk Management for the Tiles of the Space Shuttle," during the 1993 Edelman best-cases competition. It was published in the January 1994 issue of Interfaces. Following the Columbia space shuttle tragedy this February 1, the media revisited what now appears to be ... prescient research. They also published criticism by Paté-Cornell and Fischbeck of a NASA study conducted by one of its contractors, Boeing.

The space agency was warned in 1990 [by Paté-Cornell and Fischbeck] that the protective tiles around the shuttle's wheel wells were particularly vulnerable to damage and failure, inviting catastrophe because those tiles protect both fuel tanks and the shuttle's hydraulic system.

From the New York Times, Feb.28:
"It's not only the data and what has happened to Columbia but how NASA is operating," said Dr. M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, chairwoman of management science and engineering at Stanford University and an author of a 1990 report that concluded foam debris could seriously damage the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles.

"They also have to modify their culture to accommodate uncertainty and the notion it's not because you have survived something in the last few months that you're necessarily going to survive it in the next flight," Dr. Paté-Cornell said. "They have to do their analysis with a lot more consideration of the uncertainties to better support the decision-making."

"My big curiosity is why NASA has so much faith in that Boeing report," said Paul S. Fischbeck, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie-Mellon University who wrote the 1990 NASA report with Dr. Paté-Cornell. "That's the one study that seems to have been done that doesn't match what happened."

... Dr. Fischbeck said with the Boeing study was a "bottleneck" to more serious "what if" discussions of what they should do if problems arose during re-entry and landing. "They had a model that predicted how much damage would be done, but they discounted it, so they didn't look beyond it," he said. "They didn't seriously consider any of the outcomes beyond minor tile damage."

From the Washington Post, March 2:
"Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, head of the management science and engineering department at Stanford University, who led a study of the debris threat for NASA in the early 1990s, said these are among the reasons she found the Boeing studies "optimistic. ... The software seemed to assume, for example, that the tiles were well-bonded, seemed to assume a particular spot in which the foam hit the tiles. And in my opinion, it was not the 'worst case,' contrary to what they said."

Note: Coverage of Paté-Cornell and Paul Fischbeck's study also appeared in stories filed by Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News, San Diego Tribune and other media.

From Knowledge@Wharton, Feb. 26:
A breast cancer scare that turns out to be a false alarm is cause for relief, but may also trigger delays in future mammogram screenings, according to Wharton research.

In a controlled experiment that surveyed women waiting for mammograms at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton marketing professors Barbara Kahn and Mary Frances Luce found that the emotional stress of believing they may have breast cancer, even for just a few days, causes patients to indicate they would be likely to delay mammograms.

With mammogram error rates estimated to be as high as 20 percent, the findings could have broad implications for health-care providers and patients, said the researchers, who are also senior fellows at Wharton's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

"The personal testing experience itself, and false positive results in particular, could, in and of themselves, significantly influence future decisions about whether to get tested regularly," the authors wrote in a paper titled "Understanding High-Stakes Consumer Decisions: Mammography Adherence Following False Alarm Test Results," forthcoming in Marketing Science.

From Science Newsletter, March 3:
The danger of a future Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska's Prince William Sound has declined substantially since the State of Alaska, environmentalists, oil companies and the fishing industry brought together a risk management team, according to a study in a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Measures taken before the formation of the risk management team had brought down the risk by 75 percent. Actions taken based on the late 1990's risk assessment report reduced the risk by an additional 68 percent, with a 51 percent reduction in the expected oil outflow. Cumulatively, the risk is down 92 percent.

Note: Arnold Barnett's opinion piece, "Trust No One at the Airport," which appeared in "The Last Word" column in the February issue of ORMS Today, was reprinted by Air Safety Week.



Barry List is the director of public relations at INFORMS.







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