INFORMS Open Forum

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

Thanks for the recommendations. Will surely look into The Ethical Algorithm!

Here are a few more:

1. Effective Data Storytelling by Brent Dykes : Recently read this and loved the storytelling framework
2. Moonshots: Creating a World of /Abundance by Naveen Jain: On my reading list!

------------------------------
Kanishk Rastogi
Manager, Performance Analytics
Amazon Robotics
North Reading MA
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

Laura,

Thank you for your recommendations. Here are the books that I have been reading lately:

1. Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin
2. Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
3. Think Again by Adam Grant (re-reading)
4. Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman

A documentary that I watched recently "Coded Bias" by the Algorithm Justice League has been on my mind quite a bit. I added Weapons of Math Destruction to my reading list after watching the documentary.

Cheers,
Meena

------------------------------
Meena Al-Azzawe
Center of Excellence Principal
Kinaxis
Hillsboro OR
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

Thank you Laura for these recommendations!
Project Hail Mary is in my list since, I believe, last year when Bill Gates recommended it.
As for the books that I would recommend are the following:
1. The WEIRDest people in the world by Joseph Heinrich
2. Antifragile by Nassim N. Taleb
3. Loonshoots by Safi R. Bacall
4. Saving us by Katherine Hayhoe

------------------------------
AINETH TORRES
Sr Data Scientist
Fractal.ai
Austin TX
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

Thanks for recommending the books.

                        Currently working with:
                        1. Discrete Mathematics by Oscar Levin
                        2. A First Course in Linear Algebra by Robert A. Beezer

Thanking you,
Souradeep Koley

------------------------------
Souradeep Koley
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

I'm on a Paul Theroux kick (again!) Currently on the fourth of his books in a row. His travel writing and other critical nonfiction remains fresh and terrific, even as Theroux starts his 80s. I also found The Elephanta Suite - three loosely connected novellas published in 2007 - to be a surprisingly insightful meditation on intimacy and identity in a time of splintering. 

As for many of you I expect, immersion in self-improvement literature and its fig-leafed cousin, management writing, is an occupational hazard. While the Adam Grants and Cal Newports and Brene Browns of our world are terrific storytellers - I too consume them with pleasure - these works seem (to me) to lie just a bit further along the space currently infested by multi-hashtagged LinkedIn and Medium posts. However, a bracing counterexample is the most significant book I've read in the last three years: Sam Walker's The Captain Class.

The Captain Class examines leadership performance from an unfamiliar-to-me lens: sports. Its lessons on leadership emerge from understanding what turns a love of play into a serious, sustained, lifelong, commitment to excellence. Plenty in there to quibble with, e.g., there's Walker's idiosyncratic filter for choosing his study sample. But in the end what is most viscerally satisfying among his conclusions is something I now use both personally and professionally: the utter necessity of cultivating intention, dedication, and stamina. Talent and passion are necessary too, but very far from sufficient on their own. 

FWIW, TCC is frequently discussed and used in the (sports) coaching community. Almost as much as Ted Lasso!

Recommending a book is a funny business. Some 30 years ago while driving home for San Francisco - I was going 75 on I-280 past the Flintstones house if you're a Bay Area familiar - I heard a fascinating author interview on All Things Considered. The NPR interviewer clearly loved the book, and every known reader had apparently cried their heart out reading it. Impressed, I went that weekend to A Clean Well-Lighted Place For Books and bought the hardcover without learning the single additional fact or reading a review. The Bridges of Madison County still marks the worst literary (using the word loosely) purchase of my life. So maybe first check if your local library stocks The Captain Class; two-stage recourse :)

------------------------------
SANJAY SAIGAL
Executive Director, ICME
Stanford University
Menlo Park CA
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

Hi all,

I am currently reading The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina, still less than halfway through the book. It is about the lack of law, law enforcement and visibility in neutral waters, and what it implies in terms of poaching, human trafficking, safety violations, industrial pollution, piracy and all other kind of abuses. I think it is incredibly relevant for supply chain educators and researchers: after all, as the introduction says, "merchant ships haul about 90 percent of the word's goods". I now have much better understanding, for example, why carrier companies assume no responsibility for the cargo.

Other books I recently read that I think would be good for the club:
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.
I have mixed feelings about that one: it is not very well written, and the argument is clear-cut. It looks as if the authors started writing it with one argument in mind (how the quality of life of white Americans without a college degree deteriorated in the last 10-20 years, following the trajectory that black Americans went through in 70s), but while they were writing the book, the opioid epidemics hit the Blacks really bad, making them slip even lower, and the focus on Whites looks questionable now.

Nevertheless, I got a lot of interesting insights from that book that I didn't get anywhere else. For example, the role of the US healthcare cost inflation on wages stagnation and how proportion of immigrant and otherwise disenfranchised workers affects political and economics dynamic.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by by Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr.
A well-deserving sequel of  Goldratt's "The Goal", set in 2010-s and reflecting modern realities. I now strongly recommend it to all students in my Operations Management class and thinking if I can make some chapters a requirement.

By the way, I have a Goodreads profile where I keep a list of the books I read, my reviews, notes and highlights, etc. If you are there, feel free to add me!

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/24105229-yulia-vorotyntseva

------------------------------
Yulia Vorotyntseva
Saint Louis University
St Louis MO
------------------------------

Let me just expand the list by giving another perspective. 2022 is a very tough year for many investors. Nasdaq 100 and S&P were once down around 35% and 25%. It could be a good time for us, especially for folks in the US and Canada taking care of their retirement accounts (IRA/RRSP), to think again about what we actually want from our hard-earned invested money.

I was lucky enough to receive a recommendation for two books from my Canadian friend. Hope you will find them interesting, and even better, useful to read!

• Beat the Bank: The Canadian Guide to Simply Successful Investing by Larry Bates - The ideas in this book, though with a Canadian context, are also applicable to other countries. Here is a peep at two simple yet important ideas: (I) management fees matter and can eat up a significant part of your investment return; (II) you need to be robotic enough to make regular investments (towards your retirement goal).
• The Income Factory: An Investor's Guide to Consistent Lifetime Returns by Steven Bavaria - By looking at the chart of Dow 30 over the last 100 years, the return is alluring. But the timing of withdrawals and liquidations matter a lot! Say, you kept investing in Dow from the 1910s until the late 1920s for your retirement fund. You retired in 1929 and the nightmare just began...without looking at the future, what would you do to your account in 1929, 1930, ..., and 1933? To avoid this problem altogether, can we DIY a mini pension fund for ourselves in a way that it will be very unlikely to dry up? Income-oriented investing introduced in the book might be a possible answer.

(PS: I am not a financial advisor and this reply does not constitute any investment recommendations.)

------------------------------
Vincent Tsz Fai Chow
Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Email: tsz-fai.chow@polyu.edu.hk
https://tfvchow.github.io
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

I just finished Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age by Bruce Feiler.  A New York Times bestseller, described on Amazon as "A pioneering and timely study of how to navigate life's biggest transitions with meaning, purpose, and skill".  The author interviewed 225 people to get their life stories and to see how they managed disruptive events.  We think we live a linear life, but life is really nonlinear.  We have "lifequakes" - these events that disrupt our lives and force you to make transitions.  These disruptions could be things like divorce, cancer, or changing jobs. They can be voluntary or involuntary.  Made me reflect on various events in my lifetime where I had some difficult transitions, and grew as a result.

------------------------------
-Irv Lustig
Optimization Principal
Princeton Consultants
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------

I measure the impact of books on me by how frequently I talk about them during and after reading them. The two OR-related books that I talked about the most this year are Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil and Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez. The WORMS Podcast Club met today, and I found I am definitely not alone in talking about these books.

Outside of books directly about math or data, I often refer to The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. Among other things, this book gives the historical context behind the ethical concerns of using zip codes as input for algorithms. I also tend to bring up The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van der Kolk.

------------------------------
Kathryn Walter
Senior Operations Research Analyst
Avista Corp
Alexandria VA
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2022 17:27
From: Laura Albert
Subject: What's on your reading list?

With the winter break starting soon, I am looking for book recommendations. I thought we could share some of the books we have read that we would recommend.

Here are a few books that I've read lately and would recommend:

1. The Ethical Algorithm by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns
2. Digital Minimism by Cal Newport
3. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
4. Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
5. The No Club by Linda Babcock

I want to recommend two book clubs:

• The INFORMS Book Blub Discussion (meeting on December 8). The book is Think Again by Adam Grant.
• The WORMS Book and Podcast Club 

Happy reading!

Laura

------------------------------
Laura Albert
INFORMS President-Elect
Professor and David H. Gustafson Chair
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------