land O links

Here are a few links to start your work week.  I am at the INFORMS Computing Society Conference in Monterey.  I will try to work on a post or two from the conference.  In the meantime, enjoy these links.

• Pictures from a Bell Labs data center in the 1960s.  This is awesome.  What is amazing in how many women and women of color worked in the data center and how many were in leadership positions.  I am happily surprised that Bell Labs was not as Mad Men-esque as I thought it would be.  Now I’m itching to know more about the early data centers and computing.
• I thoroughly enjoyed Paul Rubin’s post about physiology, gender, and STEM education–it’s a great blog post that ties together quite a few issues regarding STEM issues.  He writes, “on the one hand, we have people telling children that they are doomed to be weak at math (and science?) because they lack a Y chromosome…On the other hand, we have teachers (at least in elementary school) who themselves are weak in math (and science?) and are inclined to pass their fear of the subject on to their students.”
• Anna Nagurney had two enjoyable posts this week.  The first is about how incentives for individuals differ from incentives for systems.  The second is about train scheduling and Formula One racing.
• Aurelie Thiele on the rise of analytics. A great post about the identity crisis of operations research.  Will analytics be a fad?
• Steve Brady on online privacy and stalking.  Are you a good stalker?  I am not, but I fear that others are.

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