News Room

Governors in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have imposed a 14-day quarantine of travelers from COVID-19 hotspots — states with high average infection rates over a rolling window. What are they thinking? The quarantine, labelled as “advisory,” gives each state responsibility for enforcement. However, governors provide no guidance on how to enforce such an advisory. The reason is that such an advisory is unenforceable, and hence, serves no useful purpose.  

A North Carolina congressman says 10% of his state’s population has been exposed to the novel coronavirus. U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy, a doctor and a Republican, made the claim in a June 23 Facebook post criticizing Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. “We also found out over the weekend that antibody testing conducted by Dr. John Sanders at Wake Forest University showed that over 1 million people in North Carolina have now been exposed to the virus. How could another institution in our state get this done so quickly when the governor’s administration could not?” Murphy wrote.

In the face of the coronavirus crisis, building improved supply chain resilience is perhaps the hottest topic in the industry right now, with literally dozens if not hundreds of articles and pundits weighing in on what companies need to do to become more resilient.

Visual cues are overtaking the text in their messaging in defining online conversations. A new study published by INFORMS, an international association for operations research and analytics professionals, and conducted by researchers from the University of Colorado, the New Economics School in Russia and the University of Washington, found a strong link between the visual portrayal of a brand in online imagery created by consumers and the larger brand perceptions.

The "multiechelon inventory optimization" model turned an inventory management process that previously relied on "rule-of-thumb heuristics and spreadsheets" into one where planners accept an algorithm's automatically generated inventory targets 99.5% of the time, the researchers said.