Mobile phones can be used in several ways in public transportation, from buying tickets to tracking your bus, checking timetables etc. “Dr P.O.” is now looking for ideas beyond these – send your suggestions to “Third Opinion” and contribute to his experiment on crowdstorming.
Gyöngyi
Posted in Logistics, Socks and sandals
Few groups see the benefit of social networks for research as clearly as the BDOM network (standing for behavioral dynamics in operations management). They haven’t just added a list of publications or a bibliography of relevant publications on their website but an archive (including classifications á la content analysis) of publications on google docs – hence one should be able to extend the list. Some (learning) models may be right 
Gyöngyi
PS. Here’s the link to Sterman’s (2002) article claiming that “all models are wrong“.
Whilst the academic debate on how to calculate carbon footprints is a never-ending story and companies are still struggling to see where to reduce their CO2 emissions, there are at least some tools that help visualising the basic idea. Here’s the recipe: Take a product (or a food item), add its parts and raw materials, the location of these, the energy used to produce them, the transportation mode etc. and draw a map of your CO2 emissions. You can change each of the parameters (i.e. what if you suddenly produced a part with say, wind power instead of the general electric grid or what if the location of a supplier was different) and play with the results. You can even browse the maps of others. My favourites are a homemade bacon omelette and the typical laptop computer. What is yours?
Gyöngyi
PS Credits for the link to Niko Solitander and the Economic Geography mailing list. It takes a geographer to visualise a supply chain 
Some may find it disturbing that not everything has a clear-cut solution. Yet the “managers not MBAs” mantra needs critical thinking and the ability to approach a problem from several dimensions – which is finally also appraised by the New York Times that comprised a story about critical thinking at business schools. Less surprisingly, rethinking the MBA was on the agenda of the “Deans Conference” as well. Just when will “leading” business schools stop discussing SCM teaching cases with a sole solution in mind?
Gyöngyi
PS. Thx to Jonathan Schroeder for the link to the NYTimes article.
