With the rise in popularity of social media and e-commerce platforms, "discrete math" is at the heart of our online experiences, playing a front-end role in the recommendation of what to click, watch, or buy, or who to follow or friend, as well as a back-end role in data storage, access, and transfer. This thesis focuses on two such…

Contributes to a better understanding of operations research (OR) as it can be applied in educational research and planning. Following definitions of OR and educational planning, a brief overview of a general decision model used in OR studies is presented. (Author/DN)

Most decision problems are those in which a choice among multiple-objective alternatives must be made. The central difficulty of such decision problems lies in finding single decision criteria that combine the decisionmaker's objectives and interests in an acceptable way. In this paper, a general procedure for the construction of such single…

As part of a project designed to construct a mathematical model of the operation of an academic library, a research team determined the usefulness of a quantitative approach to making decisions about the number of copies of each item that a university library should provide. Using the reserve collection of the University of Lancaster Library as a…

The true state of the system described here is characterized by a probability vector. At each stage of the system an action must be chosen from a finite set of actions. Each possible action yields an expected reward, transforms the system to a new state in accordance with a Markov transition matrix, and yields an observable outcome. The problem of…

Presents an activity to analyze the data from the Challenger explosion to help students understand the critical role of statistics in decision making and the importance of considering all available data. (MKR)

Describes the model for decision making used in inferential statistics and real-world applications that parallel the statistical model. Discusses two activities that ask students to write about a personal decision-making experience and create a mock trial in which the class makes the decision of guilt or innocence. (MDH)

Proceedings of the 1980 annual forum of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) on the topics of meeting the challenges of the eighties by redirecting resources for renewal are presented. Contents include the following addresses: "Planning: An Adaptive Process," by Barbara S. Uehling; "Catastrophe Models in…

The authors describe an extension that has been made to and subsequently incorporated into the system known as Teacher Cost Models. This approach -- a dollar flow analysis -- identifies and quantifies the factors that contribute to dollar changes in the ON GRID teacher wage-bill from one year to the next. The methodology is applicable at both the…