• Name: Prof. Herbert J. Bernstein
• Office: KSC 121, Lab: KSC 020
• Phone: +1-631-244-3035
• Email:

Office Hours:

• by appointment; and
• Tuesday, Thursday 12:30 pm -- 2:00 pm in KSC 020 at the Oakdale campus
• Wednesday 12:30 pm -- 1:30 pm in KSC 020 at the Oakdale campus
• By appointment on Tuesday, 8:15 pm -- 8:45 pm in B208, Wednesday 10:15 pm -- 10:45 pm in A203 at the Brookhaven Campus;

Note that, in general, Dr. Bernstein will be at the Oakdale campus on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and at the Brookhaven Campus on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Meetings at the Brookhaven campus are by appointment only. If no students are scheduled by 8:20 pm on any given Tuesday evening or by 10:20 pm on any given Wednesday evening, those hours will be cancelled. If at all possible, please use email to schedule meetings in advance to avoid conflicts with other students and other obligations of the instructor.

For more information see http://www.bernstein-plus-sons.com/.dowling/HJB_Contact_Info.html.

Required Texts:

• Fred Rispoli, Steve Cosares, Paul Abramson, "Quantitative Models for Management" ISBN-13: 9780972407908.

Students are responsible for all assigned readings even if the material is not discussed in class. Students are advised to bring the required texts to every meeting of the class to help them in classroom discussions and in answering the daily quiz questions.

Recommended Texts:

• Richard Bronson, "Schaum's Outline of Operations Research", McGraw-Hill, 2 edition (July 1, 1997), ISBN-13: 9780070080201
• James Gips, "Mastering Excel 2007, A Problem-Solving Approach", Pearson Custom Publishing; 1 edition (August 11, 2007), ISBN-10: 0536391270, ISBN-13: 978-0536391278.

Required Materials

• Avery 43462 hard-bound composition book, stitched, 10 x 7 7/8. A hard bound laboratory notebook. An inexpensive black-and-white covered composition book will suffice but it must be bound (not looseleaf).

  Keeping clear written records is an important part of working in any scientific field.

Students are expected to have their text books no later than the second week of class.

Attendance:

This class meets only once per week. Absence from any class meeting may cause the student to miss a significant portion of the material of the course. Therefore:

Attendance will be taken at all class meetings. All absences must be explained in writing (or via email). Students who miss one or more lectures must meet with the instructor to review their progress in the course. A midterm warning will be issued for any student who misses one or more lectures before the midterm, and such students will be advised to withdraw. Grades will be reduced for unexcused absences (see grading policy, below).

Arriving late disrupts the class for other students. To encourage and reward timely arrival, there will be a short quiz at the start of each class meeting. There will be no makeups for these quizzes.

Grading Policy:

• Classroom attendance and participation: 15%
• Notebook: 15%
• Daily quizzes: 15%
• Assignments: 20%
• Comprehensive Final: 35%

All students will be required to participate actively in classroom discussions and to lead discussions related to the assignments. All students will be required to communicate with the instructor via email, and many assignments will require work to be submitted via email.

As noted above students will be given daily brief quizzes. Quizzes will often be based on the assigned readings, asking material that has not yet been discussed in class. This is intended to encourage students to do the assigned readings. Even though the quizzes are open-book quizzes, you are more likely to be able to find the answers if you have done the readings before coming to class. There will be no makeups for these quizzes.

Every student will be required to maintain a contemporaneous hardbound notebook recording all significant activities related to this course. The notebook should record the major topics discussed, questions about the subject matter of the course and the answers when they are found, and all activites related to the course project (see below). The instructor will borrow the notebooks several times during the semester and grade them for thoroughness, clarity and relevance to the course. Only the portions of the notebook that are dated, written in the student's own hand and on the permanent pages of the notebook will be considered in the grading.

In order to do the work for the course, you must become proficient in working with spreadsheets. In class we will use Micrsoft Excel. You may do assignments either with Excel or with Open Office Calc. You may find the recommended reading helpful in working with spreadsheets. You may find workshops at the Instructional Resource Center helpful. It is highly recommended that you work together on the mechanics of using spreadsheets and in understanding the assigned problems, but it is important and required that each student construct their own solution to each spreadsheet problem.

Students must do the assignments steadily throughout the semester, not just to show that they know the material, but to give them the practice they need to learn the material well. Therefore, students are encouraged to submit all assignments on time. If an assignment is submitted one week late there will be a 50% penalty for that assignment. No more than three late assignments will be accepted during the semester. No assignments will be accepted that are two or more weeks late. There will not be an in-class midterm exam. The mid-term evaluation will be based on classroom attendance and participation, the notebook, assignments and quizzes.

A closed-book final will be given. For the final you will be permitted to bring in one 2-page set of notes. Each page must be on 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch paper written large enough that the instructor can read the page without a magnifying glass. The notes you bring will have to be approved by the instructor no later than the week before the final exam.

Course Syllabus

• Administrative matters.
  • Dowling student accounts.
  • Diagnostic Quiz.
• Overview of the course.
  • Review of concepts from Proability Theory
• Access to spreadsheet programs you will need
• Modeling and Decision Making
  • Making Decisions
  • Breakeven Analysis
  • Risk Analysis
  • Organizing models in spreadsheets
• Payoff tables
  • Choosing among alternatives
• Simulations
  • Monte Carlo Simulation
  • Risk Analysis Simulations
    • Notes on Simulation
  • Production and Scheduling
• Linear Programming
  • Formulating the problem
  • Graphical Methods
  • The Simplex Method
  • Using Linear Programming

Course Objectives

• To understand the concepts of making business decisions.
• To understand the distinction between business systems and models of business systems
• To understand the distinction between quantitative and qualitative decision making.
• To understand to role of uncertainty in quantitative decision making.
• To understand the major mathematical techniques used in quantitative decision making.

There will be an ungraded diagnostic quiz given during the first lecture to help students understand how well prepared they are for the work in this course.

Assignments

Please consult the course assignments page frequently, but the basic assignment that applies at all times is to read every page of the text and to do every problem, even though not all problems will be required to be submitted.

Dowling Computer Club

If you're interested in joining with your fellow students in developing and maintaining a web site, or pursuing your exploration of computer hardware or software, you might want to consider joining the Dowling Computer Club. Just follow the link for further details:

Dowling College Computer Club Web Site