Credibility and the Internet: Queuing Theory

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet!

This was old news about queues back in 1985. Yet it was written up as a journal article, and received coverage as though a new finding in the June 2010 issue of ScienceDaily, an online publication owned by Reuters.

M/M/1 queues, Kendall notation, and models of balking behavior are certainly useful. However, the concepts, and their accuracy as models, were well-established for at least forty years. This is true whether applying queueing theory to modelling the performance of computer hard-drives e.g. random arrival times for seek requests, or to consumer behavior when switching lanes because of long lines at the supermarket checkout.

The Wiley text book, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, was published in 1998.



Earlier editions were published in 1983, and explain in detail the theory and application of the concepts presented in the journal article reviewed by ScienceDaily.

A little more about M/G/1

On Math StackExchange, I noticed a rare inquiry. If you're curious for more about queues, go read my answer to this question, Kendall notation's “General distribution”, what does that mean?

I found this comment endearing:

Oh I thought that this stuff wasn't even used in real life jobs... I thought it was merely theoretical, but seems that I'm wrong!

I'm okay with the G general theory [G as the general case when you just don't know what sort of service time distribution to expect] since I'm not required to study it for now (I'm following an academic course), I just wanted to understand what the G meant and you helped me in that. Do you have any experience with multi-class queues too?

Journal Reference

1. Liao et al. "Optimal staffing policy for queueing systems with cyclic demands." International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2010; 7: 317-332.

Chemical Heritage

This aluminum necklace was on display at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in 2010. A description of the exhibit is still available in a mostly image-free post about Atomic Age jewelry. Peruse additional wonders from the Chemistry and Fashion: Making Modernity exhibit.

Aluminum Necklace circa 1950
 0.75 in x 6.25 in.

No Moore Chemical Heritage

Sadly, CHF was absorbed by the Science History Institute in 2018. The collections can still be viewed in person, at the former location of the CHF Museum on 315 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can still read about the illustrious past of the Chemical Heritage Foundation here. I have (mostly) found new source links for the in line URLs below.

The former CHF publication,
Periodic Tabloid: 
Musings on the Molecular

Interested in the legacy of Gordon E. Moore and his famous observation about the growth of technology? Read the original publication that introduced Moore's Law, Understanding Moore's Law: Four Decades of Innovation, that includes the original article written by Moore in 1966, and observations by Moore and others in 2006 when the book was published by (the now defunct) Chemical Heritage Foundation Press, to commemorate 40 years of Moore's law. The Science History Institute kindly keeps an electronic version of the full text (PDF) available for online readers.

IgNoble to Nobel pipeline?

I first wrote this post in 2010. Andre Geim won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. (Geim is actually a chemist, not a physicist, thus the relevancy here, if one wishes to be fussy; I do.) In the span of ten years, Geim went from winning an IgNoble prize for levitating frogs with magnets to the Nobel Prize for introduction of an extraordinary carbonate, graphene.

During the 2000 IgNoble Prize ceremony, Harvard physics researcher and teacher Roy Glauber was present on the stage with Geim, as a long-time member of the IgNoble committee. Just a few years later, Glauber won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics! It is hardly enough to establish any sort of trend or correlation, but if this sort of overlap continues to occur, it might be something to look into.