Lehigh IE rank drops 2 in 2007

Based on the latest US News, the rank of Lehigh IE drops to 15 from 13 this year. USC and NCSU go above Lehigh this year.

We need more professors!!

What does research do on airline industry

2007 airline quality rating comes out today. There are two major factors, I guess research field care about. One is on time performance which is related to scheduling problem. The other is deny rate which is related to RM.
http://www.eyewitnessnewstv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6312644
On time performance becomes worse

On-time performance, the report said, worsened last year, with 75.5 percent of
flights arriving on time, compared with 77.3 percent in 2005. JetBlue Airways
took a hit in February, when passengers on 10 planes spent from five hours to 10
1/2 hours sitting on runways at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New
York because of icy weather and gate congestion. It took days for the airline to
recover from the February storm and resume normal operations. It led JetBlue to
establish a customer bill of rights promising vouchers to passengers who
experience delays.

Deny rate (maybe more and more RM is adopted)

The study found an increase in the number of passengers bumped or denied
boarding because of oversold flights -- 1.01 denied boardings per 10,000
passengers last year, compared with 0.89 per 10,000 in 2005. JetBlue had the
lowest rate of bumped passengers; Atlantic Southeast the highest.

What should be my investment strategy?

Recently, due to my wife work, I get a chance to learn those retirement plans. So how should I manage the investment? My fundamental idea is to combine investment and your future life plan. There might be two big decisions. One is when to buy a house and the other is when to go back to China. The two financial risks associated are housing price and exchange rate. I am not expert in either area. But we still can do something to decrease the risk without too much effort.Generally you want to buy a house at low price and come back to China when dollar is strong. But what if the opposite things happen at the time when your decision is made. So at the current time, I put a certain percentage of money into real estate and international stock market. If hourse price goes high and dollar become weaker when I purchase a house and go back to China, it might be offset by the increase in those two funds. Although I cannot perfect hedge that since I cannot put all the investment into those two sources ( currently since I expect subprime loan would drive the housing price down, I put much less money into real estate fund ), it is still worth to do.