From the Chair

Jefferson and Change-Redux “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind…” – Thomas Jefferson, July 12, 1810 Our American health care system is under pressure to change from many directions: the government, the media, the economists, and others. In a recent Surgical Grand Rounds, I discussed my Baker’s Dozen list of key topics: (1) health care spending is flattening out, (2) physicians and hospitals will be paid less for what they do, (3) payers are getting aggressive on cost and quality, (4) hospitals are targets for cost cuts, (5) cost reduction will entail standardization and elimination of variations, (6) waste control will be crucial, (7) current payment systems are mal-aligned with quality, health and wellness improvement, (8) Accountable Care Organizations exist, (9) the 5-50 rule reigns (the sickest 5% of the population consume 50% of the resources), (10) hospital systems will necessarily morph to Total Care systems, (11) physician elements are under transition, (12) physician integration (and leadership) will be crucial, (13) aspirational items for hospital corporate leaders have evolved. We have much to do. The mantras will no longer be – “business as usual” or “increase volume to cover expenses”. The focus needs to be on individual health, wellness and population health… We’re working toward a new paradigm – “Livewell Jefferson” – a cooperative venture of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Thomas Jefferson University, Jefferson Medical College, the Jefferson Women’s Board, Jefferson Health System and our communities: eliminate unhealthy cafeteria and vending choices, expand our non-smoking perimeter, increase wellness services, institute a maximum 30-minute meeting rule and mandate daily 30-minute on-the-job treadmill walking, freshen our stairways and label them “vertical exercise corridors”, track BMI quarterly, and work with the city to design and maintain safe, measured walking routes around our campus. We have much to do to effect change! To view Dr. Yeo’s recent mini-Grand Rounds lecture on this topic visit: www.jefferson.edu/surgerylecture

Towards Evidence-Based Sustainable Communities: Report on Survey of Urban Sustainability Centers in U.S. Universities

Provides an overview of characteristics of urban sustainability research centers, including organizational structure, personnel capacity, finances, current objectives, and recent research topics. Considers policy implications

Resource Letter NSST-1: The Nature and Status of String Theory

This Resource Letter provides a guide to some of the the introductory and review literature in string theory. It is in no way complete, though it is intended to be of use to students at several levels. Owing to the nature of the subject, even much of the introductory literature is quite technical by the standards of many Resource Letters, requiring prior knowledge of quantum field theory and general relativity. This Resource Letter is thus somewhat different from others. The first part describes a few more popular accounts of string theory, which are primarily addressed to the general public, but those with an understanding of basic physics will be able to read them more deeply and so obtain a useful rough orientation to the field. The second part describes resources that are available at the advanced undergraduate level, and the balance describes string resources for more advanced students. The latter range from general introductions to recent review articles on branes and black holes, gauge/gravity duality, string field theory, non-commutative geometry, non-BPS branes, tachyon condensation, phenomenology, brane worlds, orbifolds, Calabi-Yau manifolds, and holography.Comment: 13 pages, reference corrected Thanks to the community for many suggestion

Master’s Program in Money and Finance (MMF)

The Master’s program in Money and Finance (MMF) is an innovative joint venture of the Department of Money and Macroeconomics and of the Department of Finance, both located in the new House of Finance. The program offers promising students from all over the world an intellectually stimulating and challenging setting in which to prepare for their professional careers in central banking, commercial banking, insurance and other financial services. By being located in Frankfurt, one of the world's leading financial centers and the only city in the world with two central banks (the ECB and the German Bundesbank), it offers unique opportunities for interaction with practitioners. The program is taught exclusively in English; knowledge of German is not required for admission to, or completion of the program. It has been designed with a view to establishing itself as a leading Masters program integrating studies in monetary economics, macroeconomics and finance and a major gateway to high-profile jobs in the banking and financial sector

Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends

Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and 'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data, enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013 (American Society for Information Science and Technology

Exploiting Synergy Between Ontologies and Recommender Systems

Recommender systems learn about user preferences over time, automatically finding things of similar interest. This reduces the burden of creating explicit queries. Recommender systems do, however, suffer from cold-start problems where no initial information is available early on upon which to base recommendations. Semantic knowledge structures, such as ontologies, can provide valuable domain knowledge and user information. However, acquiring such knowledge and keeping it up to date is not a trivial task and user interests are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain. This paper investigates the synergy between a web-based research paper recommender system and an ontology containing information automatically extracted from departmental databases available on the web. The ontology is used to address the recommender systems cold-start problem. The recommender system addresses the ontology's interest-acquisition problem. An empirical evaluation of this approach is conducted and the performance of the integrated systems measured

An investigation of cognitive skills and topics development within finance programmes: a UK perspective

Finance is an important subject in many accountancy and other undergraduate programmes. The technical competencies in this area are covered under the QAA benchmark in finance (2007). However, the benchmark does not rigidly lay down the curriculum and competencies it expects students to acquire; universities are free to teach the subject from a variety of perspectives. In this paper the subject specific knowledge and skills emphasised in finance subjects in accounting undergraduate programmes in the UK are examined. Learning outcomes from module handbooks/unit specifications from ten universities in the UK are used to gauge and analyse what cognitive skills and topics are emphasised. This research finds that universites should include higher level cognitive skills in order to meet the demands of the changing environment. It is also evident that funding and sources of capital is the most important topic in the curriculum

Publication analysis of the contact lens field: What are the current topics of interest?

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