Health care reform has strengthened the link between performance and reimbursement, exemplified by valuebased purchasing and accountable care organizations. This has led to a heightened responsibility for physician leaders to improve physician performance. However, providing actionable assessments of physician outcomes is not as straightforward as it may seem. The physician leader is faced with...

Double barrier options have become popular instruments in derivative markets. Several papers have already analysed double knock-out call and put options using di erent methods. In a recent paper, Geman and Yor (1996) derive expressions for the Laplace transform of the double barrrier option price. However, they have to resort to numerical inversion of the Laplace transform to obtain option pric...

We present an experiment whose purpose is to deene an analytical approach to the prediction of integration costs for COTS products. Our approach consists in deening the speciication of the COTS product as well as the speciication of the context in which we plan to use it by means of formal (relational) speciications, and assessing integration costs by estimating the functional distance between ...

The model of scientific paradigms spreading throughout the community of agents with memory is analyzed using the master equation. The case of two competing ideas is considered for various networks of interactions, including agents placed at Erd˝ os-Rényi graphs or complete graphs. The pace of adopting a new idea by a community is analyzed, along with the distribution of periods after which a ne...

The friendship paradox refers to the sociological observation that, while the people’s assessment of their own popularity is typically self-aggrandizing, in reality they are less popular than their friends. The generalized friendship paradox is the average alter superiority observed empirically in social settings, scientific collaboration networks, as well as online social media. We posit a qua...

When i began writing about class in the mid-1970s, I viewed Marxist and positivist social science as foundationally distinct and incommensurable warring paradigms. I argued that Marxism had distinctive epistemological premises and methodological approaches which were fundamentally opposed to those of mainstream social science. In the intervening period I have rethought the underlying logic of m...

Despite numerous computational advances over the last few decades, molecular dynamics still favors explicit (and thus easily-parallelizable) time integrators for large scale numerical simulation. As a consequence, computational efficiency in solving its typically stiff oscillatory equations of motion is hampered by stringent stability requirements on the time step size. In this paper, we presen...

Using a novel reformulation, we develop a framework to compute approximate resampling data averages analytically. The method avoids multiple retraining of statistical models on the samples. Our approach uses a combination of the replica “trick” of statistical physics and the TAP approach for approximate Bayesian inference. We demonstrate our approach on regression with Gaussian processes. A com...

File prefetching is an eeective technique for improving le access performance. In this paper, we present a le prefetching mechanism that is based on on-line analytic modeling of interesting system events and is transparent to higher levels. The mechanism, incorporated into a client's le cache manager, seeks to build semantic structures, called access trees, that capture the correlations between...