AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter, September 11, 2003

[Ron LaPorte <super1+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter, September 11, 2003
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http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
 
Dear Friends,
 
All men by nature desire knowledge.
--Aristotle
 
Paying for Prevention:
A very good friend of ours Nicolas Padilla from Mexico has trans-
lated and provided many lectures to the Supercourse. His last 
message indicated that he found that in his university the stu-
dents would pay 50% more for courses where the Supercourse was 
used, compared to where it was not. It thus pays to use the Su-
percourse. Many of us have dreamed of the day that prevention 
lectures would be in such high demand. Isn?t that fantastic!!
Surfing with Cerf:
 
Vint Cerf is my idol. He is a boldly creative person who is will-
ing to take chances. He typifies the concept of high risk and 
high gain. Vint was the person who set the ground work for the 
Internet by developing the initial protocols, and pushing people 
to use these protocols. A few years ago he taught in my class and 
the students were spell bound. I had a chance to meet with him 
again, and it was wonderful. Our main discussion was based upon 
agriculture:
 
Farming and nutrition world wide are more advanced than preven-
tion. However, they also are very similar, and the best farmers 
practice the most preventive actions. We are discussing how to 
build a partnership between agriculture and health, and would 
love to have you join in. A major difficult of the internet is 
that it reaches only 5% of the world. We are discussing how to 
reach the last mile for agricultural knowledge for farmers, and 
prevention for the community. One possibility would be to build a 
new profession of ?Info-brokers?, these are individuals who work 
to gather the questions in the communities on health and agricul-
ture then the go to the Internet station to retrieve the informa-
tion, and then the knowledge is taken back to the communities. We 
would love to have your input.
 
Eric Noji, M.D. 
We also met with Eric Noji, and served on a review committee for 
disaster information. Eric was the head of disaster efforts at 
CDC and WHO. There seems to be a lot of interest in our recent 
concepts of Just-in-Time networks and Just-in-Time lectures. JIT 
networks have been in the news lately with the concept of ?smart 
mobs?, or ?flash mobs?. The idea is that by rapidly trolling the 
internet for people with certain technical skills we can rapidly 
identify those needed in a disaster. With this is also the con-
cept of Disaster Dating. Disaster dating represents a web site 
similar in appearance to a Date web site, but instead of a de-
scription of one?s potential date, there is a description of that 
person?s expertise. Eric indicated that in a disaster there is 
typically not enough prevention and public health experts. There-
fore, people like us who are in the areas of cardiovascular epi-
demiology, statistics, health services, etc. are called in. Our 
network is ideal for this. Sadly we have just heard of flooding 
in Pakistan and Mexico, we can rapidly build a smart mob to help 
world wide, and obtain the ?ground truth? based upon the 60 or so 
members we have in Mexico.
 
Ratings: 
We are now in the process of the beginning analysis of the rat-
ings of the Supercourse. We have about 2,500 ratings so far on 
the 1,500 lectures. We will be building something like Ama-
zon.com, or e-bay rating systems for quality control. We plan to 
establish this approach to establish a new approach of Statisti-
cal Quality control for lectures on the web. Seok-won is also 
working with Wendy to build a search engine to go outside of the 
Supercourse to identify other lectures and slides, and to collect 
ratings on each lecture.
 
Sept. 11: 
Today is September 11 in the US. It a day of remembering as it 
was a shock to all. The one wonderful aspect of Sept. 11 for us 
was the 100s of people e-mailing to us from Arab countries, Latin 
America, Israel, England, Russia, China, India, Cuba. It was an 
extraordinarily sad day, but through your notes, we felt that 
there was hope, and we still do.
 
Sept. 19: 
If you do something for Hippocrates Birthday, please let us know.
 
When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at 
the beginning of what you should sense.
--Kahlil Gibran
 
Best regards from Ron, Mita, Faina, Eugene, Akira, Sunita, To-
moko, Seok-Won, EunRyoung, Wendy, Rania, Abed, Tom, Deb
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu

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