AFRO-NETS> Supercourse newsletter, October 16 2003

[Ron LaPorte <super3+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse newsletter, October 16 2003
---------------------------------------
 
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
 
Halloween:
It is close to the time of year when the Supercourse team world 
wide get dressed up as Goblins, Ghosts, Ghouls and Epidemiolo-
gists to go stamp our disease from the far reaches of the world. 
Halloween holds another meaning to us, as it was last Halloween 
when with Helen Restropos lecture for Columbia we leapt over the 
1,000 lecture barrier. A year before that in 2000 at Halloween 
Sherine Shawky from Egypt hurdled the 500 lecture barrier. This 
year, 2003, is no exception??.Eugene told us that we are very 
close to 1,500 lectures. Who will it be? Will the lecture be 
yours from Peru? How about from Moldavia? It could be from Paki-
stan? We do not know. It is what we call the Supercourse lecture 
library. There will be an INCREDIBLE prize, if you win. It may be 
a new Jaguar, or it could be a palace on the Riviera, or a new CD 
with 1,500 lectures on it. Isn?t it about time that you too pro-
vide a lecture?
 
Lecture Reviews: 
Faina and Fan are analyzing the lecture reviews to a much greater 
extent. As we indicated to you, there is no standardized means of 
quality control in lectures. We have a form at the end of every 
lecture for people to complete, and we surprisingly have over 
3,000 reviews. As indicated in the last newsletter, the lectures 
are rated very highly, 4.12/5 for the first 1,000. We are now 
analyzing this more. One way to look at this is to calculate the 
between and within lecture variance, as if our system of quality 
control discriminates lectures then the variance of judgments be-
tween lectures should be great than within. It appears that the F 
ratio is highly significant (contact Faina <fyl1@pitt.edu>, if 
you want specifics). Also, the approach we are taking is very 
similar to that in Amazon.com. Patterns of results are amazingly 
similar to those of Amazon. Faina is in the process of writing 
this up for publication, please send her a note if you would like 
to comment. We would very much like it if you would comment.
 
New lectures: 
Our good friend from Jaipur India, Shiv Mathur, recently contrib-
uted two outstanding lectures on violence against women and ado-
lescent health. Lectures combine excellent background informa-
tion, as well as useful statistics. One of the most important is-
sues raised in the violence lecture is the fact that this problem 
is often overlooked and poorly investigated, especially in the 
developing world. We hope that by sharing this information in the 
Supercourse and women?s health network, we will help to raise 
awareness of this problem world wide. Please, access the Super-
course website to look at the lectures. 
 
Recruitment: 
I have not had a chance to write as I have been assigned the task 
to recruit students into our department of epidemiology. As a 
friend told me, recruitment is as about as enjoyable as poking a 
sharpened pencil in your eye. Well, it started out like this, but 
I started to use the approach we have taken on the Supercourse to 
build a network. However, this network was different as I re-
cruited through faculty that were researchers but not directly in 
public health, e.g. sociology, physics, environmental research, 
nursing, psychology, exercise, nutrition, etc. It is fascinating 
as typically all these faculty members are interested in some de-
gree in health and global health, but they do not work much with 
us, but they should. We have therefore started to mobilize fac-
ulty in various diverse research institutions to recruit them 
into our global health network, and they have been very positive. 
In addition, we are obtaining very good applicants to our depart-
ment of epidemiology.
 
So next time someone says that recruitment is as painful as a 
sharp pencil in an eye, tell them they are wrong. It is more like 
a contact throbbing tooth ache!! We would very much appreciate if 
you could distribute this blurb about our program to students of 
various disciplines in your country. There is a country and west-
ern song by Willy Nelson titled ?Mother?s don?t let your sons 
grow up to be cowboys?. We have changed that to ?Mothers, let 
your children grow up to be global health epidemiologists?
 
Wanted: Trainees
 
Epidemiology, Global Health and the University of Pittsburgh
 
AIDS, Cancer, SARS, Monkey Pox, Smoking and health, the Epidemic 
of Obesity, Bioterrorism. These have been some of the epidemics 
of this young new century. Who investigates these? Who helps pre-
vent these? Epidemiologists. WHO, CDC, PAHO, NIH the World Bank 
all use epidemiologists to track down and stamp out diseases. 
Epidemiologists have been called medical detectives. We sift 
through data like detectives to find the causes of diseases and 
do what ever we can for prevention. In Pittsburgh we are looking 
for top students who are interested in joining our efforts. One 
effort is the global Supercourse, which is a Telepreventive medi-
cine effort of over 10,000 scientists sharing knowledge about 
prevention (http://www.pitt.edu/~super1). Our department is 
large, and one of the most productive. We are interested in hav-
ing you come and train. We want to build a diverse global student 
body, and therefore are looking for top qualified students from 
many different areas, biology, physics, medicine, psychology, 
history, etc. If you are interested in learning more, please 
visit: 
http://www.epidemiology.pitt.edu/
 
If you would like to find out additional information, please 
write to me:
Ronald E. LaPorte, Ph.D.
Director, Disease Monitoring and Telecommunications
WHO Collaborating Center
Professor of Epidemiology
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA USA
mailto:ronlaporte@aol.com
 
Please distribute this information to your friends, you children, 
your grand parents, you Dean, and your MOH?We need to train more 
epidemiologists!! And the world will be a safer place.
 
We wish you a wonderful Halloween, the leaves are very pretty 
here in Pittsburgh this time of year. Some day you will be able 
to visit.
 
Let?s get 1500 lectures by Halloween!!
 
Sincerely yours:
 
Ron, Faina, Mita, Eugene, Akira, Soni, Tomoko, Wendy, Seon-Wok, 
Abed, Rania, Akram, Fan, Sherine, Deb, Tom
mailto:super3+@pitt.edu

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