[afro-nets] Supercourse Newsletter, May 8 2004

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

Supercourse Newsletter, May 8 2004
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http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
 
Dear Friends,
 
Nature: 
We are very pleased to publish a short piece in Nature. It is 
exciting to have telepreventive medicine published in such a 
leading journal. Maxine Clark, one of the Editors of Nature has 
been very helpful to us during the past few years. She helped to 
have us provide an invited paper titled e-recruitment. In the 
article we discuss how we were able to recruit with you such a 
large following and a large number of lectures on the web. Our 
approach is basically the open source system used in software 
engineering.
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v428/n6985/full/nj6985-876b_fs.html
 
We think you will like this article. We are seeing the science 
of translation of scientific information requires bringing peo-
ple together and working together. Thanks so much for your help.
 
BMJ: 
The BMJ as usual have been wonderful in helping our fledgling 
organization to get off the ground. They just provided to us 70 
new lectures, bringing our total to 1,770 lecture. The goal of 
2000 is well in sight. Tony Delamothe, Richard Smith, and now 
Gavin Yamey, have helped us from the early 1990s until now. In 
the next week they will be publishing a piece on the Supercourse 
that Gavin has written. It has been very impressive as to how 
well researched this piece has been.
 
Lancet: 
Ali Ardalan, M.D. from Iran and Faina Linkov wrote a very nice 
letter to the editor on doing global distance learning using the 
Supercourse and Telephone. It describes how Ali could teach stu-
dents in Pittsburgh. The Lancet will publish this in a few 
weeks.
 
It has thus been a banner few weeks for publication.
 
e-LBP: 
During the past few weeks I have had several low back pain. A 
good friend Rashid Chotani, is a brilliant researcher and astute 
clinician. He indicated that the cause of my LBP was e-mail. I 
thought that we should write an article on the epidemiology of 
e-mail induced LBP. Clearly there is an epidemic of LBP world 
wide?If Rashid?s hypothesis were correct, it HAS to be e-LBP, 
and internet induced Sciatica.
 
Update - Tornados: 
Mita has everything set up for e-Tornados in Kansas. We have all 
the e-mails of the principals, and they have all been contacted 
several times. We are waiting for Tornados. The movie ?twister? 
was on TV the other night, e-twister is ready to roll. We plan 
to start small in pushing information just into Kansas. Over the 
summer we plan to e-recruit all the emails for principles in 
schools in the US, as the network of schools is a powerful net-
work for prevention.
 
Olympic Supercourse: 
Soni is in the midst of finishing the first draft of the Olympic 
Supercourse of Physical activity and Health. We hope to distrib-
ute this in the next few days. We would love to get your opin-
ion.
 
Congratulations for Beatriz to complete her Ph.D. in Epidemiol-
ogy. She did an outstanding dissertation examining Internet use 
for epidemiologists in Mexico.
 
Best regards from Pittsburgh, Mount Olympus, and Nature,
 
Ron, Faina, Mita, Soni, Eugene, Rashid, Sciatica, Charles, Ra-
nia, Abed, Tom, Deb, Beatriz
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu