Supercourse Newsletter - April 12 2002
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Dear Friend,
Astrology, Latoya Jackson, John F. Kennedy and Ron LaPorte:
Isn't remarkable how similar people are who were born on May 29? La-
toya, is the sister of Michael, JFK was a President, and Ron and Epi-
demiologist from Buffalo NY. What an amazing coincidence. It is only
46 days to their birthday...the excitement builds. Latoya is passion-
ate about new lectures, JFK loved sitting at home looking at slides,
and Ron, lives for PowerPoint. What fantastic birthday presents it
will be as the lectures come pouring in....and they are. The goal is
53 at 53 on the 29th!! It really is possible. In the last 12 days, 25
lectures came in. If we keep this pace, by the Celebrated May 29, we
will have received a remarkable 117 lectures. There is really no need
to wrap the lectures you send in to us in Birthday paper. Sending you
lecture inside a new Lexus to Pittsburgh, would be appreciated. Henry
Backburn, one of the fathers of cardiovascular epidemiology will be
submitting a lecture. A goal off 1,000 lectures seemed impossible,
but it is not. Your lectures will teach prevention to the world...
(don't forget by May 29th, send a lecture to Latoya, JFK, and Ron!).
We have heard that Michael Jackson is a little nervous. The new
"Thriller" Supercourse CD may be up for a Grammy award as the best
1,000 lecture CD developed by 9,000 scientists.
Lecture Preparation:
Sending a lecture to us is easy. If your lectures are in PowerPoint,
and you know how to annotate a lecture, you know how to create a Su-
percourse lecture. It takes about 2 hours, so instead of eating 2
lunches, you could do a Supercourse lecture. The lectures are re-
ceived by Faina Linkov and sent to Eugene Shubnikov who puts them on
the web. How many people saw your best lecture last year? 50? 60? If
you put your lecture on the Supercourse, 50,000 people may see your
lecture next year. Your lecture is the art, and the Supercourse is
the Art Gallery. Two hours is not much time to help educate the world
about prevention.
Supercourse 101 fundamentals:
In the past 3 months we have almost tripled the number of faculty. It
is good to overview some of tenets:
1. PowerPoint: The Lingua Franca of Science is PowerPoint: When we
started this effort PowerPoint was used less than 50% of the time for
presenting, now almost everyone uses it. We were lucky to chose
PowerPoint lectures to share.
2. Target Group: Our primary group for the Supercourse is not the
students of public health and epidemiology. These represent <2% of
students learning about prevention. Instead, the target group of the
98% of the students who are taking public health courses. This is the
18 year old medical student in Manila, the 19 year old dental student
in Moscow, the 21 year old nursing student in Milwaukee, and the 20
year old sociology student in Mexico City. Most of these students
HATE prevention, but they shouldn't. Our lectures will not make these
students expert epidemiologists, but they will help to make them ap-
preciate prevention. There is no question that the public health ma-
jors will benefit from this, but we need especially to reach the stu-
dents who think what we do is dumb, because they want to "save" that
patient in their office.
3. Educate the Teacher: The Supercourse is targeted towards you, the
teacher, you go into the Supercourse and chose the lectures or slides
that you need for your lectures.
4. Global health Network: What we are finding to be most important is
the Supercourse being to pull us together, to work together to tackle
global health problems.
5. Funding: There are no hidden costs to the Supercourse, we are
funded from NIH for another 2 years. We want to establish very cost
effective system that will be sustainable once funding is complete.
6. Speed of Transfer: Akira Sekikawa brilliantly saw that the major
problem of this effort is getting people access to the Supercourse.
If we put the lectures up in PowerPoint format, few people outside
the US could see the lectures, as PowerPoint lectures on the web are
too big. It is like sucking an elephant through a straw to take see
PowerPoint lecture at NIH, in Mali through a 28.8 model. Instead,
Akira thought of bringing these into a gif format, and you could
bring the gif picture into PowerPoint. A second advantage as this ap-
proach is portable to other graphing systems, or PowerPoint 95. We
are planning in the future to have several different formats.
7. Beliefs: The Supercourse faculty all want the Pittsburgh Steeler
football team to win Superbowl (only kidding)
American Cancer Society:
We received a beautiful lecture from John Seffrin, Ph.D., the CEO of
the American Society. We are planning to establish a Cancer Preven-
tion Supercourse. Please let us know if you would like to join this
effort.
Grants and Research:
It would be exciting if we could obtain lectures from all people who
have NIH, ACS, or grants in other countries.
Evaluation of the Supercourse:
Eun Ryoung Sa is developing an excellent system to evaluate the Su-
percourse for her dissertation.
Egypt:
Jan Dorman, Tom Songer, and Ron LaPorte will be meeting with the MOH
of Egypt at the end of June, and to give a training course on Epide-
miology. The Supercourse is growing exceedingly rapidly in Arab coun-
tries. Abed Husseini's Islamic/Arab Supercourse currently has 130
members, and 9 lectures. It is exciting to see this evolve. We will
be able to develop systems to jump over the digital divide.
Training Courses:
Bert Hoffman will be distributing a CD to all members of the epidemi-
ology training course in Rotterdam. He is a good man!!
Spring Time:
It is beautiful in Pittsburgh, buuuut, it is only days away from that
fearful allergy season.
Thank you all so much, our friends, we are doing it!!
Please tell your friends, children, parents, grand parents, and even
your enemies about the SuperCourse.
Best regards,
Ron, Akira, Faina, Eugene, Mita, Julia, Eun ryoung, Abed, Rania,
Beatriz, Fan, Tom, Deb
mailto:super2+@pitt.edu
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