Supercourse Newsletter - April 20, 2002
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Dear Friends,
A Latoya Jackson May 29th challenge:
It was quite fascinating, not only was Latoya Jackson born on May 29,
but so was Ron LaPorte and 9 others from the Supercourse Faculty. We
11 are very tough epidemiologists and rap singers. The May 29ers
challenge those people born on Aug. 3, Sept 5, Jan. 30 and all other
days. With 11 people, we could challenge you to a football game, or
even worse, American Football. Instead we challenge you all to a game
of "PowerPoint lectures". It is time that you join your astrological
cohorts and compete in the game of PowerPoint. We will reach 53 by 53
by 29 to show the power of our birth date. We personally feel that
there is something about those people born on May 29th
Future:
The initial development of the Supercourse has been in phases. The
first was to build a global health network of people interested in
prevention. This has advanced very rapidly with over 9,000 people.
The second was to extract lectures from you, this too has evolved
very quickly. We are now planning for the next few stages, and we
would very much appreciate your comments:
* Information Unit - Slides:
We see in the future that we will have a Google type search engine in
the Supercourse. You will be able to search say on the term diabetes
epidemiology, and all the SLIDES with diabetes epidemiology will drop
down into a slide sorter on your disc. At the time that it drops
down, each slide will be "branded" with the name of the person who
constructed the lecture, his/her affiliation, and the logo of the Su-
percourse. By making the slide the "atom" this allows much more
flexibility when you are constructing a lecture. You can also add
slides of your own.
* Added information:
On each slide we plan to put a button for additional information.
Thus if you are looking at a slide describing the incidence of Cancer
in Panama, a person reading this could tack on a scientific comment
about that slide, a question, or even another slide. In this manner,
we can build on each slide, and the comments will provide additional
information. It would also be possible to put data on the slides for
students to be able to use.
* Teachers Manual:
We want to establish a teacher's manual where the people using the
lectures can talk with each other, and potentially talk with the au-
thor of the lecture. This will allow people to meet with a "John
Last", or "Henry Backburn".
* Translation:
We are very fortunate that there is considerable interest in trans-
lating the Supercourse into other languages. Marcio Ulises Estrada
Paneque from Cuba has volunteered to translate the Supercourse into
Spanish. He already has done a large number of lectures. A Palestin-
ian Abed Husseini, and Egyptian, Rania Saad, have started to trans-
late the course into Arabic. We plan to put these into the mirrored
servers in Cuba and Egypt for everyone to access.
* Interface with the Web:
The number of web lectures is increasing very rapidly. Do a Google
search on prevention and .ppt and you will find 703 lectures. A
search on .ppt reveals over 800,000 lectures. We would like to inter-
face what we are doing with lectures that are already out there. Thus
if you searched on diabetes epidemiology, you would pull out the
slides from our Supercourse, but you would also jump out into a slide
"ring" to search all the slides. Soon all lectures will be on the web
from all universities. We are at the cutting edge, and it will be ex-
citing to link our work with what else is taking place on the web.
* The World:
Kiran has found on the Community of Science web site there are
350,000 scientists listed worldwide. We can reach all of them, and
potentially can reach the "tipping point" so that the Supercourse
model can cut across all of science. Instead of 700 lectures, there
could be 100,000, and we in prevention started this. We hope that
this can take off, as it has in our discipline. We plan that in 5
years everyone in science will be using this global resource, and no
one will remember that we started it. If the Supercourse PowerPoint
lecture-sharing model becomes universal, and we are forgotten...we
have succeeded as the system has been changed. There is an excellent
book called the "Tipping Point". You might want to read it; on the
web there also are nice overviews of the concept of a tipping point.
Wouldn't it be fantastic if we were forgotten, and every lecture is
put up on the web? But we in prevention will know that we started and
pushed it over the tipping point.
We would very much appreciate if you could give us comments and sug-
gestions as to where you think we should be heading in the future.
There are many exciting directions we can head.
The blossoms are coming out in Pittsburgh. If you come visit, we may
take you to Frank Lloyd Wright's house, Falling Water. It is a beau-
tiful house that has been built over a small waterfall. We usually
have 2-3 people a month from overseas coming to visit. We will also
take you to have a Rolling Rock beer, a Chili Dog, and everyone's fa-
vorite Buffalo Chicken Wings. (Buffalo Chicken wings were invented in
a bar in Buffalo NY, they are chicken wings that are basted in a very
spicy hot sauce, and then are fried). The wings are DELICIOUS!!!!
Best Regards from Supercourse Pittsburgh.
Ron, Akira, Faina, Eun Ryoung, Eugene, Mita, Rania, Abed, Julia,
Beatriz, Fan, Luiza, Tom, Deb, Kiran, Fred
mailto:super3+@pitt.edu
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