Supercourse Newsletter, August 23, 2001
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Supercourse: http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
Dear Friend,
CD Distribution:
The last few weeks have been very exciting. It appears that the dis-
tribution approach will work out very well. We already distributed
almost 500 CDs worldwide. The US State department is to distribute
the CDs throughout the Former Soviet Union as well. It appears that
in the next few weeks many people will have access to the Supercourse
for use in their classrooms. As indicated before, this number could
approach 100,000, which would be much greater than all the students
in public health worldwide! Wow, that is internationa.
We are now approaching the World Bank and WHO to see if we can
distribute the CDs through the library systems of the world. Dr
Bennett-Brandling, and Sir George Alleyne from PAHO were very kind in
helping us make contacts at the WHO library system. We would
appreciate if you could help to identify other large organizations or
people who might be interested in distributing the CDs. Genro Ochi in
Japan had a brilliant idea. He has a global group involved with
Disasters. He is about to send to each of them a CD concerned with
their society, and he plans to copy the Supercourse onto the CD. The
Supercourse only fills up <20% of a CD. If you are to send out a CD,
or know of someone who is, please include the Supercourse course as
part of it. Several others indicated that they would copy the
Supercourse onto CDs they are distributing in their classroom. Some
of you are approaching different NGOs and societies for distribution
as well. We think that everyone should have a little Supercourse in
their lives.
In many universities a Semester begins in September. Wouldn't it be a
great gift if all students (and faculty) were to receive the Super-
course from you? Please tell us the various ways you are distributing
the Supercourse so we can tell others.
Translation:
Eugene Shubnikov from Siberia is interested in having the Supercourse
translated into Russian. He has gathered a group to make this happen.
We have had numerous others wanting the course in Spanish, Portu-
guese, and many other languages. It would be great to think of a sys-
tem of how this could be done. Many people have expressed an interest
in being willing to translate. For example, there are over 1,000 peo-
ple who speak Spanish, and about 300 indicated they would translate.
Abed Husseini has developed a system where his students have trans-
lated some of the lectures into Arabic, and they get their names on
the lecture as well as the Supercourse listing of translators. We do
not have the capacity to do this in Pittsburgh. Potentially other
centers could coordinate the translation efforts into Spanish, Rus-
sian, Greek, etc. should there be the interest. Thus you could be the
Supercourse Translating Center for Cantonese, Polish, or Turkish. We
could help by writing to help you obtain funding, as well as helping
to set up a mirrored server at your institution. We can also desig-
nate you as the "Portuguese Translation Center for the Supercourse".
We would very much like your ideas about translating the Supercourse.
Nice Pictures:
Some of you have asked to see what we look like. Our pictures can be
found by going to the Supercourse and clicking on the developers'
page. We have a very international group of people working on the Su-
percourse as you will see here in Pittsburgh and Siberia. As we have
now shown you what we look like, it will be wonderful if you could
send us a picture of you so that we and the other members of the Su-
percourse family can make "face contact" with you. Please e-mail your
picture to <super3@pitt.edu>.
NIH Grant:
We have written the first draft of a NIH grant which is to be submit-
ted for Oct. 1, 2001. We have put this on the web at:
http://www.pitt.edu/~super2/GRANT2/
for you to examine. To our knowledge a few years ago we were the
first to put an NIH grant on the web for all to view. Here we are to
submit again. Akira in fact published a paper in the Lancet about
Grants on the Web. Please feel free to use parts of the grant if you
are submitting for funding in your own country. We will target 3 ar-
eas. The first will be to establish Supercourses in the areas of Sta-
tistics, Diabetes, Physical Activity and Global Minority health/or
global health research. These areas were chosen as they are underrep-
resented in curriculum worldwide. If you can think of other areas
that we might be able to establish, please let us know. Also, we have
interests in these areas. The second area is to improve the interac-
tivity of the Supercourse by adding data. Below represents a descrip-
tion of the approach we are considering taking for incorporating data
analysis interactivity. We would love to have your feedback. We are
very pleased that so many researchers have already agreed to provide
their data sets. We hope to obtain 20 data sets from across the
world. We see that in the future many more people will include their
data so that others can learn how to do research, not only from the
data, but your experiences. Please consider lending to the Super-
course your data so that the students of the world can learn from it.
This is from the grant, please comment if you have a chance.
Specific Aim II
The enclosed table lists the data sets that have been made available
to us. We will establish Supercourse Lectures to overview the topic.
Another lecture will describe the specific project, and to provide
opportunities to analyze the data. Let us present one example from
the work we have done. Our research has been in the area of Type I
diabetes where we have set a global standard for registries. In the
mid 1980s we became a WHO Collaborating center for Registries, and
the in 1990, we started the WHO Multinational Project for Childhood
diabetes. To our knowledge our registration system is the only one to
incorporate a standardized approach to the assessment of undercount
using capture recapture, and a means to adjust the data for under-
count. No study is published in the area without capture recapture.
In addition, the analyses have ranged from simple descriptive statis-
tics such as cross tabs, and 95% CI, to the complex using age-period-
cohort analysis and time series analysis.
Our approach will be to first create a lecture on the epidemiology of
Type I diabetes, which we have already done. A second lecture will be
describe the research in Pittsburgh and the WHO Multinational pro-
ject, how it developed, why we got excited and involved with it, and
how it grew.
There would be a lecture specific to the data set, describing the
data set. We would also pull into the teaching, the lectures on the
use of computers (e.g. SPSS, Microsoft based statistical analysis and
EPI Inf), and on statistical lectures. We are using 3 approaches to
software because of cost. In the poorest areas in the world, the cost
of SPSS and possibly even Microsoft Office, may be too dear, and thus
people use Epi Info. We want to maximize the access to the software
by making our approach compatible to the 3 major forms of analysis.
In the Statistics series we would have lectures on incidence rates,
age-period-cohort analysis, etc.
The students would thus be taught from each of these lectures, and
would interact with their instructor. Finally, there would be an
"Internet work book lecture" where specific, and important questions
of the data would be asked of the students, with cues as to how to
analyze the data. There will be a workbook for the faculty members
with the correct answers as well.
We will also develop advanced lectures such as how to analyze HLA
data, or Physical activity data, depending upon the data sets we ac-
quire.
--
Best regards from Pittsburgh. The last newsletter was based on an
"infomercial" by a company named "Ronco". An Infomercial is a 30 min-
ute commercial. The head of the company is Ron Popeil, who invented
the Veg-0-Matic, and the "pocket fisherman" among other things. He is
an amazing inventor/salesperson. The Pocket fisherman is a fishing
pole about .25 meters long, that you put in your pocket should you
ever feel like fishing in the Ganges River, Lake Erie, or the Volga,
and you just happened to have your fishing pole. He also invented the
classic "head paint" for baldness. Say you are getting a bald
spot...why not just paint your skin brown? As a result of the news-
letter, one of us has been started to be called the Ron Popeil of
Epidemiology!!! If you ever want to find out about this classic
American salesman (and we are not sure why you would want to) you can
find him at http://www.ronco.com ...(this is in noooo way an endorse-
ment)...But we can learn from Ron as to how to distribute CDs!!
Good luck to everyone if you are beginning the semester, hello spring
for Argentina, hello Fall for Siberia.
Best regards from Pittsburgh,
Ron, Akira, Eun Ryoung, Benjamin, Mita, Faina, Eugene, Fan, Grace,
Abed, Tom, Yue Fang, Deb
mailto:super3+@pitt.edu
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