Supercourse Newsletter, February 27, 2005
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The butterfly counts not months but minutes.
But that is enough. - Tagore
Friends:
We all want our time to be enough, to do good. Sharing on the
Supercourse allows this to happen.
Slam Bang: New lecture total
Eugene just told us that we crushed through the 2,100 barrier,
and now have 2,128 lectures. Once again this is the largest col-
lection of prevention lectures in existence. It is fantastic to
see it grow, and grow, and grow... it is difficult to keep up.
The lectures are coming in at the speed of light.
Paksitan Workshop:
We are still receiving wonderful, positive feedback from our
training course in Pakistan. There is little question as to the
need. Since the workshop we have had at least 5 other groups who
want to establish a research, research design and statistics
work shop. These include 2 groups in India, Tanzania, Sri Lanka,
and Cameron. There were several others. We need more of these
workshops around the world.
Please contact Khawar Kazmi at <khawar.kazmi@aku.edu> to find
out about the logistics of developing a program like this. Kha-
war was remarkable in his ability to raise funding. In develop-
ing countries it costs US$ 30-40,000 for a nine day course.
Typically this is held at a University. The faculty donate their
time but receive full travel expenses. The students pay for
their travel, but their room and board is paid. In this manner
everyone gives a little bit. Professor Mohan from Madras sees
this as a means to improve training across developing countries.
We see that we can establish these work shops, with the Super-
course as a means to train 1,000s of young scientists in the
area of prevention and public health.
It is impossible for a small number of scientists to go to all
the courses. We will need to develop a core of teaching faculty
world wide so that many have the opportunity to teach at these
courses.
References:
During the past week I received 3 requests to write a letter of
recommendation for people, for promotion to professor, or a job,
and for training in the US. It was an honor to do this. My cri-
teria for writing a recommendation are that an individual needs
to have a lecture in the Supercourse, and the position/training
slot involves at least some research in the areas of public
health. I will not write letters for people who want to become a
rich plastic surgeon in Hollywood (or even Bollywood!! Or Lolly-
wood). If your plans include epidemiology and public health, it
would be very happy to help you out.
Yang Ze:
Yang Ze is my Chinese brother in Beijing. Peter Bennett, Jan,
Yang and I are just submitting a grant on the epidemiology of
Childhood Diabetes in China. It is a rather neat grant. We will
monitor the incidence in over 26 million children. We are also
collecting several swimming pools worth of pee in Shanghai to
find out how prevalent Type 2 diabetes is. In addition, we are
testing a cool hypothesis, that the increased prevalence of Type
2 diabetes is due to the "little emperor syndrome". The Little
emperor syndrome is partially due to the one child policy, also
the increased longevity where now 4 grandparents are often alive
in the family, and the increases SES. The children are like foie
gras. (foie gras is when you force feed geese in France to make
their livers big)... here in a way the grandparents walk about
with calories in their pockets, yelling at their grandchildren
"Eat, Eat, Eat" producing "roly-poly" kids. If you would like a
copy of the grant, please send a note mailto:ronlaporte@aol.com
Whenever our life is stirred by truth, it expresses energy and
comes to be filled, as it were, with a creative ardor. This con-
sciousness of the creative urge is evidence of the force of
truth on our mind. - Tagore
We must push our creativity to change the world.
If you have any other great philosopher/ scientists/ epidemiolo-
gist that you love, please send my the URL as we would like to
read them.
Lecture of the week:
Stephen Waring from the University of Texas School of Public
Health gave us a beautiful lecture on public health response
following natural disasters:
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture/lec18941/001.htm
Public health provides critical services to support clinical
care activities in disasters and other complex emergency situa-
tions. This series is a timely review of issues relevant to
preparation, response, and successful completion of the chal-
lenging missions associated with public health disaster relief.
This lecture is a perfect teaching and educational tool for any-
body interested in disaster mitigation and just in time knowl-
edge.
Best regards from the Pittsburgh. It has been snowing with 40
Turkeys and 15 deer in the year, with Benson going nuts in the
house.
Sincerely yours,
Ron, Khawar, Soni, Faina, Mita, Eugene, Samar, Ali, Tagore,
Julia, Tom
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu