Supercourse newsletter, July 26th, 2002
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Dear Friends,
Get by with a little help from our friends.
We are excited to announce that the Beatles are coming together once
again and will give a benefit concert for the Supercourse on Oct. 31,
2002 (Halloween). These and other rock stars will be coming together
to celebrate the Supercourse Sale on that date. This is a sale that
none can miss, you give use one lecture....and....you will get back
1000 lectures. WHAT A DEAL!!! In the next few weeks many of us will
start to think about the beginning of the new term (with a groan...)
As we pull out our lectures, we must think as to what is the best
one. This lecture must be shipped to the Supercourse with all do
haste so that you can get 1000 lectures back. Is there any place in
the world that you can get a deal like this? It seems just like yes-
terday that we only had 500 lectures, now we are aiming towards 1000.
Perhaps you want to add one or two new lectures. We all know what a
pain it is to do a lecture in a new area. Oh...No....I nominate Leu-
kemia as having the most boring epidemiology. A new 1 hour lecture
will take about 15 hours to construct, and usually the first time
that you give it is really dull. When you use a "super-duper" Super-
course lecture you save at least 10 hours in course preparation...For
you to send us your best lecture, it takes about 2 hours to format
it. It seems like it is a very fair deal, you send a lecture which
takes 2 hours to develop, and we save you 20 hours of which you could
go play golf, swim, take naps, or read a prevention journal. Clearly
this will be a revolution. It is time that we move lectures from an
"artisan guild" to mass customization. Please do not slow down as
there is something you can do for our field.
You may ask why the Beatles are interested in helping us. They are
making a deal with the Supercourse, they will help us, if we help
them, as what has been discovered is a Ringoism syndrome, character-
ized by deafness, addictive behavior, bad singing a life expectancy
longer than a gnat, but slightly shorter than a race car driver. The
loci appears to be on the short arm of chromosome 7, and looks a bit
like a drum stick. Yes it is our duty to help to prevent Ringoism.
Only kidding of course, but we have 830 lectures now. We very much
want to have 1000 lectures by Halloween, as these lectures we can put
into a CD and distribute to the world. Nowhere can any man find a
deal like this. I am sure many of you have been thinking of joining.
Now is the time. Please help new teachers, teachers in developing
countries and even us old teachers whose lectures need to be punched
up. We have 95 days before Halloween, if we all work together, then
we can all get 1000 lectures, which will be WONDERFUL. Please do not
let it be, we need 1000. We can all work it out together.
(Do you want to know a secret? We together can work it out!!)
Library of Alexandria Scientific Supercourse:
Things have been moving exceedingly rapidly with the Library of Alex-
andria. Tony Villasenor, formerly of NASA has figured out how we can
share scientific lectures relatively easily. We will be able to do a
search to find say all the lectures on diabetes epidemiology that are
on the web, AND in your hard drive, if you grant permission. We can
then share the files with one another. What is even more exciting is
that in addition to the .ppt files we can do the same thing with
video files. Obviously one needs sufficiently high band width, but it
would be exciting having a John Last teach part of your class, of the
Minister of Health of Japan. We received a very positive message from
the Minister of Health of Egypt who will be providing us a lecture on
the prevention of TB. We have had quite a few who have joined in the
development of the Library of Alexandria Scientific Supercourse.
Bioterrorism:
The first two lectures on the epidemiology of Bioterrorism will
shortly be sent out. The first is the one that many of you commented
upon on Understanding Sept. 11. The second is by Nobel Prize winner
Josh Lederberg on bioterrorism. We will shortly have these lectures
translated into 10 different languages. We plan to send the lectures
to some of you. It would be wonderful if you could see if you could
have these distributed to the classrooms for kindergarten through
12th grade as well as those in Universities. Please feel free to
change the lectures for example many of the examples are US based.
International Epidemiology Association meeting in Montreal:
Akira, Eun Ryoung, Akira and Ron will be attending the IEA meeting in
August in Montreal. They will be joined by John Last in giving a sym-
posium on the Internet. We hope you could attend. We are trying to
hold a small get together so we can meet. In addition, if you are at-
tending, we will be handing out fliers to people so that can get the
CD and join the Supercourse. Please let us know if you could help us
hand them out.
Best regards from Pittsburgh. It is a nice time of year.
Ron, Akira, Faina, Mita, Eun Ryoung, Fan, Mita, Soni, Abed, Deb, Tom
mailto:super2+@pitt.edu
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