Supercourse Newsletter, November 19, 2002
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The Supercourse is Loooooove, baby!
It is exiting times. We thought that we have discovered all the won-
derful uses of the Supercourse, but alas, this is not true. The Su-
percourse can bring LOVE. Think of it, we who are epidemiologists or
involved in prevention are a strange lot. We go around talking the
language of prevention, Odds Ratios, Primary Prevention, Risk Fac-
tors, Life Tables. Who - oh who - could fall in love with us? We
speak a strange language. Who would be interested in our mission to
save the world? Who would love our whispering in each others ear
about death rates, incidence density, or the cooing about the poetry
of case-control studies? Well, yes, it is hard for loves of our life
to understand our passion of prevention. Today, we found the answer
to the problem of finding a soul mate - the Supercourse matchmaker. A
good friend of ours Latin America just contacted us and indicated
that someone she met through the Supercourse told her that he loved
her. Isn't that beautiful? It is fantastic as they are both extremely
nice people. This is the second 2 X 2 relationship of the Super-
course. The implications are enormous. It is time for you to find the
epidemiologist of your dreams through the Supercourse!! The Super-
course love story!
One of us in Pittsburgh (ron), did in fact marry an epidemiologist
(jan). It is quite nice to have some who you can talk about preven-
tion. Having two epidemiologists marry can help to propagate our spe-
cies. In the US there has been a television program called How to
marry a Millionaire. We need a Supercourse Lecture on How to marry an
Epidemiologist. (Some would turn this around to Why marry an epidemi-
ologist?)
It is great the Supercourse is bringing us together in ways that we
could not imagine. The reality is that all the people on the Super-
course are pretty nice.
Only kidding of course, but it is a good feeling.
Can You Distribute CDs in your country?
We are trying to cut down the enormous cost of mailing the CDs. We
will be burning 9,000 next week. We were wondering if you might con-
sider distributing the CDs to the Supercourse members in your coun-
try. We would express mail to you the CDs, along with the mailing ad-
dress stickers. All you would need to do is to put these into enve-
lopes and distribute these to those in your country. We would, of
course, give you a few extra to distribute to your friends. This
would save us a lot. We already have one volunteer from Pakistan who
will be distributing the CDs to those in Pakistan, and hope that
there will be other volunteers.
This is a very expensive proposition for us, and if we could cut down
the postal expenses for say 30% of the CDs, it would be wonderful.
The CD is complete with an incredible 1,038 best lectures of the
world. We are very pleased to also bring to you EpiInfo. Several peo-
ple have indicated that it is quite difficult to download EpiInfo in
their countries because of its size. The people at CDC have been very
nice to us providing a CD so we could copy the information to our CD.
What we hope in the future is that we will be able directly link our
lectures, as well as data sets to EpiInfo so people can have more
hands on-experience.
We set an enormous task a few weeks back, 10,000, 1,000, and 150. We
got very close to 10,000 people in the Supercourse as now there are
9,176. We have 148 countries (or 138 based upon the UN designation)
and 1,038 lectures. I think we all did darn good. We now have repre-
sentation from 75% of the world's countries. It is time that we
should declare ourselves the Global Internet Prevention Network.
Library of Alexandria, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
This week we met with a wonderful person, Herb Elish who directs the
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland
and moved to Pittsburgh when he was a boy. He built an empire of
Steel, and became the richest man in the world in the early 1900s. He
decided to give away all of his money before he died. Sadly, he died
before the Supercourse - But, he started the public library system in
the US, as well as much of the world. He helped to build over 2,800
libraries world wide.
We discussed our efforts with Mr. Elish, and he was interested in the
possibility of collaborating with us and the Library of Alexandria to
build a scientific Supercourse.
We wish you all well, we in Pittsburgh are not quite sure what the
definition sunshine is. We think that our good friends in Kuwait,
Okinawa, Hawaii, Cuba or South Africa might want to send us some sun-
shine. We badly need it as there is green mold on our feet, and small
plants growing out of our ears.
We would very much appreciate any comments or thoughts that you might
have about the CDs. Jan and I decided to have CD ornaments on our
Christmas tree this year, as they do make us feel happy that we know
you. Please feel free to use the CDs for any religion!! They work no
matter what religion you believe in! We thought when we had friends
and neighbors over for a Christmas party, they will be most inter-
ested in having us present to them a Supercourse lecture.
Please take care.
If you would like to comment on this newsletter, please send a note
to <ronlaporte@aol.com>
Ron, Akira, Faina, Eugene, EunRyoung, Mita, Global Matchmakers Inc.,
Julia, Wendy, Beatriz, Soni, Andrew Carnegie, Tom, Deb
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu
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