Supercourse Newsletter, October 22, 2004
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Friends,
Trick or Treat:
We are on the verge of having Halloween. Little "munchkin" kids
come up to our house almost all dressed as either Spiderman or
famous Epidemiologists (they demand apples instead of candy). We
wish your could be here.
Supercourse quality control:
Over 15 Supercourse faculty members expressed their interest in
the Supercourse Quality Control research, conducted by Faina for
her dissertation project. We are pleased to announce that 7 fac-
ulty members from 6 countries already finished their reviews. We
would like to thank doctors Richard Clapp (USA), Michele Cazau-
bon (France), A.K. Avasarala (India), Zulema Fuentes (Cuba),
Abir Youssef (UK), David Apsey (USA), and Zhou Xiaming (China)
for their time and support of our project. This information is
invaluable for the future development of the Global Health Net-
work Supercourse effort. Thank you very much! More updates on
this research will be coming up soon.
APHA:
Faina will be doing an oral presentation on quality control at
the annual APHA meeting in Washington DC. The title is "Epidemi-
ology on the Web: Assessing the Quality of Internet Based Lec-
tures ", taking place on 11/09/2004 at 2:30pm at WCC hotel, room
140B.
Faina will also be available at the University of Pittsburgh
school booth on:
Monday, November 8th: 11:30-2:30
Wednesday, November 10th: 8:30-12:30
If you would like to meet Faina, please e-mail her at
mailto:fyL1@pit.edu
20005 and 2005 in 2005
Mita made a very important observation. On Jan. 1, 2005 we may
have 20,005 Supercourse faculty on our roster of people, and
2,005 lectures. The Supercourse continues to grow. Last month we
visited the web sites of all the Schools of Public Health in the
US and we wrote to every faculty member providing information
about the Supercourse. Ezzeldine Sharief, is working with Samar,
and we will do the same in Arab/Muslim countries, and Eugene
will do this for the Former Soviet union. We want the Super-
course to be the best known program in International Health.
Tell your friends about this! We think by doing this we can
gather the 2,000 global faculty needed to push us over the
20,000 barrier. We are also seeing if we can e-mail to interna-
tional scientists at WHO, PAHO and UNICEF. We are using the con-
cepts marketing where we want to create a brand identify, if you
think of prevention, you think of the Supercourse.
Google, Google, Google:
Google has developed a wonderful, free product of Google on your
desktop. It downloads in seconds (http://desktop.google.com). It
is amazingly powerful. If I put in the term �laporte�, it will
find every file on my computer that has the term �laporte� in
milliseconds. It even searches your mail files. In addition,
Google has produced a system of gmail (http://www.gmail.com)
which appears to be a lot simpler, and faster than hotmail, ya-
hoo or AOL. I am using it now as AOL views mail from our Pitt
system as spam, and I miss 20% of my letters. In addition, there
is a huge memory file so that you can save all your mail. Google
has a lot of pizzaz now.
Pakistan:
Drs. Kazmi (Aga Khan University) and Dodani (Aga Khan and Uni.
of Pittsburgh) are collaborating with our WHO Collaborating to
develop a research design and methods course in Pakistan early
in February, 2005. We wanted to find faculty who might be inter-
ested in teaching about methods and statistics at the 8 day
training program. What will be very exciting about this is that
we will also put the lectures up on the Supercourse and poten-
tially distribute training throughout Pakistan, but also through
out the world. Please let us know if you would be interested to
be a global Supercourse site to train students about statistics
and methods in population research.
Lecture of the week:
We have a new lecture from Dr. Kevin Gorey from Canada on Social
Epidemiologic Methods in Population Health and Health Services
Research.
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture/lec17561/index.htm
Social epidemiology is a very important field, however it often-
times receives very little attention. If you are interested in
this exciting area, this lecture is definitely right for you.
Please, contact us if you would like to contribute additional
lectures in the area of social epidemiology.
Deer and Turkey:
This has been an exciting year for deer as we have now 5 in our
back yard. We also have a turkey family which had 11 members. A
problem is that a turkey is no match for an SUV, sadly a Tom
Turkey was crushed last week.
Best regards,
Ron, Faina, Mita, Soni, Eugene, Ezzeldeen, Samar, Monica, Julia
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu