Supercourse Newsletter, September 18, 2003
------------------------------------------
"You will find, as a general rule, that the constitutions and the
habits of a people follow the nature of the land where they
live."
--Hippocrates
Sadly Hippocrates, had he not died, would have been over 2000
years old by now. He to us is one of the leaders of prevention,
and if more physicians today thought about prevention as he did,
we would be much better off.
It is very exciting, quite a few people are celebrating Hippo-
crates day. If you are in your center, please send us a note
about this and we will include it in the newsletter.
We are very proud that since May, to Hippocrates birthday, the
Golden lecture has flown around the world and has reached about
73% of the countries. We owe the golden lecture to Hippocrates.
We submitted a letter to the Lancet concerning the Golden Lec-
ture, as John Yudkin wrote a beautiful lecture on International
Health in last week�s Lancet. We are responding to this, and
showing how we can reach the world with prevention. It is most
fun figuring out how to reach as many people as possible with a
lecture good-virus as it has travelled from friend to friend.
Muninjaya from Bali is organizing quite a spectacular Hippocrates
special. Wouldn�t it be great to go visit!! (we will try and get
pictures). Sabina will have a great time in Pakistan on his
birthday as well. I beg to inform you, that Subject Training
Course on Radiation Epidemiology has been launched in Kiev
P.L.Shupic Memorial Medical Academy for Post-graduate Training,
Radiology Chair, head - Prof. Dmitry S. Mechov M.D. On September
19 students will attend the "Golden Lecture of Hippocrat" worked
out by the Supercourse scientists. Thank you very much, Dr. Boris
A. Ledoshchuk M.D
Many others indicated that they are honouring Hippocrates day. In
future editions, we will show you the excitement world wide!
Social Network:
The newest thing on the web are "friendship networks" like
'friendster'. Friendster is a dating site where you go to find
people, but the people are recommended to you by friends of
yours. Other sites are springing up, using social networks. We
have in fact developed something like this with the Supercourse
as we are one big social network.
Quality Control:
We finally had some time to begin to examine the quality of the
Supercourse. At the end of each lecture is a form to which people
can complete to rate the lecture and provide comments. We have
been collecting the ratings since we began. The results so far
are extremely striking. We have 1,460 lectures, amazingly we have
over 3,000 ratings. The overall rating was based on a scale of 1-
5. We were overjoyed to see that the first 1,000 lectures had a
mean rating of 4.12 out of 5 with a SD of .7. Isn�t that fantas-
tic ratings??? The people looking at the lectures loved them. We
will soon put these up, probably in a manner similar to Ama-
zon.com. We will make the comments available to the people who
wrote the lecture. Any time a lecture is updated, we will wipe
out the previous ratings, so that we can strive for continuous
improvement. We asked the authors for their very best lectures,
not their dog lectures, and we obviously got them. It is most
wonderful to see this.
Faina Linkov is planning to see how the lectures relate to expert
reviewers. Thus we will ask experts in diabetes epidemiology,
such as Akira and I to review all the diabetes lectures, and we
can see the degree of concordance between Akira and I as experts,
with the people who reviewed the lectures.
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.
W. Edwards Deming (1900 - 1993)
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it,
be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot commu-
nicate and teach it. Hesse, 1951
Best regards for Pittsburgh (where the hurricane is coming!!!),
Ron, Faina, Mita, Eugene, Soni, Akira, Wendy, Tomoko, Arin,
Julia, Abed, Eun Ryoung.
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain. Pray of the center of the
hurricane.
--
To send a message to AFRO-NETS, write to: afro-nets@healthnet.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe, write to: majordomo@healthnet.org
in the body of the message type: subscribe afro-nets OR unsubscribe afro-nets
To contact a person, send a message to: afro-nets-help@healthnet.org
Information and archives: http://www.afronets.org