Dynamic colleagues

I’m so impressed by how multi-faceted many of our faculty, staff and students are. In April, our home page highlighted the athletic prowess of Environmental Sciences and Engineering students and faculty who completed the Boston Marathon. Many of our faculty, staff and students bike considerable distances to work – and anyone who’s biked around here understands that we earned the name Chapel HILL!

Musical talents in the School of Public Health are awesome as well. I’ll mention only a few of many examples. Cathy Melvin plays dulcimer, along with former Senior Associate Dean Ernie Schoenfeld. Michael Kosorok, who has a master’s in music as well as a PhD in statistics, composed a piece for his daughter’s high school. Mike McQuown plays in Freylach Time! The Klezmer Dance Band. Will Vizuete hosts a Sunday afternoon jazz show called Jazz Incognito. Kathryn Johnson is in a local band called Schooner. Kathy Barboriak and Laura Linnan sing with the Chapel Hill Community Chorus. I saw Laura Sunday and she mentioned that tomorrow she’s off to tour Italy with the chorus. Happy travels and please don’t decide to leave us for the Met!

The School of Public Health is full of fascinating people who are accomplished on many levels, and I’m proud to call them colleagues. In the coming months, we’ll find more ways to showcase their non-academic talents. Let us know if you have ideas.

University of Iowa flooding

Our thoughts are with our colleagues at the University of Iowa and the citizens of Iowa. The scale of flooding seems almost inconceivable, and the economic, social and personal dislocation are vast. I spoke with Jim Merchant, the dean of the School of Public Health at Iowa, last week, and he conveyed an optimistic determination to forge ahead, but wow, this is tough to deal with. It’s frightening to think that these horrible floods could become more frequent and more intense as a consequence of global warming.

Off to CDC

I’m off to the CDC this week where I co-chair the Task Force on Community Preventive Services. As I’ve said before, there’s probably no better way to stay on top of multiple literatures than to be part of evidence review teams. While the Task Force requires a lot of work, I really believe in the mission.

It’s great to have a break in the weather. After torrential winds and rain yesterday evening, the air is cool and pleasant. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Happy Monday!
Barbara

Reading matters

In the last week, I’ve read some interesting pieces in The New York Times and Atlantic about email and the internet. Last week, the Saturday NYT carried a story about a convergence in thinking among some big companies that now recognize that email is both a blessing and a curse and are trying to find a way out of the conundrum. They’ve done some interesting experiments which show that when people restrict their email to certain times of the day, in other words, when they exert control over their email, they appear to be more productive. It’ll be important for us to follow emerging best practices in this area. As readers know, I am concerned increasingly that my own productivity, at least, has suffered in the last year as a consequence of mounting email, much of it spam that is not immediately recognizable as such.

A related story in Atlantic asks whether Google is making us stupid. The hypothesis is that we are spending more time on the internet using Google and less time reading. This has important relevance for how we teach and learn, but it also has implications not just for our professional development but our leisure activities as well. I confess that my own book reading has declined over the last few years. At first, I attributed it to work overload, eye strain, late work nights and early morning workouts. But I noticed that all the explanations I give are similar to ones reported in national studies about reading. Right now, I am reading four different books; in past years, I would have devoured them much more quickly but it’ll take me several more weeks to finish them all. In contrast, I finished both Neverland and PR 2.0 on the plane to and from Abu Dhabi using the Kindle which shows what happens when one is a captive audience for 14 hours.

Nicholas Carr, author of the Google article, recounted his personal experiences and conversations with friends. There’s general agreement among them that the longer people spend online, the less reading they do and the more difficult time they have focusing attention for extended periods of time. That’s pretty scary for us as individuals and also as purveyers of knowledge and critical thinking. We need to talk a lot more about how these social phenomena should affect how we teach and how we continue to develop ourselves as people with ideas. There’s a lot of traffic on the web about the story, so it must be striking a chord.

Bad news

Many of us were saddened by news of Tim Russert’s death. Who can’t remember election night Gore vs. Bush and Russert’s famous whiteboard? (It’s also a lesson that sometimes simpler is better.) I haven’t watched “Meet the Press” in years and years, yet Russert is etched indelibly in my mind. How can we have a national election without Tim Russert!

Uplifting message

Many of you have heard of or know Ron Davis, MD, who once led the government’s Office on Smoking and Health and has been a tireless anti-smoking advocate. Ron is now a leader at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and President of the AMA. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer several months ago. Pancreatic is one of the most virulent forms of cancer. I really admire the forthright, sometimes even humorous way, he has been writing about his personal cancer experiences. Michael Eriksen sent this link to a speech Dr. Davis gave to the AMA recently, AMA (Comm) Legacies in the circle of life.

Davis said about his disease, “As a physician, I know the survival statistics for someone with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. But if the five-year survival is 5 percent, that’s not zero. And as someone with relative youth, good functional status, outstanding health care, love and support from family and friends, and a thirst for life that feeds into a strong mind-body connection, then who knows what the future holds for someone in my situation. So never take away someone’s hope.” Those are powerful, inspiring words from a man with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Davis also reminds us about the importance of friends and family. “Another positive to come out of my illness is that family and friendship have been redefined for me. It’s cliché to say this, but yes, a serious illness does force one to reexamine one’s priorities in life. And I’ve been so very happy to be able to spend more time with Nadine and our three sons during these past four months. A person cannot be president of the AMA without having incredible love and support back home. And when you add the big “C” to the mix, that love and support become your lifeline. So Nadine and Jared and Evan and Connor, I can’t thank you enough.”

Davis, Russert and the recent articles about email and the internet all share a common theme: legacy. What contributions do we each leave behind that make the world better, healthier, safer? How do we make a difference?

Part II: Monday, June 9, 2008

On Monday late…in the skies approaching Lvov

Earlier tonight, before leaving the hotel, I sat in the hotel bar sipping coffee (read caffeine) and observed the world in which I found myself. All around me were groups of men dressed in traditional Middle Eastern galabiyya beautifully starched pure white cotton garments perfect for the 105 + temperatures, in animated conversations. There were almost no women anywhere in this male society, and I was an interloper but not at all uncomfortable. Outside, the sea glistened, a slight breeze had finally brought some movement into the stillness; against the traditional fashion and conversation was a huge outdoor screen and the French Open at Roland Garros. Abu Dhabi is a land of contrasts.

Earlier in the day, Drs. Jackie MacDonald and Ivan Rusyn, Jennifer Platt and I participated in the signing of a contract between UNC Chapel Hill and the Environmental Agency Abu Dhabi. Our collaborators, including UAE University and RAND Corporation were there. I did interviews with some Abu Dhabi TV and print journalists and found them a lot like their US counterparts. We had a project kick-off meeting to begin the work. Then, there were some remaining issues to be worked out about the scope of work, nuts and bolts research issues that one might have to work out on any large research project that involves many players.

We sat in a Majlis and met for a few more hours before we reached a conclusion everyone could endorse. The room itself was fabulous, in fact, I wish we could turn one of our SPH rooms into a space like that. Imagine a long room with beautiful loveseat size couches covered in a lovely kilm print and in front of every couch a low table. Several of us already were positioned on couches along the wall, and the men moved from sitting along the far wall to sitting on chairs and the floor around the coffee table. We dove into substantive discussions about sampling, measures and the pros and cons of different kinds of samples. We left with a plan. I really like the people with whom we are interacting, and although there are differences in how we work, there also are many similarities.

If only there were a magic carpet for getting between NC and Abu Dhabi…Happy Monday—just barely. Barbara (near Warsaw)

***

Part I: Sunday, June 8, 2008

DATELINE: Somewhere above the Porcupine Plain heading toward Abu Dhabi

I am on the plane in route to Abu Dhabi, with Jackie MacDonald, Assistant Professor ESE, also on board. Ivan Rusyn, Associate Professor, and Jennifer Platt, Research Associate and Project Manager for the UAE project, will be joining us, along with other colleagues on our contract and those from the The Environment Agency Abu-Dhabi (EAD). We are returning five months after our first visit, to sign a contract with the EAD to develop an environmental plan. We are all very excited about the opportunity to do this work, especially because we will have excellent partners from Abu Dhabi and the US. The methods we will use could be applied in the US if we were so fortunate to be in the position to develop a plan for a state or the US. The more I read about this part of the world, the more I recognize how important it is for UNC to be there and public health as well. I just read a very interesting book about the region, called Dubai Inc. It provides a good history of the area and also some of the issues in doing business or any work there. As a behavioral scientist who understands how culturally-specific programs often must be to be effective, I wonder how we will have to adapt our methods to fit with the culture, practices and values of the UAE.

I could not believe the number of different electronics and chargers I packed for this trip. Laptop, regular cell phone, Treo, Blackberry (which should work in UAE while Treo won’t), digital camera, and Kindle so I only have to carry one book (failure back-up). Traveling light is an oxymoron. And after doing my homework about adapters, none of the four I brought worked on the plane. This helped me commiserate with a nice young businessman from Pakistan who was planning to work for the 14 hour flight. Finally, one of the extremely pleasant Etihad attendants offered us adapters that worked. So, now I am quite happily working and watching the flight pattern. It’s easy to be happy on the first of 14 hours! It will get tedious, but at least this is a direct flight—from NYC. This is an impressive airline, the official airline of the UAE, and it just started in 2004. Think about how different it is running an airline from the UAE where the price of oil is a fraction of what it costs in the US!

I was thinking about how different it is going back to places. I am not a person who eagerly awaits going to new places. I admire the people who can’t wait to explore the next place. That’s true for a lot of our students, staff and faculty. But I do like going back to places I have been. I like knowing my way around whereas I am not crazy about learning my way for the first time (I have a terrible sense of direction.). I think about how unknown everything was when we went to the UAE just five months ago. But this time, I know more what to expect, including the neon everywhere that will be an arresting sight when we emerge from the arrival area in the airport. And I look forward to walking on the famous Corniche in Abu Dhabi—although when we were here before, the temperature was merely in the 80s, and it was 106 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday in Abu Dhabi. Of course, it was a mere 100 in Chapel Hill, so I am as ready as one can be.

Reading on the Kindle

For those not familiar with it, the Kindle is the e-book reader Amazon created, and it is pretty amazing in that it actually feels like a book but it is a fraction of the size of a book; in fact, I am carrying around many books on mine, and I can order more easily, along with magazines, newspapers and more. Eventually, our students may order their textbooks on e-books and download them. Are we ready? Are we thinking about how these increasingly good new technologies will change how we deliver our information? One of the books I am reading is PR 2.0. It is making me realize even more acutely that we must be tracking how we as a school are being written about on the web, because viral, social messages can be extremely important. It’s a new way of thinking about communications. We will harness these new tools or be left behind.

It’s 1:30 am in Abu Dhabi, and there’s a huge celebration of some sort going on outside my window. Better to work than be sleepless in Abu Dhabi… More tomorrow after we sign the contract and before I board the 2:00 am return flight Tuesday morning.

Happy Monday, Barbara