Category Archives: education

Welcome to National Public Health Week

Since 1995, presidential decree has designated the first full week of April to be National Public Health Week in the United States. The American Public Health Association is kicking things off with an online “viral video” campaign. Public health has much more experience trying to stop the spread of viruses, so this campaign has some underdog appeal. It’s also got nice motion graphics, but definitely not my first choice for inspirational music.

(Hey, this soundtrack would be so easy to remix, if only it had an appropriate Creative Commons license. APHA could probably get a bit of notice from folks who wouldn’t otherwise see a public health video by changing the license today and send CC and friends a nice press release. Hint hint.)

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Filed under education, global health, videos

C4G @ GaTech

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a short piece on public-service applications of computer science that are coming out of a class called Computing for Good (C4G) that TCS star Santosh Vempala co-taught at Georgia Tech last spring.

This is an idea that is emerging in several ACO-related disciplines. Manuela Veloso has been running a similar program at CMU called V-Unit, Karen Smilowitz and Michael Johnson held a session at INFORMS 2007 on community-based operations research, and in 2006 student statisticians started a network of volunteer consultancies called Statistics in the Community.

It’s great to see a tradition of “pro bono” work developing in theoretical fields. It’s not just a way for lawyers to assuage their consciences anymore.

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Filed under education, science policy