Interesting reading, doing more with less, etc

Interesting reading

I don’t know about you, but for the first time in my life, I absolutely cannot keep up—with the hundreds of emails every day, the journals that seem to appear before I have read the last one, the books I want to read and so much more. I’m still wondering why I added a subscription to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) to the other two papers we get every morning—New York Times (NYT) and the Chapel Hill Herald/Durham Herald Sun. WSJ does give me another viewpoint, one I might not ordinarily get. I use the local papers to learn about the local scene and to get perspectives on UNC that I might miss otherwise. And I check to see that our School and faculty are being covered. I’m a hard copy newspaper reader. I like print, and I like it in my hands. I have no problem reading books on the Kindle, but I like to go out for the paper in the morning, and have a physical paper not a virtual one. That may make me an anachronism, but so be it! My sister is a reporter so I am very sympathetic to newspapers. By the way, she had an interesting article on texting while eating in the NYT last week.

I liked Nicholas Kristof’s NYT column today. Of course, I like Kristof. He travels to some of the world’s roughest spots and had what appear to be great tips for traveling safely. Check them out. He criticized universities for being “far too parochial, rarely exposing students to worlds beyond their borders.” That is definitely not true for us.

Excellent article on digital surveillance in recent New England Journal of Medicine.

Doing more with less

We are grappling with potentially very large permanent budget cuts and trying to figure how we can do more with less, especially since our School (like most UNC schools) had little discretionary budget to start with. I only wish we could put as much time into planning strategy as we are into planning budget cut scenarios. At this point, we do not know where we will end up, only that it is not where we are now. North Carolina has been good to us in the past. We’ll all do the best we can.

Quintiles’ new building

Several of us heard Dennis Gillings, CBE, Governor Perdue, Durham’s Mayor Bill Bell and others celebrate Quintiles Transnational’s new building. It is a beautiful space. I enjoyed interacting with SPH alumni and others who spoke highly of the School. The growth of companies like Quintiles, even during poor economic times, demonstrates one aspect of the growing importance of public health professionals. In the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, our graduates in biostatistics, epidemiology and health policy (among others) have an opportunity to shape the kinds of medical treatments available to people around the world. Congratulations Quintiles.

Happy Monday. Barbara