Tuesday 19 February 2013

This blog needs a meme

Posted by Heather Yoeli

We’ve been discussing on here for a while how we’d like to make this blog a more interactive. So… does anyone fancy a little quiz? Ten years or so ago, endless mini self-created interview questionnaires were bouncing around Blogspot and MySpace and LiveJournal as a sort of forerunner to LOLcats, bronies, Ridiculously Photogenic Guy and other such memes. But I always quite liked the quizzy type format as a fun way to get to know people.


Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit's quiz time
The premise of this quizlet is that, whereas we all love public health research (well, I do anyway) we tend to spend a lot of our time focusing on single aspects of specific research projects, and public health is a broad and exciting field and we (or is it just me?) sometimes wonder what colour the grass is on the other side. So, here are three questions. You can answer them as a comment to this blogpost, or you can submit your own blogpost based on them. You can add questions too, and nominate people you’d like to answer them.

OK: the questions…

1. In an entirely hypothetical scenario in which time, money and skill were no object and you could research absolutely anything at all, what would you choose?

2. If you could poach a piece of research from one of your colleagues, which and whose would you pick and why?

3. If you could study and/or work at any university in the world, where would you go?

Right. Shall I go first?

1. In an entirely hypothetical scenario in which time, money and skill were no object and you could research absolutely anything at all, what would you choose?

I would seek to render the anopheles mosquito completely extinct, thereby eradicating malaria. Malaria is one of the most under-resourced and under-researched challenges to global public health, affecting as many as quarter of a billion people across the world each year and killing up to a million, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. I have no idea how one would even begin to approach such a task, and am aware that there are cleverer people than I already out there working on it. But thinking entirely hypothetically, that’s what I’d do.

2. If you could poach a piece of research from one of your colleagues, which and whose would you pick and why?I’d pinch Monique Lhussier’s PhD. Monique starts out looking like a rather mainstream qualitative interviewer thinking about quality of life in multiple sclerosis, and then she starts watches Pinocchio. She makes intriguing observations about the whole concept of quality of life within a postmodern framework, considering one of the many paradigms or constructs which public health tends never to question. Monique clearly has significantly more brain cells than I do, but I’m nevertheless wondering if I could slip a few quotes from Bart Simpson into my thesis.

3. If you could study and/or work at any university in the world, where would you go?
Somewhere hot and sunny and dry. Many many things attracted me to Northumbria, but the weather was not one of them…


Now, over to you. Please join in.

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