Dear Statistics friends
I am a professor emeritus of Epidemiology, and former director of a WHO Collaborating center. I have been collaborating with Ismail Serageldin, the director emeritus of the Library of Alexandria, Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet, and Gil Omenn, the former president of AAAS. It is our mission to improve research productivity in Africa and Arab countries.
Only 3% of the world's scientific literature comes from developing countries, despite the fact that 25% of the scientists, and 80% of the people live there. I am sure that the statistical journals of the ASA have few articles from Africa.
A library of Alexandria mission is to build scientific equity world wide so that those in developing can have equal access to science. We have targeted three Barriers to scientific equity, and would appreciate if you could join our quest for multilingual science. The three barriers we target are:
Barrier 1: Limited access to scientific books (we are partnering with the Library of Congress to provide free Interlibrary loans).
Barrier 2: Stataphobia (not having access to research methods materials). The majority of scientific articles are turned down as the result of poor research methods and Statistics. At the Library of alexandria we built the largest e-statistics and book library In the world, with free access
Barrier 3: Language: There are 83 languages in Europe, and 6500 languages world wide, but only one language of science, English. Statistics is a difficult topic for most to learning. Learning it would be difficult for any of us to learn statistics in Arabic, a student in Japan, has a similar difficulty learning statistics in English
The Library of Alexandria has been very successful in building access to the scientific literature in Africa and Arab countries, as well as establishing an enormous research methods library. We now want to tackle Barrier 3, Language, to break out from the strangle hold of English to give all languages access to science and all scientists the means to communicate with each other.. We would like to have you join this is all free, and you can stop at any point. We have no hidden agendas other than knocking down the language walls in science. Information about our effort has been sent out to major editor societies.
Translation is simple. On your web page you include a multilingual translation button. When a scientist in Jordan, wants to review your web page, it can be done in Arabic. This is based upon google translate machine translation.. The quality of translation can be examined with forward and back translation, as well as multilingual speakers. This "round trip" translation can be used to measure the quality of translation.
It is time to build a Super Statistics Polyglot, and would love to have you join. There is interest with the American Association for the Advancement of Science sections.
You can install the button on your web page for free. Contact Ronaldlaporte@gmail.com, and we will send to you instructions. We hope you are interested in making your statistical web pages multilingual.
Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D. Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology
Ismail Serageldin, Ph.D. Emeritus Director library of Alexandria
Vint Cerf, Ph.D., Internet Evangelist Google
Gil Omenn, MD, Ph.D, former president of the AAAS
------------------------------
Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus Epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh
ronaldlaporte@gmail.com724 934 9023
------------------------------