SLIM Meeting Minz 1/18/10

I hope you all had a nice long weekend, but I sure did miss all of yinz that didn't come to the meeting yesterday! Oh well, we'll just have to wait 'til next week. Anyway, we were introduced to a new club on campus called Students for Food Awareness. They want to educate students on eating well and how our current food system is flawed and how we can change it. In addition, they'd like to open up a free dialogue with the dining halls about the origin of their products, because like all of you, I always suspected that those cakes at Market Central were made in a lab. If you are interested in the group, contact Eli Gabel-Frank (edg23@pitt.edu).

Next, we heard from Lionel Levine about his project Butterfly Medical, and open resource of medically relevant information with a hint of Facebook and a healthy dash of Wikipedia. The story behind the group is when Lionel went to India, he found out that many doctors don't have up-to-date medical information like signs/symptoms of disease, treatment techniques, current research, etc. Users of the program can submit their articles or tidbits of info like in Wikipedia, but all of these points are reviewed by licensed physicians. As of now the project is just taking off, but Lionel hopes to expand the network of contributors and users into other countries. If you'd like to know more or became involved with developing the project, contact Lionel (lml35@pitt.edu).

Next week we will not be having a meeting because we want you all to go see a presentation by One Life One World One Peace called "Child Soldiers: Modern Day Slaves". This is just one of a semester-long series of presentations on modern day slavery, but it promises to be very informative. So instead of going to the Cathedral, go to the William Pitt Union Assembly Room on Monday, January 25th @ 7:30 pm.

Later this week, there are some other interesting things going on. FORGE is hosting Simon Deng, a refugee from Sudan and a survivor of child slavery, who will be speaking this Thursday, January 21st in the WPU Kurtzmann Room (next to the Ballroom) @ 6:30 pm. There is also a Haiti Awareness event being held in 4130 Posvar this Friday from 2-5 pm. If you are interested in helping more with the situation in Haiti, I encourage you all to donate through Partners in Health, which is a public health initiative stationed in Haiti (https://donate.pih.org/page/contribute/donate). Just select "Haiti Earthquake Relief" under the Program bar and contribute what you can. If you don't have money to spare, you can always give blood at UPMC Presbyterian, some of which will be taken to Haiti. Just go in the general entrance (in the tunnel perpendicular to Lothrop St.) and go to the 11th floor cafeteria on any Tuesday during normal business hours (10-5). I'll keep you all posted on any other ways to help in Haiti.