Re: [PhillyOnRails] projects; facebook

On Nov 13, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Angel Pizarro wrote:

Hey I have an idea to work on something that is actually useful for work, not just procrastination ;)

Basically, biologists and biomed researchers need to store their research results electronically, but existing systems are cumbersome and very expensive. A lot of after-the-fact annotation goes on, if any annotation goes on at all outside of the tried and true paper lab notebook. My thought is that researchers see the entering of information in a computer as "extra" work. The only way I have found researchers actually use a LIMS (lab information management system) is when they are:
A) forced to use it (never good for moral);
B) need to use it to analyze the mountain of data they produced on a compute cluster. Even then, they enter the bare minimum info to just get the files that need analysis into the system, but never go back and enter the results!
c) Has some really cool functionality/widget/whathaveyou that they play around with and can show off to other folks

My thought is to leverage (C) using iphone/touch/nokia N810 as a bench top devices to enter data in real time, instead of a lab notebook.

Anyone interested in starting a project for this type of work?

Another project idea I had: Biomed researchers need to collaborate across the country/globe, but there are no good (read "approachable") systems out there that are also HIPPA compliant. E.g. if there is the potential to put personal information in clear text field in the DB, then the app is not compliant, even if there is no personal info in there at the time.

My thought was to build a proxy on top of basecamp (or whatever) to ecrypt/decrypt the messages and writeboards and files as they stream to/from the client. Sort of a super-secure Basecamp. Anyone interested?

On Nov 13, 2007 9:44 AM, Mat Schaffer <schapht@gmail.com> wrote:
On Nov 12, 2007, at 9:44 PM, Mike Mangino wrote:
> If you guys ever want somebody to talk about Facebook development I
> would be interested.

+1 to that
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--
Angel Pizarro
Director, Bioinformatics Facility
Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics
University of Pennsylvania
806 BRB II/III
421 Curie Blvd.
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6160

P: 215-573-3736
F: 215-573-9004
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