“Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.” – Albert Einstein

Personally, I’d remove the ‘only’ at the beginning because no one really has the right to judge life worth, but other than that the quote is spot on.

PG mentioned that to create wealth: you must build something people want. I’d make a slight modification to that: build something people need.

We already have enough people building things that people want. And let’s clarify whom we are referring to when we say people. We’re talking about first world people building things that other first world people want.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with that. And I’d be a hypocrite to claim otherwise. I also partake in the building of what people want. But please don’t say a platform that lets you rent out your apartment is putting a “ding in the universe.” I’m sorry, it’s not. (Not hating on AirBnB, just the first example that popped in my head).

So what do people need? People need clean water. People need shelter. People need medicine. People need better public health measures. Sure, many of these problems can’t exactly be solved by building out applications on an internet that many people still don’t have access too, but some of them certainly can. And perhaps that’s a better usage of our time than solving more first world problems.

Don’t quit your job or anything. Just know that there are people out there who still don’t have the things they need. Maybe we should address them first. A community of entrepreneurial, driven, badass devs can do a lot.

At a very basic level, I imagine an interface where a cell object can be initialized and passed various methods – to modify cellular components or run cellular functions. Consider the following code snippet:

SkinCell cell = new Cell();

    protein_A = cell.translate(chromosome 12, gene 56);
    visualize protein_A;


//load protein_A via HTML5 App


   protein_A.phosphorylate(C56); //Phosphorylate at carbon 56
   visualize protein_A;

Imagine inducing a genetic mutation at a specific loci via code instead of going through the difficulty of doing such in a lab on actual cells. Then, calling a function to visualize the modified, translated protein or calling a function to see how this new molecule reacts with other molecules.

Instead of turning to the lab to understand cellular functions, we could turn to our computers. Of course, to model the cell completely or accurately would be arguably impossible. There are too many unknown unknowns in cellular biology currently and probably will be in the foreseeable future. Further, calculating the result of interactions between n molecules would become extremely resource intensive once the number of molecules in this cell became larger than n – without making certain assumptions. We still can’t accurately model the folding of proteins, let alone the complex interactions of multiple proteins.

But nonetheless, let’s start somewhere. And I understand that these kind of domain-specific languages already exist – actually probably a ton already exist. But I don’t see any web API’s where we could leverage the increasing number of HTML5 webapps available for biologists. Further, a web API would call for a more centralized cloud-based development effort and increased open source contributions. Watch out for a future post for a prototype of this API.

Oh yeah – an awesome post of DNA seen through the eyes of a coder.

- Ariq

A lot of medical problems are caused by underlying social maltreatment. A doctor continuously treats a patient who comes in with asthma but never treats the underlying cause – perhaps dust in the household or a polluted neighborhood. The lead leaking into the water pipes lead to lead poisoning, but the landlord doesn’t do anything and nor does the doctor (and how could they, doctors are overwhelmed with patients – they don’t have time to treat the very non-medical underlying causes of ailments).

I’m not saying all medical problems are due to underlying social problems, but I’m sure many are – especially in lower income areas. And because many landlords don’t resolve issues from complaints, why don’t we create an alternative platform for drawing attention to problems? Create an app that simply allows you to take a picture of your problem and distribute it over this specialized network. People can chime in, comment, get angry and cause some change (similar to CitySourced – which lets you complain about local problems via your iPhone or Android app).

Give them a voice, and crowdsource the feedback. Of course there are a lot of issues with this idea. This does not apply to all medical ailments or social problems. And the potential audeince for this idea – the urban poor mostly – probably can’t afford access to smartphones or the app market (is this true?). Even more fundamentally, Can we address problems like these through apps or do apps tend to address richer audiences?

- Ariq

The Issues

Right now, the biggest issue with the set of current features is that some of the data doesn’t format nicely on the mobile interface. This is evident on bulletin or SSOL. HTML tables suck on mobile and both these sites love sending me tables via my AJAX returns. I probably have to write a better parser and spend more time styling, which won’t be fun.

Second, sometimes clicks just don’t register. Or scrolling is erratic. Or the load screen hangs. Or your Droid starts talking to you. I’m not too sure how to handle these and they’re probably ramifications of my non-native approach. Hopefully newer iterations of jQuery Mobile will fix some of these.

Upcoming Features

SSOL and Courseworks are the biggest upcoming features. SSOL is already in place, I just need to request CUIT for unlimited requests before I release it. If you remember during class registration, spamming the refresh button lands you a temporary IP ban on your connection. Now if a bunch of people using the app at once request SSOL, that’s the equivalent of spamming refresh and my server will get banned. So I have to talk to CUIT on how to proceed.

Some people are bringing up privacy concerns regarding the fact that you have to input your uni/pass to access SSOL or Courseworks. It’s not an issue. Your uni and pass will be stored locally – using HTML5 localStorage – meaning I’ll never see it. And why would I want to phish your credentials anyways? To log into your SSOL and drop you out of Lambert’s currently maxed out orgo class so I could get a spot? No, that’s ridiculous

UX Redesign

The current interface is pretty shitty, I’m not gonna lie. I tried to model it after the Harvard mobile app (bad idea, I know), but I didn’t get the icons right. Thankfully Iiro Jäppinen designed a new set that looks substantially better. They should do, for now.

UX Redesign

I’m not sure if the traditional one-page icon interface is very scalable though. As more features are added (though I don’t want to add too much), the home page will become pretty cluttered. Kevin Zhang suggested a ‘carousel’- style UI which may be better suited.

Carousel design

Anyways, again the app is very much a work in progress. If anyone has any suggestions, concerns or wants to help out: shoot me an email.