[FoRK] Rpad? Web-based math collab?

[Lisa Dusseault]

I think I'm coming at some of what you're envisioning from a starting  
point that might not seem related, but anyway:  I'm building a Web  
site for aggregating health statistics so that they can be much more  
accessible: findable, browsable (no Web forms to puzzle out or  
databases to understand) and visualizable.  You have no idea how much  
of an improvement can be made with a couple months of programming, in  
being able to find out "how many women in my state get Lyme disease"  
or "how long do American 60-year-olds go between blood pressure tests"  
and browse related information.  Also the amount of public "dark data"  
here was shocking to me.

In the longer term, the visualizations will be more and more under the  
contributor and end-user control, and it would be good to allow user- 
contributed visualizations, analysis routines, and branch out to other  
kinds of data and utilities for scientists.

I agree Google should be doing this but I f*ced up my chance to demo  
this to Chris DiBona: the demo server chose that day to stop running  
reliably.  So I'm still doing it as a personal semi-official CN  
fellowship project but it's open source too.

Happy to talk about it, give me a call.

Lisa

On Apr 26, 2008, at 9:26 PM, Jeff Bone wrote:

> 	
> Anybody using this?
>
>  http://www.rpad.org/Rpad/
>
> It looks like a fantastic idea, perhaps not fully baked.  I've been  
> waiting for somebody to (a) take the wiki-as-app-server idea (which  
> this isn't quite) and run w/ it since JotSpot got assimilated by the  
> GoogleBorg and apparently entirely defudefangedsed (thank you Mac  
> mail edit widget, but it's an amusing enough pseudo-typo to leave  
> in) and (b) come up with a reasonable Web-based collaborative-space  
> math notebook, preferably open source, preferably not the Sage hair  
> ball.
>
> I mean, clearly Google should be doing this.  Buy Wolfram, open  
> source Mathematica, and provide integrated Mathematica and Google  
> Notebook.  Barring that, build R into Google Notebook;  numerical  
> and stats stuff has more practical application to more people  
> anyway.  But I'm getting tired of waiting for the Google-Herd-of- 
> Cats to get their feature sets aligned, I mean, hell, we don't even  
> have a consistent tag / folder / bookmark / feeds etc. thing that  
> works reasonably well across their apps.  An operating system  
> factors out common functionality, dammit!
>
> Anybody have any pointers to similar things, perhaps more usable?
>
> jb
>
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