In class, Dr. Atkinson has encouraged us to think of innovative ways to use technology. Recently I found a rather interesting article on how other people have created innovative facebook applications that are useful in the Science and medical field. In the article "Top 20 Facebook Applications in Science and Medicine" these applications are listed with a brief summary. Some of the applications include an app where you can share ratings on over the counter and prescribed medications. There is also a health tip of the day app, an app to help people quit smoking, and even an organ donor app, which allows you to fill an organ donor application online! Out of all the applications, the one I found most interesting is an app that distributed computationally-intensive tasks to home computers worldwide. Apparently doing such a thing aids scientists in medical research and has given researchers advanced understanding in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease. I do not thoroughly understand how this works, but I would be very interested in learnig more about this. After reading this article, I am even more impressed with technology and with the people who figure out ways to use it for the improvement of peoples health and knowledge.
http://scienceroll.com/2007/11/06/top-20-facebook-applications-in-science-and-medicine/
I have used distributed computing to a small extent. Google, microsoft, Amazon, etc have could computing spaces that you can buy, be it data storage or computation power. you pay by hour or by storage space per some time frame. Its much cheaper than owning a server and maintaining it. My labmate worked at google for an internship. she worked on one million videos, and categorized the videos by the content in it. Imagine having space to work with a million videos.
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