Behind the Curtain at TCG

LAMHDI News

LAMHDI has a new release, and has included information from the Rat Genome Database in its searchable animal models, and has added functionality that allows users to search PrimateLit for information on non-human primate models. LAMHDI has a booth at the Zebrafish Development conference in Madison, WI this week.

Also, we added Micah Adams to the LAMHDI tech team.

Global Warming Can Cause Snow!

Watching the evening news, I saw yet another person ponder the unusually cold weather and claim "I thought global warming was supposed to be a bigger deal...".  Here's the fun fact: global warming causes amazing new patterns of snow and heat, consistent to what we are witnessing now.  How?

Take a look at the double pendulum simulator at: http://www.myphysicslab.com/dbl_pendulum.html .  Global warning represents a shift of the pendulum a bit to the right, so grab the middle ball and move it to the right.  You'll notice that the bottom ball swings rather wildly.  The more you disturb the middle ball, the more wildly the second ball swings.  This chaotic behavior is seen with a pendulum with only two balls.

Now realize that the Earth's weather is like a pendulum with billions of balls.  If you add more energy (through global warming) you'll end up with gigantic chaotic behavior with balls swinging more to the left (colder) and to the right (hotter) than usual as well as the average of the balls moving to the right (the actual global warming).  So instead of thinking, "hey, it's unusually cold, that means global warming is false," after looking at the double pendulum I suggest you consider: "hey, it's unusually cold, they may be right..."

"Facebook" for scientists to be developed

The NIH has funded a new initiative to create a "Facebook for scientists." The $12.2 million/2 year grant was awarded to a consortium of seven universities, led by the University of Florida, to develop a web resource that will pull together information about faculty and staff, published articles, and information provided by researchers. The initiative will use VIVO, a "networking template" from Cornell.

The schools involved are Cornell University, Indiana University, University of Florida, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research, Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. Their roles are detailed in Cornell's press release on the news:

Cornell will spearhead the development of the multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida will focus on developing technology for keeping each site’s data current; and Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions — Scripps Research Institute, Juniper, Fla.; Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce, P.R.; Washington University of St. Louis; and the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City — will serve as implementation sites.

The "VIVOweb" initiative, as this will be known, has enormous potential. The communities of researchers are generally eager to participate in social networks such as VIVOweb is scoped to become, as has been demonstrated by the active community surrounding NITRC and other projects in which TCG has a role.

[Disclosure: TCG participated on a competing application for this grant.]

Presentation of NITRC's Excellence.gov Award

We took a little video of (some of) the NITRC team accepting their Excellence.gov Award yesterday. Included in the video are James Luo, Nina Preuss, David Kennedy, Christian Haselgrove, and Dan Turner. Shoddy camerawork is by me (for which I apologize!).

NITRC projects wins Excellence.Gov Award!

I have some very exciting news: One of our projects has won the overall, top 2009 Excellence.Gov Award! The NIH's Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC) project was recognized for its achievements in helping researchers collaborate to develop even better tools to aid scientific discoveries.

There will be a panel presentation from all of the award winners on May 13th. Details will be announced on the ACT/IAC web site.

In the meantime, here's the press release about NITRC's award, and here are a few pictures of the happy crew!

We are incredibly proud of the NITRC project, and I'm delighted that our industry also sees the value in this great program.

Grants.gov to be updated in 90-120 days

Jason Miller at Federal News Radio posted an update to our story last week about OMB's concerns over Grants.gov's ability to handle the expected surge in grant applications:

"The Department of Health and Human Services expects to upgrade the Grants.gov site in the next 90-to-120 days, well into the surge in applications expected from the Recovery act.
"Sheila Conley, HHS's deputy assistant secretary for finance and acting deputy assistant secretary for grants, says she and other senior officials throughout government are concerned about the time it will take to improve the centralized federal Web site to find and apply for grants."

There's also a recognition that some thinking needs to go into how Grants.gov develops over the next several months:

'"We need to begin our effort to plan out the next generation of Grants.gov," she says. "We have to take advantage of the acceptance and successes of Grants.gov. We will look across an interagency group to build off well accepted concept and make that work. It will be not long after we stabilize the current environment."'

Certainly a step in the right direction.

Transparency is the watchword, and already a practice

President Obama is already speaking to a large choir with this particular hymn:

In one of a handful of memorandums released during his first full day as president, Obama said he planned to issue an open government directive, which will instruct agencies to make their operations more transparent and to create a process that asks the public to submit opinions on policy issues and enable collaboration with organizations in the public and private sectors.

It's certainly true that there is a lot left to accomplish to truly meet this goal. However, a lot of government operations have already embraced a philosophy of transparency and collaboration, and are doing very well as a consequence. The NITRC program at the NIH, which is a collaboration platform for research grantees to share some of the products of their research, is one example that TCG is involved in. Others will be highlighted by the 2009 Excellence.gov Awards, whose theme this year is "Transparency: Using IT to improve the interaction between Government and its Stakeholders." Nominations are due today so, if your program is already meeting the President's goals, get your information submitted quickly!

100% of TCG Project Managers Now PMP Certified

TCG achieved yet another milestone this week: every single one of our project managers is now Project Management Professional (PMP) certified by the Project Management Institute. Nina Preuss crossed the line (in a good way) -- good job, Nina! You can read about it here.

At TCG, we are committed to the best practices captured in the PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and our project managers have either been PMP certified or on the road to it. With Nina's achievement, we now have 100% coverage.

Job: Business Consultant/Architect

We just posted a new job opening to the TCG web site, here, for a Business Consultant/Architect. If you've got system analysis, business analysis, and architecture experience, take a look!

TCG is on the 2008 Inc. 5000

Inc. magazine announced the Inc. 5000 today, the list of the fastest-growing companies in the USofA. We're delighted that TCG is number 1,716 on the list! (Number 1 would be better but all good things come to those who work hard...)

We believe that a large part of our 218.9% growth from 2004 to 2007 is our relentless focus on supporting grants management and scientific collaboration, so we're particularly pleased by this recognition. Being able to build a solid business by improving the operation of our nation's government and scientific research is extremely gratifying.

So, thanks to all of our staff and the customers we're lucky to support. You're doing great!