News You Can Use

News you can Use

Play and feed hungry people

(www.freerice.org)

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playing a game, you help end world hunger. Not a bad deal, is it not? Freerice.com is sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com Freerice.com has two goals:

hat can online game give you? Refreshment? A cash award? A free trip to Caribbean Islands ? An act of Philanthropy!! Nay, seems simply out of imagination. But, now you can. www.freerice.org gives you that unbelievable chance. You can feed an unknown face, by just sitting at your desk, playing a simple word game.

* Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free * Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So

All that you have to do is to visit the site freerice.org and you will see a vocabulary game. For every word that you correctly define, 20 grains of rice are donated to people in need. By learning vocabulary and having fun

by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people. The site explains that the rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The World Food Program is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good. As of December 2, 2007, 5,773,015,170 grains of rice have been donated.

Donate a laptop to a child (www.laptop.com)

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ot just rice, you can even donate a laptop to a child in a far off developing country. Visit the site www. laptop.com and you can make your donation. You can donate even 100 or more laptops through the site. The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC) is a nonprofit organization, created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, set up to oversee The Children’s Machine project. The laptop specially designed for this is called XO-1 $100 laptop. The hardware and software are designed for elementary school children aged 6-12. Both the project and the organization were announced

ing world are able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning. at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005. OLPC is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat. Each company has donated two million dollars. As claimed in the website, the mission of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) movement is to ensure that all schoolaged children in the develop-

The OLPC Association focuses on designing, manufacturing, and distributing laptops to children in lesser developed countries, initially concentrating on those governments that have made commitments for the funding and program support required to ensure that all of their children own and can effectively use a laptop. The laptops are sold to governments, to be distributed through the ministries of education willing to adopt

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the policy of “one laptop per child”. The operating system and software is localized to the languages of the participating countries. Initial focus is on the launch of the One Laptop per Child program. In the future, the OLPC Foundation will focus on the grassroots, “bottom-up” aspects of the OLPC mission. India rejected the initiative, saying “it would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents”. The Ministry of Human Resource Development of India has stated plans to make laptops at $10 for schoolchildren.

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Digg and share the information that apeals to you! (www.digg.com)

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ig and share the information that appeals to you! Here is a website for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg.com surfaces the best stuff as voted on by the users. You won’t find editors at Digg - Digg provides a place where people can collectively determine the value of content. Everything on Digg - from news to videos to images to Podcasts - is submitted by its community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of its visitors to see. And it doesn’t stop there. A conversation happens around

the content. The site promotes the conversation and provides tools for the community to discuss the topics that they are passionate about. By looking at information through the lens of the collective community on Digg, you will always find something interesting and unique. Digg is democratising digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you. How Digg works? Submit your favorites. Find an article, video, or podcast online and submit it to Digg.com. Your submission will immediately appear in “Upcoming Stories,” where

other members can find it and, if they like it, Digg it. Become popular. Once a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes “popular” and jumps to the homepage in its category. If it becomes one of the most popular, it qualifies as a “Top 10”. If a submission doesn’t receive enough Diggs within a certain time period, it eventually falls out of the “Upcoming” section.

Digg. Participate in the collaborative editorial process by Digging the stuff that you like best. As you Digg, you contribute to the popularity of any given item. Bury. If you find stories with bad links, off-topic content, or duplicate entries, click “Bury.” That’s how we get the spam out of the system and let the good stuff rise to the top. Build a network. Invite your friends or find them on Digg and add them to your friends list. Then your friends can track what you are Digging and you can see what they Digg as well, enabling you to collectively find news together. Comment. Share your opinions by commenting on stories, videos, and podcasts as well as Digging and Burying comments by other users.

Manage your side job easy!!

(www.sideJobtrack.com) ide Job Track is a free service for anyone looking to quickly and easily manage small side projects. Side Job Track is an easy way to track and manage projectrelated information for small, single person jobs. Side Job Track allows you to store a set of default information for services and/or materials you commonly use performing your side-work. Simple entry

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screens give you the flexibility to be as vague or detailed as you desire and a reporting system gives you the information you need to expand your side-work. You can use Side Job Track to gather and leverage as much or as little side job related information that will allow you to learn more about your after-hours work. By assembling your jobs into projects with associated serv-

ices, clients and/or materials you can better track what needs to be done for who, when. In addition, by using Side Job Track you will automatically organize the vision of your side work. Its features include: webbased job tracking, invoicing, and reporting and project management software for the part-time independent contractor.

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Side Job Track is targeted towards freelance artists, programmers, web developers, web designers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, server administrators, computer repair persons, and anyone who works full-time but also provides services casually for friends, family, or clients! Raj. A 41

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The power of communities Build Good Communities (www.Injoos.com)

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t last we have one safe and secure community network site amidst hundred other network sites that provide problem instead of a promise of safe netwrok. Injoos is a safe and easy platform with rich interactivity that will help you to start or join a community, share or seek relevant information, and make it easy for you to form world communities to realize goals online. By no means it is simple. There is power and punch though it looks simple and small. The mission of Injoos is to harness the power of communities in thought and action. Today, more and more people who build communities look for communities that build trusted connections, a sense of common identity to achieve greater

relevance of information through sharing and realize common goals through collaboration. All these are truly realized in Injoos.com. Injoos supports and sustains communities through member interaction, sharing, collaboration, and moderation. Different organizations, schools, institutions and even a small group of four or five can have easy access to this safe portal for a dynamic interactivity. You can share about ideas, events, your class notes, articles and even your work process. You can share photos, video and audio files too. This automatically documents your files and helps your group members to download them with ease. There is no doubt injoos develops identities which connect people with a

strong bonding and provides a lifelong community experience. If you are not part of any group or even if you are part of one in other networking sites, try Injoos and you are sure to make an indelible identity and a unifying experience.

Literacy, the Basic Currency of Knowledge Economy! (www.Childrenslibrary.org)

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arents could be happy that this multicultural library features carefully selected, age-rated books and is completely kid-appropriate. Parents can rest easy -- the site doesn’t have any interactive areas, and the non - profit organization uses strict policies on privacy and external links to keep kids away from inappropriate content. With a growing collection from around the world, the International Children’s Library invites kids to grow their world through online reading. The library’s multilingual books are age-rated and include a variety of genres like folk tales, classics, non-fiction, etc.

The library also focuses on translations, offering most books in more than one language (one book is offered in thirteen different languages!). The site has great search tools, broken down into many ed matrix july 2008

categories. Large buttons make it easy to navigate and to read through the books, but some books required the “zoom in” feature, which enlarges text and pictures (but depending on your monitor, resulted in not having everything on one page). While this online library doesn’t offer the newest best sellers, it overflows with exotic places, spell-binding stories, fascinating characters, and exciting languages. It’s an excellent resource for parents who want to expose their kids to different cultures and languages, and for families who speak more than one language. Raj. A 41

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Wii-habilitation: Using Video Games To Heal Burns ScienceDaily — Video games — often regarded as nothing more than mindless entertainment for lethargic kids and teens — are proving to be an effective, new tool to motivate patients to perform rehabilitation exercises. Rehabilitation therapists from the William Randolph Hearst Burn Centre at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center are using the motion-sensitive Nintendo Wii video game console, along with traditional

methods, to help patients recover from life-changing injuries. Patients hold wireless remotes that control actions on screen. Players swing the controller to simulate realistic motions, like swinging a tennis racquet, swatting a baseball for a homerun, among countless other motions. For burn patients or any patient with a skin graft, moving and stretching the skin is very painful, but imperative for a successful recovery.

The Burn Centre is also employing a special add-on to the Nintendo Wii system, Guitar Hero III. The controller for the game resembles a miniature guitar. Patients strum a bar on the guitar’s body and press color-coded buttons that resemble notes. Therapists hope that Guitar Hero will help patients with burns on their hands, arms and shoulders to regain fine-motor control. For details visit http://www.med.cornell.edu/

Choose your Free Web Space & Domain http://www.freewebspace.com Are you eagerly waiting to create a website in no time? There is a chance of having a free website with 100mb free space. All you need to do is to log on to www.webspace.com Type your site name and check the availability. Now choose the name for your site and then create. Free web space.com provides you free domain hosting or a free sub-domain name: http://myname.freewebspace.com or http://myname.741.com. You can use new or existing domain name with their free web hosting . The reliable servers at Free Web Space ensure maximum uptime. The site copier utility makes

it easy move your existing website. Choose the webbased file manager or FTP for uploading files. Improve your traffic with site promotion and enhancement tools. Upgrade your account for more web space and to avoid advertisements.

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50MB of Free Web Space 250KB File Size Limit 1000MB Max Monthly Bandwidth Web-based File Manager Excellent Upgrade Options ed matrix august 2008

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100MB of Free Web Space 1MB File Size Limit 1200MB Max Monthly Bandwidth FTP or Web-based File Manage Excellent Upgrade Options 41