Chapter 20

Ten Worthwhile Things to Do Online

In This Chapter

Donate to food relief by answering questions or shopping

Help poor people around the world

Choose efficient charities

Help budding entrepreneurs with tiny loans

Educate yourself and become an informed voter

Increase the world’s knowledge

Make classic books accessible on the web

Look for a cure for cancer

Mentor a teenager

Change a child’s life

The Internet lets you make the world a better place, by working directly on projects or making it possible for other people to do so. Whenever you find other ways to improve the world, send email to us at [email protected].

Feed the Hungry

On the web, you can donate money to fight world hunger while improving your vocabulary — what more could you ask of one website? Free Rice (www.freerice.com) asks you to match words with their meanings. For every correct answer you give, the site donates ten grains of rice to an international food relief organization. You start with easy words at Level 1 and work your way up; the challenge can become addictive (we tend to get stuck at level 50). If you know a teenager who is studying for a standardized college entrance test, this site is a helpful way for them to learn some new, fancy words.

Support a Charity While You Shop

If you buy on the eBay online auction site (described in Chapter 15), look for charities selling things or people selling things and donating part or all of their proceeds to charity. A little blue-and-yellow ribbon icon indicates charitable listings. If you want to see only charitable listings, visit eBay Giving Works, at givingworks.ebay.com, where you can search, buy, or sell on behalf of charities.

Find Charities That Don’t Waste Money

When you choose to give money to a charitable organization, you want the money to go to the organization’s mission, not to their management, marketing, or overhead. Charity Navigator at www.charitynavigator.org helps you evaluate how efficiently your favorite charities spend their (or your) money. For more detailed information on individual charities, Guidestar at www.guidestar.org has details about every charity in the country.

Become a Microfinancier or a Philanthropist

Microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize for starting the Grameen Bank, which makes tiny loans to people in Bangladesh and other developing countries to start small rural businesses. Kiva (www.kiva.org) lets you become your own microfinance lender to groups of people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for projects such as starting a sewing business, delivery service, or fish market. Loans start at $25.

Heifer International (www.heifer.org) provides livestock and other resources to poor farmers for both food security and income. A heifer (that’s a young cow, for you city folk) costs $500, and a share of a goat or pig starts at $10.

Educate Yourself

Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Keeping up with national, international, political, and economic news is your responsibility as a citizen. Try searching the web for newspapers; almost all have websites. Some prominent newspapers charge if you want to read more than a few articles a month, such as the New York Times (www.nytimes.com), but most online newspapers are free. At election time, go to Project Vote Smart (www.votesmart.org) to find unbiased information about issues and candidates.

If you need background information, you can take a course at the Ivy League level on almost any subject at MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu). Videos of lectures, lecture notes, and exams are all posted online. You receive no credit, but you can get educated for free!

Edit an Encyclopedia

Wikis were designed to enable groups of people to work together to make and maintain websites. A wiki (named for the interterminal bus at Honolulu International Airport, which is in turn named for the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki, which literally means “in a hurry” — no, really) can have an unlimited number of authors, all of whom can add and change pages within the wiki website. Unlike a blog, it doesn’t have to be a sequence of journal entries. Instead, you can organize your text any way you like, including making as many new, interlinked pages as you like.

If this process sounds potentially chaotic when you have more than one author, it is, but most wikis have ground rules that keep the group moving in more or less the same direction. A wiki can work well if it has a single author or if it has a group of people who trust each other to edit each other’s writing. For example, a group of co-workers can make a wiki that contains information about a project they’re working on. A church or club can make a wiki with committee meeting minutes, mission statements, plans, and schedules.

The biggest wiki of them all is Wikipedia, at en.wikipedia.org, a collaborative encyclopedia that is, with more than 4 million entries (in English, plus millions in other languages), well on its way to including all human knowledge.

Not only is Wikipedia a free encyclopedia, but it also lets you edit its articles. If you feel knowledgeable about a topic, look it up in Wikipedia. Most pages have an Edit link so that you can add what you know. If you find mistakes or have more to say, just set up a free account and then click the Edit tab. If no article exists, Wikipedia offers to let you create one. Read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing for how to edit existing articles and write new ones, following the rules of Neutral Point of View. A page might have a sidebar with complaints about the article from the Wikipedia editors, begging you to help improve it.

Digitize Old Books

Many websites require that you decode some blurry text known as a CAPTCHA (which allegedly stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) before it will let you set up an account or post a message. The reCAPTCHA project at Carnegie-Mellon University (now owned by Google) uses CAPTCHAs to help digitize old books and newspapers. The scanning process first makes a photographic image of a page and then tries to identify the words in the text. It can recognize most words, but some are just too blurry or obscure for automatic identification. That’s where you come in. Every reCAPTCHA challenge shows you two words: one that’s already been decoded and one that hasn’t, as shown in Figure 20-1. When you type the two words, reCAPTCHA checks the one it knows, and if you get that one right, it assumes that you probably got the other one right, too. Just to make sure, the unknown words are shown to several different people, and if they all agree, the word is considered decoded. ReCAPTCHA is used by thousands of websites all over the world, showing about 30 million CAPTCHAs per day. Not all of them are solved, of course, but that’s still a lot of decoded words.

You’re helping the reCAPTCHA project every time you solve a two-word reCAPTCHA challenge. For more information, see its website at www.google.com/recaptcha.

Search for Extraterrestrial Life or Cure Cancer

The SETI@home (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu) scientific experiment uses Internet-connected home and office computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The idea is to have thousands of otherwise idle PCs and Macs perform the massive calculations needed to extract the radio signals of other civilizations from intergalactic noise. You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes data collected at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

If eavesdropping on space aliens seems a bit far out, you may enjoy lending your computer’s idle time to solving problems in cryptography and mathematics. Distributed.net (www.distributed.net) manages several projects. (Feel free to join the Internet Gurus team there.) When you sign up to help a project, you can set up its program on your computer to run when the computer isn’t otherwise occupied, and your donation of computer time helps achieve the goal of the project.

If math and cryptography don’t ring your chimes, consider joining the Folding at Home project at folding.stanford.edu. This project studies how proteins acquire their three-dimensional shapes, an important question in medical research. By signing up to run its program, you’re helping with basic research that may help find a cure for “Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many cancers and cancer-related syndromes.”

You can find other ways to volunteer to help with scientific research at crowdcrafting.org.

Mentor a Teenager or Young Adult Online

An adult mentor can make all the difference to a young person struggling with life. Several online mentoring websites match adults with youth. Icouldbe.org serves 2,300 underprivileged junior high, high school, and college students every year. Sign up to share your career expertise — or your life experience — with the next generation. iMentor (www.imentor.org) concentrates on the New York City area.

Adopt a Kid

Do you surf the web for hours each day? Maybe your life needs more meaning. Adopting a child is more of a commitment than upgrading to the latest Microsoft operating system, but at least kids grow up eventually and you don’t have to reinstall them to get rid of viruses. These two excellent websites list special children in need of homes: rainbowkids.com and capbook.org. It can’t hurt to look.