By A. Green
While normally this article would tell you about exciting new products, this is the giving season. So, let's explore a few ways you can give without investing much time, and it won't cost you a cent.
Visit this website every day, it will quiz your vocabulary, and for every correct answer, they will donate twenty grains of rice through the United Nations World Hunger Program. The vocabulary list adjusts automatically based on how many you are getting right and wrong, there are 50 levels: level one being words that might challenge someone learning English for the first time, level 50 meaning you are a super genius who should be receiving a Nobel prize any day now. When I was somewhere around level 40 I received the word "tintinnabulation." I guessed and got it right, but my vocabulary skills are not the point, the point is: when you play, hungry people eat rice! In under ten minutes I was able to earn 1620 grains of rice. (A good estimate for an average bowl of rice is 150 grains.) So, I donate rice at an average speed of one bowl per minute. This is a neat way to see how everyone can make a difference, and very small actions, if taken by many people, have a very great effect. An interesting side note: If you click on the options tab of freerice.com you can set it to remember your vocabulary and give you a running total of all the rice you've ever earned through the site!
Now that we've done our part to end world hunger, how about we work on ending disease... The basic principle is this: rarely are you using your computer at 100% capacity. In fact, often, your computer is hooked up to the internet but you aren't using it at all (for some of you this may only happen while you are sleeping.) By downloading software onto your computer, you can allow medical researchers to use your computer to aid in major calculations. They network the unused processing capabilities from your machine and others that have downloaded the software, and perform the calculations that would otherwise take a great deal of time. This particular site will allow your computer or PS3 to aid research in "protein folding" a process that plays a key factor in diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Cancer, and Mad Cow, as well as many others. Letting this program use your unused processing capability should not slow down your computer, but it will cause it to use more energy and generate more heat. So, you could save the energy, and the fan on your computer, or you could help cure cancer, your call.
But what about all of the other worthy causes in the world? Goodsearch is a site that lets you donate to a charity of your choice, by searching the internet. Just use this site for anything you would normally Google, and they will donate about a penny per search to any charity you like. You can even add your own charity, as long as it has non-profit status. I know, a penny isn't much, but neither is a grain of rice. If you use this site a lot, and lots of other people use this site a lot, that adds up to a lot of pennies. Now if only I had a penny every time someone googled "get paid to take surveys online."
By the way, it is lame to gift somebody a certificate that states you made a donation to some aide organization in your friends' name. Get them a real present, like a DVD or something AND make a donation in their honor. |
Ok, here we go again, sifting through the garbage of trashy magazines for women. I am blown away here. I really had no idea that this particular assignment was going to be so difficult... 
While normally this article would tell you about exciting new products, this is the giving season. So, let's explore a few ways you can give without investing much time, and it won't cost you a cent. 
I was very excited about the December date involving going to look at Christmas lights, because that's so romantic, and some of my best memories involve Christmas lights. Then they come up with this whole gaming themed issue, so I decided to go with the flow. 