from Mashable (by Chris Taylor) — New Jersey 19-year-old Marie Sowler was diagnosed with stage 4 leukemia. Her sister and father pitched in with a double bone marrow transplant. Sadly, it didn’t work. Marie has been given just days to live.

Her fondest wish is to meet Kellin Quinn, lead singer for indie band Sleeping With Sirens. And thanks to the combined information-spreading powers of Reddit and Twitter, that wish looks like it is about to come true.

Marie’s heartbreaking video, above, was posted to YouTube by Friends Are By Your Side, a foundation that provides wigs for chemotherapy patients and helps grant wishes for terminally ill children, early Thursday. Her story was posted to Reddit Thursday afternoon, and got upvoted to the front page of the site within one hour — a rare feat.

Thus began the campaign to connect the Oregon-based Quinn to his biggest fan, spawning the Twitter hashtag #kellinmeetmarie. It reached 800 tweets per minute by Thursday evening, and also received more than a thousand notes on Tumblr.

Read the full story of Marie, Friends Are By Your Side, Reddit, Twitter and Kellin Quinn here:http://on.mash.to/10vLL3G

Maddie & Jon (Facebook)

There are so many wonderful stories being shared right now of kindness, compassion and generosity surrounding prom festivities in the United States.  (Come to think of it, I’m only seeing US-based prom stories.  Do other countries have prom?  Please share similar stories from other countries!)

Here are a few of my favorites.  I’ll update this blog post as stories are shared.

CLICK TITLES to be taken to the stories.

17-Year-Old Girl Goes Out of Her Way to Make Prom Special for Her Date With Autism:  There is no doubt that teenagers tend to get a bad rap. Between the bullying and the weird YouTube videos and the drug use and the sassiness, most parents of children dread the day our precious babies turn 13. But there are some teens who make us realize things aren’t really as bad as they might seem.

Maddie is a senior in high school, and in a story that is floating around Facebook this week, it’s revealed that she went to the parents of Jon, a junior, and asked them if she could take their son to prom. She chose this way because Jon is autistic. “He’s a junior,” she explained to Jon’s mom. “So it’s his prom too. I just think he should have the chance to go.”

Miller HS Prom King

Prom King Shows Royal Character With Gesture:   This is one of the better displays of character, unselfishness, and friendship ever.

Special Olympics Athlete Takes Miss Minnesota to Junior Prom (video)

Catholic Hospital Welcomes Gay Couples to Prom (w/video)

NYC Group Gives Away Prom Dresses to Sandy Victims:   Girls whose families were wiped out by Superstorm Sandy can still party in style, thanks to a New York City charity that has collected more than 1,000 prom dresses for the storm’s victims.

Special Education Student Becomes Prom King (article w/image at link)

Hospital Prom  (image and story at link)

Local mom organizes prom for special needs kids:  Do you remember your high school prom? It’s a rite of passage for high school students, a chance to dress up and shine. But not everyone gets the chance to go, especially students with special needs

Family Copes With Baby Son’s Loss by Creating Charity for His ‘Prom Dates’

May 5, 2013 4:00 PM

Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones’ charity – the Robin Hood Foundation — fights poverty with the hardnosed, business sense of Wall Street. Scott Pelley reports.

(Phys.org) —Researchers at India’s Institute of Technology Madras have developed a new kind of portable water purification system based on nanoparticle filtration. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team explains how their new device does its job—it employs nanoparticles to remove not just biological hazards, but toxic heavy metals as well.

The researchers note that access to clean drinking water is still a major worldwide problem—making it available to everyone, they say, would save approximately 2 million lives a year (approximately 42.6 percent of deaths are due to diarrhea alone and impact mostly children). To help reach the UN millennium development goal of doubling the number of people with sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015, the team has been applying nanoparticle technology to the problem.

The system they have developed is a two-stage filtration process that provides 10 liters of clean water in just an hour’s time. The biggest challenge, the team says, was figuring out how to deliver silver ions into the water to be processed, without using any electricity. The process also had to use a minimal amount of silver ions to meet international safety standards. The answer, they say, was to use a new material that employs silver nanoparticles that are trapped in tiny cage-like structures made of other clay materials.

Other nanoparticles are used to create other materials that serve as filters, killing microbes and sucking heavy metals out of the water, making it safe to drink or use for cooking. The first stage of the process kills viruses, bacteria and other dangerous micro-biota. The second stage absorbs heavy metals such as lead and arsenic.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-nano-scientists-kind-portable-purification.html#jCp

Brilliant use of technology to target a message for children who may be abused (or may know of another child being abused), with a way for them to get help. Most importantly, they can see they are not alone.

Granted, as this video is circulated more abusers will be aware of it and the message is no longer “secret,” but they also know people are paying much more attention.

“Sometimes you can give more, and sometimes you can give less,” said Thornton, a teacher’s assistant. “Today was one of my ‘more’ days.”

Panera, based in suburban St. Louis, has long been involved in charitable giving, donating millions of dollars and giving away leftover food to the needy. But Shaich sought more direct involvement.

“We were doing this for ourselves to see if we could make a difference with our own hands, not just write a check, but really make a contribution to the community in a real, substantive way,” Shaich said.

FULL ARTICLE

1.

Site Concept: Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. By dividing the workload into individual pages, many volunteers can work on a book at the same time, which significantly speeds up the creation process.

During proofreading, volunteers are presented with a scanned page image and the corresponding OCR text on a single web page. This allows the text to be easily compared to the image, proofread, and sent back to the site. A second volunteer is then presented with the first volunteer’s work and the same page image, verifies and corrects the work as necessary, and submits it back to the site. The book then similarly progresses through two formatting rounds using the same web interface.

Once all the pages have completed these steps, a post-processor carefully assembles them into an e-book, optionally makes it available to interested parties for ‘smooth reading’, and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive.

How You Can Help

Register with the site as a volunteer.
Read the introductory email you receive and the Beginning Proofreader’s FAQ.
Confirm your registration, sign in, choose a project, and try proofreading a page or two!

http://www.pgdp.net/c/

2. 

Volunteering for LibriVox

LibriVox volunteers read and record chapters of books in the public domain (books no longer under copyright), and make them available for free on the Internet. Practically, this means we record books published before 1923. All our recordings (including yours, if you volunteer for us) are also donated into the public domain.

We record books in all languages.

You do not need any prior experience to volunteer for LibriVox, nor do you need to audition or send us samples. All you need is your voice, some free software, your computer, and maybe an inexpensive microphone.

All LibriVox activity (book selection, project management, discussion, etc) happens on our Forum, and you’ll need to register there to join us. Our forum members are a friendly bunch, and questions will be answered there quickly (much more quickly than if you send us an email!).

We do suggest you read the document below, before registering and posting on the Forum, to get an idea of how everything works.

http://librivox.org/volunteer-for-librivox/

(Thanks to Todd Howell for the information!)

3/19/13 | 12:30:05 PM; by Dena Patrick; Founder, Wishadoo.org

“They were feeling helpless, and that’s the worst feeling in the world.  I told my wife, ‘I have to do something.  I am going to take the Amberjack to the city and help.  I have to do what I have to do.  Nobody can stop me right now.  Even if I save one person or rescue one person, that’s one person less who will suffer and die.”‘   Vincent Ardolino; Captain, Amberjack V

On September 11th, 2001, as hundreds of thousands fled south from the burning towers, people quickly discovered something we often forget: that Manhattan is an island. As officials closed all bridges, tunnels and commuter lines linking Manhattan to the rest of the world, people were trapped.

The little-told story of what happened next is the focus of a documentary short film, BOATLIFT, narrated by Tom Hanks. The film premiered at the Center for National Policy’s 9/11 Ten Year Anniversary Summit, in Washington, D.C.

BOATLIFT is the story of the largest maritime evacuation in history.

On 9/11, over 500,000 people were rescued from Manhattan’s seawalls in just nine hours.   This is the story of the resilience of the every day people at the scene that day, and the brave community who sail the waters of New York’s Harbor.

As the buildings fell, hundreds of boats of all types rushed towards the disaster. They did so at great personal risk.

These heroes pushed their boats into the harbor, and filled over and over with dazed passengers. That the evacuation was unplanned and unrehearsed is remarkable. But what is even more impressive is that not a single person was injured in the process.

The story of the 9/11 boatlift is a reminder of the sense of shared purpose and resilience that pervaded New York – and the world – in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

It is also a reminder of how helping one another, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming suffering is how we survive and thrive.  One person, one step at a time.  As Mr. Ardolino said:  Even if I save one person or rescue one person, that’s one person less who will suffer and die.

Many around the world are frightened and feel alone, in despair.  The world does not feel safe; they don’t know how they are to survive from day to day.

This is true in the United States and all countries around the world.

We need to come together for a global boatlift. 

In these modern times, with myriad forms of communication at the fingertips of so many, there is no need for anyone to feel so desperately alone and hopeless.

We each have something to offer the world, even if we are suffering ourselves.  Every single person has the capacity to offer empathy and moral support.  That is priceless, and it may open the floodgate to the many other ways we can be of service to one another without realizing it.

It is a choice.  Do you choose love or fear?  The mariners shepherding survivors on 9/11/01 chose love and compassion, in spite of their own fear.

One person at a time.  Reach out to one person at a time, and allow others to reach out to you as well.  Surely we can come together to rise above the current challenges and create a new way forward, a way of compassion, cooperation and authentic community.  We must embrace the better angels of our nature and be of good courage, knowing we are not alone.

I invite you to join others who believe in the power of community and have faith in Humanity, and know that we can do better. 

Are you ready?  Please visit www.wishadoo.org

“In the environmental movement, every time you lose a battle it’s for good, but our victories always seem to be temporary and we keep fighting them over and over again.” David Suzuki.

Welcome to the world of reverse graffiti, where the artist’s weapons are cleaning materials and where the enemy is the elements: wind, rain, pollution and decay. It’s an art form that removes dust or dirt rather than adding paint. Some find it intriguing, beguiling, beautiful and imaginative, whereas others look upon it in much the same way as traditional graffiti – a complete lack of respect for the law. Reverse graffiti challenges ideals and perceptions while at the same time shapes and changes the environment in which we live, whether people think for the better, or not.

Environmental Graffiti has d compiled a collection of 35 of the most incredible works of reverse graffiti and the artists behind them for your viewing pleasure.

READ MORE