January
8

Charity Engine – BOINC

If you’re anything like me, you have every intention of being a good person. You’d love to get out there and donate your time and money to a variety of charities and causes, but you just don’t have the time. You also leave your internet connected PC on all the time, despite knowing that it is using electricity. The Charity Engine offers an opportunity to help charity and scientific causes while putting that otherwise wasted electricity to good use. It also offers you a chance to win a prize.

Charity Engine Logo

The Charity Engine is a recent development on the long running services provided by BOINC (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). BOINC uses the CPU processing capability of internet connected computers to process data for a variety of scientific causes that cannot afford to rent time on supercomputers. It was originally developed for use by SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). It has since been used for research on a variety of causes as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics.

The Charity Engine takes things a step further, using the same software base. Rather than simply choosing a variety of causes you wish to support, the Charity Engine rents out your CPU power to anyone who will pay, and then divides those profits to donate them to charity and to encourage users to join by giving it away as a prize via a lottery of users based on your production. As you run the Charity Engine, you rack up credits for the amount of CPU usage your computer provides the network, which are then used in the lottery. In addition to those who will pay for the CPU power, the Charity Engine also devotes a small portion of the CPU power to those aforementioned projects on BOINC.

For more information, go to The Charity Engine – How it Works.

Sign up for the Charity Engine and put your computer to work for charity. Use the invite code FRIEND.

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Filed under: Causes by Matt McBrien at 11:07 pm
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October
1

Cystic Fibrosis and my friend Gabe

When I was growing up, I went to public school here in Findlay, Ohio, and I became friends way back in elementary school (it might have even been as early as kindergarten), with a boy by the name of Gabe Poland. Gabe always seemed to cough a lot, and as a child I didn’t really understand it. I thought he was sick all the time. And it turns out, in a way, that he was. Gabe was diagnosed at a young age with Cystic Fibrosis.

I’m not going to claim to be anything close to a doctor, but let me briefly explain what Cystic Fibrosis is. Basically, Cystic Fibrosis is a disease which affects the entire body, caused by a mutated gene. From what I understand, the gene controls the work of bodily fluids like mucus and sweat. With the gene working incorrectly, it’s basically like the body isn’t oiled correctly, and parts start to work wrong. One of the most commons issues with Cystic Fibrosis is frequent lung infections. Cystic Fibrosis is a seriously debilitating disease, and leads to an early death for those diagnosed with it. Based on data from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (and which I swiped from Wikipedia), in 1959, the median age of survival of children with Cystic Fibrosis was six months. In the United States, the life expectancy for infants born in 2008 with Cystic Fibrosis is 37.4 years.

Research and treatment for the disease has gotten better over the years. I remember when I was in elementary school with Gabe, it was a possibility that he wouldn’t even live long enough to graduate from high school. He has done that and more. He has worked with his disease and gone on to some real academic success, graduating from college and law school. He passed the bar for the state of Ohio, and will hopefully become a practicing lawyer. But first, he needs to take care of some issues with his disease. His lungs have basically given out. He needs a double lung transplant to survive.

On Saturday, October 16th, from 5-8pm at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church (directions) in Findlay, Ohio, there will be a fundraiser in association with the National Transplant Assistance Fund (NTAF) to raise money to help cover the costs for Gabe’s transplant. There will be a Spaghetti Dinner, with tickets costing $7. There will also be some sort of Chinese Auction. For more information, check out the Facebook Event Page – Spaghetti Dinner & Auction in honor of Gabriel Poland. If you’d like to contribute, but won’t be able to make it to the event, you can do so online at the NTAF website.

Gabe is also keeping a blog about his progress and thoughts through the transplant journey. It is some truly inspired writing. It is entitled Breathe Easy. I encourage everyone to check it out, and keep Gabe in your prayers.

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Filed under: Causes by Matt McBrien at 4:22 am
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