Inspirational and good news.
Hey people in Ontario, if you can vote you should vote!
Things Are Good supports anybody you want to vote for except the Tea Conservative Party. Vote for the Ontario you want to see, vote with hope and optimism. Vote for a party that will actually make the province a better place to live!
NDP
Green Party
Liberal Party
Ontario Conservative Party 😉
In addition to the links above Torontoist has great primers on issues in this election.
CUSO is a Canadian-based non-profit that sends people oversees as volunteers to help the developing world. Recently as a drive to get more adults to help them out (you know you want to) they have produced a couple videos to show their work.
Every year, around 120,000 young Peruvians join the ranks of those who are neither studying nor employed. There just isn’t enough work, and many can’t afford schooling.
But despite the obstacles that life puts before them, many youth in San Juan de Miraflores — a poor neighbourhood of Lima, Peru — are creating a better future for themselves and their families.
Three youth and a Canadian volunteer involved in an innovative Youth Employment Centre in San Juan agreed to tell their stories.
‘Jacky’s Story’ is the first of three videos following youth and volunteers involved in the Centros de Jovenes y Empleo. The centre is a collaboration of CUSO-VSO, the Quebec NGO Carrefour Jeunesse Emploi de l’Outaouais, and the Peruvian NGO Kallpa.
If you’re not Canadian, and many readers aren’t, perhaps there is an organization in your country similar to CUSO-VSO.
Link to CUSO-VSO
If you thought playing games was just for fun, well Foldit is a game that has people solve problems for science. That itself is pretty neat, but what pushes this one over the edge is that Foldit has brought some great results and fast!
Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — using a set of online tools.
To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks.
Cracking the enzyme “provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs,” says the study, referring to the lifeline medication against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a long-standing scientific problem.
“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab said in a press release.
Thanks Kathryn!
I’ll come out and say that I”m a keen supporter of Greenpeace so I’m happy to point out all the good work they’ve done over the past 40 years that they’ve been around. You can see what Greenpeace actions we’ve covered at Things Are Good in the past.
Greenpeace has put up a slideshow on their site celebrating the accomplishments, you can view it here.
You can read Greenpeace’s blog post on the event here.
From the CBC:
“We wouldn’t see the kind of action by governments that we’ve had in the last 40 years if you hadn’t had that kind of pressure applied by the environmental movement.”
Sept. 15, 1971, is cited as the beginning of Greenpeace, the day a group of anti-nuclear activists in Vancouver called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee chartered a ship with the aim of heading off underground nuclear tests by the U.S. government on the remote Alaskan island of Amchitka. In anticipation of the protest, the vessel, Phyllis Cormack, was renamed Greenpeace, a term coined by activist Bill Darnell.
The ship was ultimately blocked by the U.S. Coast Guard before it could reach Amchitka, and the scheduled tests went ahead as planned. But the protest aroused significant public interest in the group, which was renamed Greenpeace International in 1972.
Read more from the CBC on Greenpeace’s 40 year history.
Malaria No More has a book released through The Domino Project that is a collection of essays on the state of malaria. The good news is that when you purchase a copy of this book, the money spent goes directly to campaigns that stop the spread of malaria.
The Domino Project in conjunction with Box of Crayons is working with Malaria No More to help end malaria. No More’s mission is to end malaria in Africa by 2015. A child dies every 45 seconds from malaria.
It isn’t very often that a book has the power to save a life. Yes, good books can improve lives, shape lives, even change lives. But when was the last time a book literally helped save a life? If you’re reading this page, the answer is right now.
$20 from the purchase of each copy of End Malaria will go to to Malaria No More to send a mosquito net to a family in need and to support life-saving work in the fight against malaria. That’s 100% of the Kindle sale, and most of the hard copy price ($25).
Thanks Allen!
You can buy the book through Amazon.