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Keeping Tabs on Your Reps
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2002-11-26
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I recently discovered a free
and useful service for keeping track of how your Senators and House
Rep. vote on key issues. Congress.org
has a thing called MegaVote that
sends you an e-mail once a week letting you know how they voted and
upcoming votes of interest. They also provide an option of writing your
reps through a single convenient form. It seems like they just e-mail
you the one time per week and do not send you a bunch of junk mail, so
I've found it helpful thus far. Democracy doesn't work unless you
educate yourself and then make your voice heard.
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Distributed Proofreading and Free Books
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2002-11-21
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You may know of Project Gutenberg. They provide
etexts of public domain works (for free). This means you can go to
their site and read or print out most of "the classics" and
increasingly, tons of other old writings. Someone has to scan these
books and proofread them before they can be put online. For one
individual or even a small group of volunteers, doing even a single
book would take a really long time. But, what if a whole bunch of
people just proofread one page a day? If enough people participated, you
could get through hundreds of books per day! This is what is happening
at Distributed
Proofreaders. They are harnessing the millions of eyes on the
internet and they just ask you to proofread one page per day. If you
know how to read this, then you're qualified. Go help them out. It'll
actually help you, by giving you more free books online.
While you're enjoying some free books, you should also check out The Freedom to Read Foundation.
If you didn't know, librarians only look mousy and quiet. You
try to censor something or restrict someone's access to something, and
librarians are some of the first people to go ballistic. Michael Moore (author
of Stupid
White Men and filmmaker behind Bowling
for Columbine) told a story on NPR
a while back about how his publisher was going to scrap his now bestselling
book (even after already printing 50,000 copies) because it was too
controversial and critical of Pres. Bush (especially after 9/11.) He
just happened to tell this story at a reading at a bookstore with a
librarian in attendance. The librarian sent an e-mail describing the
publisher's censorship plans to a list of other librarians. Well, they
didn't take it well. The publisher calls up Michael and says, "What did
you tell the librarians?!" Michael has no idea what they're talking
about. "We're getting loads of hate mail from librarians!"
The publisher couldn't take the heat. They published the book. They
made a fortune. (It's now in its 34th week on the NYTimes bestseller
list.)
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