Kudos to these kids for coming up with such a great idea!!

The Cell Phones for Soldiers program was started in April of 2004 by 13-year-old Brittany Bergquist and her 12-year-old brother Robbie of Norwell, Massachusetts.

After hearing a news report about a local soldier who ran up a massive phone bill calling home from Iraq, they decided they wanted to do something to help. Brittany and Robbie donated their piggy bank money, collected snack money from their friends at school, and with $21.00, they went to the bank to open an account. The South Shore Savings Bank of Hanover, Massachusetts donated $500.00 to help them get started.

Their goal is to help our soldiers serving overseas call home. They hope to provide as many soldiers as possible with prepaid calling cards for now with an ultimate goal of providing banks of satellite phones, video phones and VOIP communications. Through generous donations and the recycling of used cell phones from drop-off sites across the country, they have already distributed thousands of calling cards to soldiers in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Jim Kelly, Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, is a proud sponsor of Cell Phones for Soldiers. With Jim’s help, not only will you be helping soldiers call home, you will be saving money at the same time.

For information on how to send your old cellphones in go here

With summer approaching, I think this is an important issue. Being a certified pool and spa operator, I can tell you this is a bigger danger than most people know. Chemical levels are often not what they should be, frankly, because many operators don’t know what they are doing or don’t care. I am very leary of all public pools and it’s a given I’m not getting in a hot tub unless it’s mine. I carry a test kit with me. (yes, I am obsessive about this issue because I know the hidden dangers) I’ve been in 5 star hotels where the condition of the water in the pools and spas was so bad it was even visually apparent. At municipal pools, many times it’s not checked that people shower prior to getting in the pool, babies aren’t checked to be sure they have swim diapers on, people get in with their clothes or with their underwear on under swim trunks. The staff is often underpaid, young, not trained properly and they don’t give a crap. Look for these things, and if you see them, file a complaint. I could go on and on about this……but I’ll leave it at this. Beware.

By Denise Mann
WebMD FeatureReviewed by Louise Chang, MD

First Jaws kept millions of Americans out of the water, and now some experts fear that the rapid increase of recreational water illnesses (RWI) may do the same thing. And they caution that with the soaring rates of childhood obesity, anything that prevents kids from getting regular exercise — including swimming — may do more harm than good.

RWI refers to any illness or infection caused by organisms that contaminate water in pools, lakes, hot tubs, and oceans, resulting in diarrhea, skin rashes, swimmer’s ear, and other conditions. And they are on the rise. The rate has more than doubled in the past 10 years, according to data from the CDC.

“No one who swims is safe from RWIs,” says Alan Greene, MD, an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., and author of several books including From First Kicks to First Steps.

In the summer of 1975, Jaws had beachgoers heeding the advice of the movie’s tagline, “Don’t go in the water.” But unlike great white sharks that may lurk below the ocean’s surface, simple prevention methods as well as quick treatment can help keep RWIs at bay — where they belong, Greene says. “Not swallowing water and drying your ears can reduce the great majority of RWIs,” he says.

As with most things, the best defense is a good offense.

More at WebMD

I’ve been waiting for this!

Farewell, wires? Power beamed through air

A-WiTricity- can light up lamps and laptops; system touted as safe, efficient
Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

Wireless power is transmitted over a 7-foot distance from the coil on the left to the coil on the right, where it powers a 60-watt light bulb. The researchers are obstructing the direct line of sight between the coils. Front row: Peter Fisher and Robert Moffatt; second row: Marin Soljacic; third row: Andre Kurs, John Joannopoulos and Aristeidis Karalis.

Power cables and even batteries might become a thing of the past using a new technique that can transmit power wirelessly to cell phones, laptops, MP3 players, household robots and other electronics.

Scientists lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source 7 feet (2 meters) away with their new technique, with no physical connection between the source and the appliance. The researchers have dubbed their concept “WiTricity,” as in “wireless electricity.”

MIT physicist Marin Soljacic began thinking years ago about how to transmit power wirelessly so his cell phone could recharge without ever being plugged in. Scientists have pursued wireless power transmission for years - notably, eccentric genius Nikola Tesla, who devoted much energy toward it roughly a century ago.

The problem with wireless power transmission is that broadcasting energy in all directions - say, as radio waves - can be tremendously wasteful, with a vast majority of power ending up squandered into free space. One could imagine focusing energy along just one or a few directions - say, using laser beams - but such approaches can readily prove dangerous and cumbersome, requiring an uninterrupted line of sight between the source and device as well as sophisticated tracking systems on the device if it is mobile. (Scientists have proposed beaming power from orbital solar power stations to Earth for years.)

Full article at MSNBC.com

Funding Battle Highlights American Embrace of Moronitude

ORLANDO–I’m against the war. Who isn’t? (Maybe the two percent who tell The New York Times/CBS poll that Iraq is going “very well.”) But this column isn’t about the war. It’s about logic.

In his new book Al Gore argues that Americans are losing the ability to, well, argue. “Reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions,” claims the President-in-Internal-Exile. Never mind left versus right; irrationality has become so prevalent that outlandish jingoism and sentimental lunacy have displaced reason as the framework of our national dialogue. What passed for debate on the latest funding bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan makes a convincing case for Gore’s thesis.

The 2006 midterm sweep was widely interpreted as an electoral mandate to end the war. Democrats were supposedly now in the driver’s seat on Iraq. So why do they keep steering right, as if November never happened? Despite Democratic control of both houses of Congress and polls that show widespread contempt (76 percent) for the war and Bush (63 percent), party leaders felt they had no choice but to give Bush exactly what he wanted: another $100 billion, no strings attached.

Even for the majority that believes invading Iraq was a mistake, there are several reasonable, even liberal, arguments for staying the course: preventing a bigger civil war, keeping the conflict from spreading into other Middle Eastern nations, honoring our commitment to rebuild a country we’ve destroyed, the superpower’s strategic imperative of flexing its military prowess just because. Logic, however, never entered the debate. Instead, an absurd rhetorical turd carried the day, among prowar Republicans and reluctant Democrats alike: supporting the troops requires funding the war.

“Like it or not, we ran out of options,” said David Obey, the Democratic chairman of the House appropriations committee. “There has never been a chance of a snowball in Hades that Congress would cut off those funds to those troops in the field.” Even Hillary Clinton, one of just 14 senators who voted no, said she’d thought “long and hard” about her vote because she wanted to “do everything we can to protect the troops.”

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)

read the rest of this opinion at YAHOO! NEWS

from The New York Times Editorial Staff

For months, senators have listened to a parade of well-coached Justice Department witnesses claiming to know nothing about how nine prosecutors were chosen for firing. This week, it was the turn of Bradley Schlozman, a former federal attorney in Missouri, to be uninformative and not credible. It is time for Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to deliver subpoenas that have been approved for Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and their top aides, and to make them testify in public and under oath.

Mr. Schlozman was appointed United States attorney in Missouri while the state was in the midst of a hard-fought Senate race. In his brief stint, he pushed a lawsuit, which was thrown out by a federal judge, that could have led to thousands of Democratic-leaning voters being wrongly purged from the rolls. Just days before the election, he indicted voter registration workers from the liberal group Acorn on fraud charges. Republicans quickly made the indictments an issue in the Senate race.

Mr. Schlozman said it did not occur to him that the indictments could affect the campaign. That is hard to believe since the Justice Department’s guidelines tell prosecutors not to bring vote fraud investigations right before an election, so as not to affect the outcome. He also claimed, laughably, that he did not know that Acorn was a liberal-leaning group.

Mr. Schlozman fits neatly into the larger picture. Prosecutors who refused to use their offices to help Republicans win elections, like John McKay in Washington State, and David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired. Prosecutors who used their offices to help Republicans did well.

Congress has now heard from everyone in the Justice Department who appears to have played a significant role in the firings of the prosecutors. They have all insisted that the actual decisions about whom to fire came from somewhere else. It is increasingly clear that the somewhere else was the White House. If Congress is going to get to the bottom of the scandal, it has to get the testimony of Mr. Rove, his aides Scott Jennings and Sara Taylor, Ms. Miers and her deputy, William Kelley.

The White House has offered to make them available only if they do not take an oath and there is no transcript. Those conditions are a formula for condoning perjury, and they are unacceptable. As for documents, the White House has released piles of useless e-mail messages. But it has reported that key e-mails to and from Mr. Rove were inexplicably destroyed. At the same time, it has argued that e-mails of Mr. Rove’s that were kept on a Republican Party computer system, which may contain critical information, should not be released.

This noncooperation has gone on long enough. Mr. Leahy should deliver the subpoenas for the five White House officials and make clear that if the administration resists, Congress will use all available means to get the information it needs.