Ideal for people with some degree of hearing loss, the Captioned Telephone works like any other telephone with one important addition: It displays every word the caller says throughout the conversation. CapTel users can listen to the caller, and can also read the written captions in the CapTel's bright display window.

This is cool technology for people who have difficulty making telephone calls due to the inability to hear. If cost is an issue people can apply to get this phone free of charge.

The Captioned Telephone

Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, was a driving force in the push for racial equality in the 1950's and the 1960's. In 1963, King and his staff focused on Birmingham, Alabama. They marched and protested non-violently, raising the ire of local officials who sicced water cannon and police dogs on the marchers, whose ranks included teenagers and children. The bad publicity and break-down of business forced the white leaders of Birmingham to concede to some anti-segregation demands.

Thrust into the national spotlight in Birmingham, where he was arrested and jailed, King organized a massive march on Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he evoked the name of Lincoln in his "I Have a Dream" speech, which is credited with mobilizing supporters of desegregation and prompted the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This is a speech that is very important to this country but I never heard or read the whole speech until I was a freshman in college. I am a day late but I submit here the full text of the speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

The I Have a Dream Speech

Geez that is crazy unexpected!!

Actor Heath Ledger found dead - CNN.com

The Things That Suck
Air travel
Batteries
Booze
Car alarms
Credit cards
Customer service
DVD sound
Evite
Fuel economy
Hearing aids
Infertility treatments
Junk mail
Knees and backs
Medical records
Office copiers
Plastic packaging
Prescription drugs
Printer cartridges
Radio
Roads
Robots
Science
Spam filters
Subscription cards
Teleconferencing
Ticket purchasing
Tomatoes
Traffic
Vending machines
Web video
Whiteboards
Wireless speakers

Cute article and if you click on the things in the list it tells you why they suck in a very acurate and sometimes somewhat technical way.

The 33 Things That Make Us Crazy

When your eyes start to go, you have some satisfying remedies. Glasses — a centuries-old technology that costs a couple hundred bucks and is often covered by health insurance — or contacts, which are constantly improving. But if your hearing starts to fade, get ready for sticker shock and frustration. Hearing aids can cost more than $3,000 apiece, they don't do a good job of correcting the problem, and insurance companies rarely pay for them.
Welcome to the screwy world of ear gear. Because these devices are highly specialized, manufacturers build most of the parts from scratch — their products benefit from neither economies of scale nor third-party innovations. And as a result, there has been little progress in improving three critical components: the microphone, the microprocessor, and the battery.
The woes start with the microphone. Typical hearing aid mics pick up sound from all directions. The resulting cacophony is exhausting for the user, who must concentrate to isolate relevant input. High-end hearing aids add a directional microphone trained in front of the listener, but that increases cost and, critically, bulk.
The microphone feeds a processor, which amplifies certain areas of the audio spectrum according to the user's particular type of hearing loss. But inevitably, some signals recirculate between mic and speaker, producing feedback —

I full heartedly agree with this article. It sums up all of the downfalls of having to wear and maintain a hearing aid including the lovely price tag. :P (This a link off of the "Things That Make Us Crazy" article)

Why Things Suck: Hearing Aids

This is an interesting tool. I like that you can compare you answers to the politician and see where that info came from

Electoral Compass

Anna is a chatbot designed to pass the Turing Test - having a human judge incapable of telling that the bot they are chatting to is not human. The most formalized Turing Test is the Loebner Prize contest, which Anna finished seventh in 2002. Anna is a fork of ALICE, which won the competition in 2000 and 2001. Alice is designed to be a general web-bot, however, whereas Anna is really more of a general conversationalist bot, but tailored to the competition. Anna is written in a special, easy-to-learn interpreted language, called AIML.

Wow and all these years I had no idea...... I'm a bot.

Anna. Evolution. Revolution.

FINCA International provides financial services to the world's lowest-income entrepreneurs so they can create jobs, build assets and improve their standard of living. We target the poorest of the working poor: those who have the least access to services such as loans, savings programs, and insurance. Our clients include women, who make up 70 percent of the world's poor; individuals unable to find work in the formal sector; families displaced by war and internal conflict; the rural poor; and those affected by chronic poverty. With more than 20 years' experience and over 500,000 clients on four continents, FINCA offers a proven solution to poverty.

These are the type of programs that I feel really help a community

FINCA International

I was doing some digging around for sites to use with my students and stumbled upon this. This is a site designed for kids but I think it is extremely interesting for adults too. You can click on a congress person and get a link to their website, information on how to contact them, and all kinds of other useful information like where they went to school, what degrees they have and how long they have been in office. You can also click on an election cycle and see who contributed to their campaign. This site also boasts break downs in the congress members demographically. The other cool thing is that you can click on a committee and see members, last meeting, jurisdiction, and staff members complete with phone numbers. Browse the site. I found it informative.

Information About Members of Congress