donation

The Skepchicks are sponsoring a pertussis vaccination clinic at Dragon*Con over Labor Day weekend. They're teaming up with the Georgia Dept. of Health, who is providing free assistance and vaccines, but they need some assistance raising funds to cover space rental, posters, and other miscellaneous charges. If you're able to assist, you can donate to their "Hug me! I'm vaccinated!" campaign at the links included in the post. And while I'm nagging about donations, I'll also note that donations to help the flooded in Pakistan have been slow, especially compared to the Haiti earthquake. If you…
One of the challenges we faced with our new blogosphere initiative, Silence is the Enemy, was how to mobilize people to do something about the plight of rape victims. It's not that people don't have empathy for rape victims; it's that the experience of living in a war-torn nation where rape and murder are routine facts of life is so foreign and horrifying to us, we tend to tune it out. Part of the way to deal with this is to give people a clear mission - something simple they can do; in our case, donating to Doctors without Borders (as I am for the month of June), or writing to Congress, or…
Thanks to SEED's matching Bloggers Challenge funds and some generous donors who gave me DonorsChoose gift certificates for Christmas, I got to push several worthy projects to completion this winter (by "topping off" their funding). That meant that I got real, snail mail thank-you packages from those classrooms. At first I was a little ambivalent because I didn't really want the kids to spend their valuable classroom time thanking me. But then I realized that while writing those thank-you notes, they spend at least a few minutes thinking about the fact that a complete stranger cares about…
Christmas greeting card, school unknown, circa 1920. Dittrick Medical History Center from Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 Slate has an intriguing new review by Barron Lerner of a book called Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930, by John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson. The book delves into the turn-of-the-century practice of photographing medical students with cadavers - photos that today read as weird, grotesque, even offensive. The photos unearthed by Warner and Edmonson depict an astonishing variety of…