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Rice from Shakespeare, how to help cure cancer, 60 million ways spam helps literature, a first-person snooper, and solid proof you may be the wrong gender.

In their quest for a share of our increasingly strained attention capacity, many charities and nonprofits have resorted to some rather atypical methods. Including online games, which let people contribute to a good cause simply by playing. Here’s our pick of the 5 coolest, smartest and funnest charity-benefiting games.

FREE RICE

You may recall this project from a while back. You may even have a slight FreeRice problem — the thing is positively addictive.

“The thing” being a neat little web game that tests your knowledge of various “advanced vocabulary” words SAT-style and donates 20 grains of rice to third-world countries for every right answer you get. Just yesterday, 72,724,400 grains were donated thanks to vocab junkies like ourselves, with over 50 million grains donated since the game’s inception a little over a year ago.

And the “game” is no joke either. Composed by professional lexicographers, it ensures maximum benefits for your vocabulary and aims to benefit people in the developed world as well by helping us sound smarter, formulate ideas better, make greater impact with our speech, score better on tests, and give better job interviews. The game even remembers your vocab level as you play, so it automatically adjusts the difficulty level to ensure you’re making tangible progress. There are 50 levels total, but getting above 48 is Shakespearean.

FreeRice is a sister site to Poverty.com and donations go through the UN World Food Program. And while 20 grains of rice may not seem like much, there are millions of people playing. Together, it’s a chip at the world’s enormous hunger problem that causes 25,000 deaths per day, most of them children.

The idea, needless to say, is pure genius. Talk about symbiotic benefit. Not to mention it’s certainly a better (as in funner and gooder) timesuck than watching random people’s cats fall into toilets on YouTube.

Go, be all smart and humanitarian. And check out FreeRice’s extended web presence on Facebook, MySpace and Think MTV.

Word up.

FOLD.IT

Hooked on House, Scrubs or Grey’s Anatomy? Here’s your chance to make your contribution to medicine without the drama.

fold.It is a brilliant game that lets your inner puzzle geek help advance key scientific research. How? You’re given a cool 3D model (which happens to be an actual protein structure) and you have to figure out the most compact way to fold it, competing against other players. That 3D model is actually scientists’ best guess as to how that protein may be shaped. Because proteins naturally take the most compact shape possible, finding an even more compact way to fold one completely changes any previous understanding of that protein.

Why is this important? A protein’s shape determines its function. So by helping discover the shape, you’re essentially helping scientist understand how a protein works, which enables them to target it with drugs.

Plus, it sure beats poring over grandma’s Manhattan skyline puzzle.

>>> via GOOD

RECAPTCHA

Okay, so this one isn’t really a game. CAPTCHA, the ubiquitous anti-spam human filter, is more of an annoyance, really — spammers get annoyed that they can’t get their bots past it, and non-spammers get annoyed because, well, we’re not spammers and we have to waste time on it.

That’s exactly what inspired the guys at Carnegie Mellon University and the Internet Archive to put that colossal waste of humanity’s time — 150,000 hours of work each day, to be exact — to use. reCAPTCHA was born, a project that capitalizes on this human effort by helping digitize books written in the pre-computer (yikes!) age.

Here’s the tricky part about digitizing books the usual way — they’re first scanned, which turns each page into an image, and computer software attempts to turn the shapes of the letters into actual digital text. That’s called “Optical Character Recognition.” Which is cool, but it’s incredibly inaccurate.

That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It takes words that can’t be read by a computer and places them in those annoying little spam puzzles, so that actual humans help decode the text. It’s called human computation, and it’s absolutely awesome.

Like any large-scale wisdom-of-the-crowds approach, the average of millions of people’s guesses amounts to a virtually error-free result. (There are, after all, 60 million CAPTCHAs solved by humans around the world every day, just in the normal course of web-dwelling.)

The project is currently helping digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

So if you run a website, especially a blog, grab reCAPTCHA for your site. And check out this interview with reCAPTCHA founder Luis von Ahn on Wired.

HOMELAND GITMO

When Boubacar Bah, a Guinean tailor detained for overstaying his visa, died in a New Jersey jail last year, human rights organization Break Through jumped on it with a rather unusual effort to raise awareness about the inhumane conditions of immigrant detention in the U.S. (We’re talking pregnant women being forced to give birth in shackles and HIV-positive patients being denied medication.)

Homeland Gitmo, a web-based video game, casts the player as a reporter seeking clues in the death of Mr. Bah.

It may sound hum-drum, but the investigation, the plot and the interface actually make for a pretty thrilling game. The reporter takes an undercover job as a detention guard and discovers things backed by links to real newspaper articles, court documents and other factual material.

This kind of first-person appeal brilliantly taps basic psychological principles for impact much greater than a mere article about the incident could have. To take it a step further, the site offers multiple ways to take action — finding your local Gitmo, speaking up online, and donating.

>>> via The New York Times

GWAP

The web has its fair share of funny-sounding names (Squidoo and Google, we’re looking at you), but GWAP actually stands for something, literally: Games With A Purpose.

The outfit, out of Carnegie Mellon University, designs games for humans that help make computers a little more intelligent. It’s like that “human computation” thing we mentioned about reCAPTCHA, which is no surprise since reCAPTCHA mastermind Louis von Ahn is actually one of GWAP’s founders.

Currently, they offer 5 different games, all based on a pairing principle that randomly matches players up and gives each partner various tasks. Check them out:

• The ESP Game, which shows both partners the same image and asks each to guess what words the other is using to describe the image. Players win points for correct guesses. It’s essentially an image tagging effort, designed to make image search richer and more efficient.
• Tag a Tune, which is similar to ESP in structure, but obviously uses tunes instead of images and asks players to decide whether their partner is listening to the same tune based on words he or she is using to describe it.
• Verbosity, a Taboo-style game in which one partner, the Describer, has to describe a word giving clues to its meaning and the other, the Guesser, has to — duh — guess it. The game, surprisingly fun and addictive, aims to collect common-sense facts about words, stuff that’s strongly associated with a certain concept but wouldn’t be found in the word’s dictionary definition.



• Squigl, another image-based initiative, in which players are shown the same image and each holds down the mouse to trace an object their partner is describing. They get points if their traces match. It’s a genius concept that aims to help computers recognize objects more easily by their shape.
• Matchin, which simply shows players two images and asks them which one they like better. This one was the foundation of GWAP’s Gender Test, which promises to correctly guess your gender based on images you pick out of image pairs. (We regret to say it failed miserably on us, telling us with 70% certainty that we were the other gender.)

Tag a Tune is probably our favorite, party because we consider ourselves rather the musicologist types, and partly because music search is the least developed of the tag-based search genres and needs the most grassroots help.

So start playing nice and pick up a new favorite timesuck that scores you some karma points to offset the should-be-working guilt.

How to nail the I-don’t-give-a-fuck look by actually not giving a fuck but hopefully getting one.

TRICK OR TRITE

Halloween, that special time when people who should not be roaming the streets half-naked get to roam the streets half-naked, is almost upon us. And if you’re employed by any part of the creative industry and/or consider yourself a “hipster” (despite never admitting to it), so is that tortuous hunt for the right costume. You know, the one that lets you out-hip, out-snark, and out-I’m-too-cool-to-care-about-this-kind-of-stuff everyone else. The one from the comfort of which you can make fun of all the vixens, sluts, bachelors, pimps, and other oh-so-cheesy get-ups out there. The one that inevitably turns out to be much less funny/original/culturally-relevant than you thought.

Well, this year we’re doing a full 180 and refusing to let this whole fuss consume a good two weeks of our lives. So, we’re getting a marginally-out-of-the-box costume that comes in a box. Yep, we’re Amazoning it. Because, seriously, it’s a Catch-22: If you end up on the “most original” list, you’re inevitably slammed with the “trying too hard” stamp. And if you don’t, well, you’re just unoriginal.

So join us in screwing with the system by boxing it all with a few click-ship picks that are sure to set you apart from the cheeseballs and the try-hards by being, well, neither. If only so you can make fun of all your friends who did spend those obsessive two weeks on their costumes.

If you’re hitched, how about the Plug & Socket set? Nothing says “we have great geek sex and like to rub it in your face in a way you can’t exactly call us out on” better. Or, if you’re on the not-wanting-to-look-desperate-so-broadcasting-desperation-hoping-it-would-appear-snarky side, just don the One Night Stand costume — sure, you’ll go home alone again, but at least you won’t wake up next to one of those much-less-attractive-in-the-morning French maids, vixens or naughty nurses.

And although it’s so 2007, we’re yet to have someone take us up on our Borat mankini dare. Plus, nothing says “I’m too cool to care about impressing people with my time-relevant wit” like a has-been costume that your rock out with your… oh, never mind.

The big picture gets bigger, P2P filesharing gets legal, why the Japanese are better smilers than us, what Kentucky and Lithuania have in common, and how to replace the White House with a potato.

EARTH IS IN THE AIR

Today, we tour the world of ideas by touring the world of, well, the world — and we start our cultural journey in France, with photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

His entire body of work comes from an incredibly inspired humanistic and planetarian perspective, but we’re particularly taken with his project Earth From Above, a collection of 500,000 breathtaking aerial photographs shot across 100 countries on 6 continents. (You may recall our fascination with aerial photography from the Birdseye Visionaire special issue a while back.)

Each photograph in Earth From Above includes a caption by an expert on sustainable development, making the bigger picture all the clearer: the world is a precious, fragile being whose beauty and heritage we must try our hardest to preserve.

In Holland, for example, chemicals have seeped into the water and are causing a deterioration of the soil, endangering the 5-century-old tradition of flowering bulbs and The Netherlands’ astonishing crop of over 800 tulip varieties.

In 2005, Yann Arthus-Bertrand founded GoodPlanet.org, a nonprofit aimed at promoting and educating about sustainable development across the world through various creative projects.

Our favorite: the Alive Exhibition, a collection of stunning photographs that raise awareness about biodiversity and the need to look beyond our own species in caring for the planet.

MUSIC GOES DUTCH

Next, we move a little north towards those tulip-covered lands of Holland, where we take a look at up-and-coming Dutch indie rock band Silence Is Sexy.

Besides loving their sound — it’s distinctly unique, yet somehow makes us think of what would happen if Thom Yorke sang to the beats of Coldplay with the lyrical sensibility of Vampire Weekend — we have tremendous respect for their industry-revolutionizing choice of distribution.

We’ve long been singing the same old song about how the music industry’s business model is undergoing massive tectonic shifts. Now, Silence Is Sexy are joining our choir — their new album, This Ain’t Hollywood, was just released as a free, legal download on peer-to-peer torrent network Mininova.

Mininova actually has a powerful, free Content Distribution service aimed at doing just that: Helping indie artists and filmmakers discover new audiences, and helping musicologists discover up-and-coming acts.

Take that, Steve Jobs.

>>> via Mininova Blog

KEYBOARD SAYS CHEESE

In honor of brilliant Japanese director Nagi Noda, who passed away at the pitiful age of 35 last week, we bring you a more obscure piece of Japanese culture you probably never knew about: Japanese smileys. These little weirdos are Japan’s answer to the sideways smileys that we all know (and often abuse), invented by Scott Fahlman in 1982.

Unlike those, Japanese smileys are read upright and their method of interpretation has a stronger focus on the expression of the eyes — which makes a lot of sense, since we remember from behavioral psych class that much of human emotion is indicated by the muscles surrounding the eye, just like we’re wired to distinguish a genuine smile — also known as a Duchenne smile — from a fake one through the presence (or absence) of those small crows-feet wrinkles in the outer corner of the eyes.

Most Japanese smileys can be created with a Western keyboard and your usual UTF-8 character set. For ones you can start texting to your friends immediately, check out this list. Meanwhile, a few of our favorites:

(^_^) Hi

(#^_^#) Blushing

(-¡-)y-~~~~ Smoke a cigarette

((+_+)) Ummmh

o(^-^o)(o^-^)o o(^-^o)(o^-^)o Dancing

(^_^)/~~ Bye

>>> via Google Blogoscoped

ACCENT ON THE U

Are feeling all worldly and cultured yet? Don’t let it get to your head — let the good folks of Language Trainers Group show you who’s who with the Accent Game, an interactive quiz that puts your knowledge of different accents to the test: Folks from across the globe read Rudyard Kipling to you, then ask you to guess where they come from.

It’s harder than you think — take it from us and our ego-devastating score. Think you know a Finish accent from a Norwegian one, or Lithuanian from Estonian?

Don’t think you’ll get away with just the country, either. After each correct guess, you’re drilled on the country region the person comes from — Kentucky vs. Chicago may be on the easy side, but let’s see you do Cape Town vs. Pretoria or York vs. Birmingham.

And if you’re reaching for the map just reading this, shame on you and your middle school geography teacher.

>>> via Very Short List

THE WORLD IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

We’ll wrap up with an ultimate culture-crosser: Since 1999, London-born, Berlin-based photographer Michael Hughes has been trekking the world and dabbling in the simple wonders of perception — his collection Souvenirs playfully replaces some of the world’s greatest landmarks with their toy replicas using nothing but a camera and some strategic perspective.

In much of the collection, Hughes’ subtle and not-so-subtle snark comes through — like the image of the Trabant car model, a brand synonymous with all the ills that lurked behind the Iron Curtain, seemingly bursting through the remains of the Berlin Wall.

Souvenirs is part of an ongoing book project, so we’ll be sure to keep an eye on Hughes. Meanwhile, we got the sudden urge to go photo-replace the White House with a potato.

>>> via Very Short List