Sunday, September 28, 2014

Get Magic The Gathering Or Football Cards While Helping Find A Cure For Cancer

This is the easiest way for you to participate in my disease research project while getting a nice reward for your work. There is no drawing here. If you do the work and follow a few simple rules you will get to pick one of the prizes above and I will ship it to you and cover the postage as long as you live in one of the 50 U.S states. In addition I will roll a 6 sided die on camera if I roll a 3 you get a $10 walmart gift card. If I roll a 4 you will still get the same gift card but you will also get to pick two prizes above instead of just one. Remember we are all running this to do scientific research that could lead to new drugs that could help treat cancer in both adults and children. This is just a way for me to give you a nice little price for your good work. If you are invited to join this project you will need to download the world community grid program here. Then join team endthedisease. You can learn more about world community grid here. Once you complete the required amount of work units listed in the rules below I will send you a private message through twitter to get your mailing address.

This contest is invite only but if you have a twitter account with just a little bit of activity ( retweets and replies to your own tweets) you can reply to the tweet below and most likely I will let you in. For the most part I will be sending out invites through my main account @endthedisease or most likely from my other account @Iametd

Please read the current rules for this giveaway, they may change in the future.

Participants: Invite Only (If you want an invite reply to my tweet below)
Location: U.S residents only (I will not ship outside the 50 U.S states)
Completion: 30 work units (This might go up in the future so take this offer now)
Bonus: Complete another 20 work units for a total of 50 and I'll send you 1 extra pack of my choosing but you can decide on a magic the gathering pack or football.


I have enough cards to run this giveaway many times over. I'm making it invite only to prevent to much cheating by people using multiple twitter accounts. Even after you participate in this I may allow you to participate in other giveaways and contests. Keep following this blog for future announcements.

After you receive your prize I hope you will at least post a pic on your twitter account and mention that you got them from @endthedisease. If you really want to do something nice you can open your packs on youtube and link back to my twitter account and tell people how you won, of course you don't have to open the packs if you'd rather sell them. I will have a page on this blog where I post links to twitter posts and youtube videos of people that have received my prizes.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Win Three Packs Of 2014 Bowman Platinum Baseball Cards While Helping Find A Cure For Cancer

Up For grabs are three packs of 2014 bowman platinum baseball cards pictured above. To see if you can qualify to win these just scroll down to the contest rules listed just above the embedded tweet announcing this contest. If you meet the qualifications and want a chance at winning them just download the world community grid program here. Then join team endthedisease. You can learn more about world community grid here. After you join run the program and complete the required number of work units. Usually you won't have to run the program for more than a day or two. As soon as you join the team reply to the tweet with your team name. I will usually limit the number of participants to 5-10 people although sometimes I might go higher than that. After all the participants complete their minimum number of work units I will do a drawing using rafflecopter or a similar program. I will send the packs to the name drawn as long as you have followed the rules below. Please continue to run the program after you have completed the minimum requirement as this is used for disease research.

Please read the current rules for this contest, they may change with each new contest

Participants: Limited to 5 twitter users
Location: U.S residents only (I will not ship outside the 50 U.S states)
Completion: 10 work units
Bonus: If you win the drawing and have over 100 completed you will get a 4th pack
Frequently asked questions and rules.


This contest will be run many times over with the same prize but the rules may be changed. Below you will find links to twitter images or YouTube/Facebook videos people have made showing off their prize or doing breaks of them. Be sure to do this when you win as this is a great way to get extra traffic to your favorite social media pages as I will link this post to my tweet every time I relaunch a contest.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Has World Community Grid Found The Cure For The Most Common Type Of Childhood Cancer?

This was an update post that was added to the news section of world community grid the site back in early July. It's mostly about Dr. Nakagawara's new position as CEO of Saga Medical Center. However if you read the third paragraph you will see that as a result of the hard work put forward in the help fight childhood cancer project we may now have a cure for neuroblastoma which is the most common type of childhood cancer. Because of all the home users running the grid program there are several new drug candidates in the pipeline now. These have been shown to kill cancer cells in lab testing with no apparent side effects.

From my reading this article and others the researchers involved seem to be very excited with the results they have been getting. Now they have to move to trials to see if these can work with human candidates. This research has been so successful that world community grid is starting a help fight childhood cancer phase II project that will focus on another form of childhood cancer. I don't know what they are planning on focusing on but I am looking forward to supporting it.

I really hope that they get a new miracle drug from this research. If they do, not only will it save many children's lives it will also be a huge media promotion for programs like world community grid and folding@home. Hopefully it will convince many people to start running the software on their computers so we can find cures for many other diseases. Right now there are only about 500k people using this program worldwide, most of them are not even actively running it. Can you imagine the research that we could get done if this number jumped into the millions?

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Statistics For The Endthedisease Social Media Project For July 2014

In an effort to increase participation from my blog followers and to keep everyone in the loop as to how we are building our brand up on social media I have decided to make a monthly post that will show how we are trying to grow. This will also be a great way for me to reach out to you guys for help as time goes by. These charts are statistics from all the major blogs and social sites I use to build traffic. In theory the more traffic, like and shares I can get the more people I can get to sign up for world community grid and folding@home and the more research we can complete that will lead to cures and better medicine for disease like cancer and HIV. I will make a statistics post like this every month but it will be done somewhere between the 1st and 3rd of every month because of work schedules and real life issues I have to attend to.

Endthedisease Blog
First we have the most important blog of all which is the one you are reading this post on. This blog is where all contests for prizes will be held, it's where I talk about world community grid and folding@home research projects. It's the place where I blog about cancer and disease from a scientific perspective and where I tell stories about other peoples battles with it and other disease. Basically this blog brings all my social media sites and other blogs together. As you can see this blog has been live for many years but I really haven't used it much until last month. I only received 314 page views in July but this month you should see a much bigger jump in traffic if everything works out the way I plan. Defiantly share any post on this blog that you think fits with your audience. I'd rather you share something you see here before you share anything else across my network.

The second most important part of my social media empire, at least for the time being. We are giving away sports memorabilia and sealed packs of collectible cards like football, baseball and basketball cards as well as a large selection of magic the gathering cards. Some of the post here might seem kind of spammy but it is crucial that I seek out as much search engine traffic as possible with this blog. Share anything you see fit to share with your friends and keep watching this blog for new developments and announcements of future contests. Last month we got up to 2,725 page views but I'm not sure if we will get this high in August. If Google starts sending me search engine traffic to this blog that will be a different story. I really need incoming links to both these blogs. Anyone want to throw me some free linkbacks?

My Facebook fan page is probably the most important of all my real social media sites. My best day last month was 128 likes but I also bought $20 worth of traffic that day because I had a little money left in my PayPal account. I expect to work much harder on it this month but I won't be spending anymore money. When you like, share or comment on any of my posts it really helps to create traffic for the project. I post about anything from posts related to disease research to stories about real people dealing with their illnesses. I also use this page to post links back to my blogs which helps to create more traffic flow. Contests will be run through my blogs but the actual interactions will occur on my Facebook page so stay in touch there.


 
Twitter is probably the second most important social media platform I use. I don't really use it as much as I should and in the past I wouldn't even do one tweet per day but as I move forward with this project I will have to start using it a lot more. In fact it is probably the best way to spread the word about projects like world community grid and get more people into the research projects. By increasing my presence on twitter and by gaining more influential followers I increse my chances of being able to reach out to celebrities and professional athletes. If I can get some of these people to retweet and favorite my tweets I can really get things moving in the right direction. I have found a great stats website that allows me to track just about everything I do with twitter. I will not be trying to tweet hundreds of tweets a month but I am trying to increase my percentage of retweets and favorites. You can expect these scores to go up significantly this month.

Although I do use my Google plus account to push my disease research project and to discuss issues relate to it I also post a lot of personal things here. I tend to watch a lot of youtube videos and post comments on ones I find interesting. I almost never post a comment unless I feel it is worth sharing it on my Google+ page. If you decide to interact with me here you have to realize that I have my own personal and political views and you might not always agree with what I have to say. I also comment on friends videos and that can sometimes generate a lot of replies and pluses on my Google Plus page. 

  
My YouTube account is not really a big part of my projects right now but in the future I might start hosting some contests there. You might want to sub my channel in case I decide to work on something more in the future.

I use empire avenue almost everyday to build up traffic to my social media sites and blogs. It's a great way for you to help me grow what I'm trying to do. It's basically a stock market game but the stocks you buy are of real people that have their own little social media empires. When you buy stocks in a player they get what the game calls eaves. This is a virtual currency that can be spent to get other players to do you favors like liking you Facebook posts or subbing your youtube channel. This might seem like a bot scam waiting to happen but I have been using this site for years and I know that the majority of players here are reall and they are looking for social interactions with other users. I have had many of these people donate money to gofundme projects in the past so there is a real benefit here. Sign up through this link and buy as many shares in ETD as you can.

I have my Klout page towards the bottom of this post but it really should be closer to the top. Klout is a great social media tool to increase your followers across all your social media platforms. It's also a great way to get the attention of people in high places. If you want to rub elbows with the social media elite you really should be using klout. There are many major celebrities and corporate brands on this site. The website uses a plus system like Google plus but you can only give out 5 of these a day. You can however ask your friends to give you pluses every day. It's a big popularity contest and the more pluses you get the more chance you have of being heard online. As your score goes up you get into higher brackets and start getting recognized by those higher in the system. Klout also looks at the activity of you twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts to determine your total score. I have found that the more klout pluses I get the more twitter mentions I get from this site which has an accumulative affect on your score as a whole.

This is the last statistics pic I will add to this post but this is actually the most important thing since it is the whole reason for me running these blogs and all my social media sites. I'm trying to get more people to join my world community grid and folding@home teams. Right now the latter is not active and since world community grid already has a much larger user base I have decided to concentrate on bring new members here, plus it seems to me that their childhood cancer research project is the closest to finding a cure for the most common form of children's cancer. I look at our point ranking before I look at anything else. The more points our team completes the more research data we have completed. This makes our point rank go down which means we are beating other teams. If were ranked number one by points we would be beating IBM super computers and some huge corporations that support this research by running the program on every computer in their businesses and offices, obviously that will never happen but I do believe that one day we could be in the top 100-200 teams. Currently we rank under 700 which is almost in the top two percent out of over 30k teams. I hope next month that we can at least hold this position. Once I start doing contests for prizes these numbers will drop even lower as people compete for prizes and gift cards. Pleas run the program and join my team as soon as you can.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

How To Run World Community Grid On Your Computer And How It Helps To Find Cures For Diseases

This post may be kind of long and as I write it I have to make secondary posts that it will link to. If you just want to learn how to install the program scroll to the bottom of this post for the installation guide.

First off for those that have never heard of world community grid, what is it? Without getting too scientific so that I can keep this simple, programs like world community grid and folding@home are grid computing software that allows every person with a desktop computer, laptop or smartphone to participate in scientific research that can lead to cures or breakthrough drugs for many human disease that affect millions of people every year. I won't go into detail about how the programs actually do this research but to put it simply they crunch data that has already been collected to determine the shapes, changes in shape and interactions of different molecules related to the diseases being researched.

How can your home computer/ipad or smart phone help? Simply by downloading this program and letting it run on your system. Once you install the BOINC software on your system a small piece of data in the kilobyte or lower megabyte range will be sent to your system over the Internet. Your cpu will start doing the data processing on this piece of data called a work unit. In as little as an hour but up to 12 hours depending on the size of the work unit your computer will finish the data crunching and send the work unit back to home base at Stanford University. These work units are then assembled together to form the completed research project. With millions of these work units being completed every day we are getting closer to finding cures for disease like cancer and HIV.

Can my computer really help find a cure for a disease like cancer? Absolutely it can. Many drugs that we use today came about through the use of computer research. There are many big super computers that are working on large amounts of data collected in the lab and trying to develop new treatments and drugs this way. Without the incredible power of these machines we would not have many of the medicines we have today. The problem is that using these super computers can be very expensive for scientists and research groups. Even with millions of dollars at their disposal these behemoth machines can be out of reach for smaller research labs. That's where world community grid and folding@home come in. A program like this allows people like me and you to become research partners. It's much cheaper to use our idle systems to do this valuable scientific work than to have to pay millions of dollars a month for it. Plus, there are many groups lined up to use the resources that world community grid provides. All we need now is more people running this program so we can get this research done. There are so many things that scientist don't know about these diseaes but with your help we can increase human knowledge.

What will I accomplish by running this program and will I be rewarded? You can accomplish a lot by running one of these programs. First and most important of all you will be contributing to scientific knowledge and working towards a future where there is no disease. It may sound like an impossible dream but computers become faster every day and as I said above many of the biggest super computers are already working on disease research. Real science is being done through world community grid and folding@home, the proof of that is more than 200 peer reviewed scientific papers that have been published by these two programs combined. Not just anyone can publish these types of papers, you need to be a scientist working with a research group and have very good credentials. By running one of these programs on your computer you become part of these research groups. As far as rewards go you can read this blog and the blogs connected to it to see what prizes you can earn, I have plans to give away things like magic the gathering cards, autographed baseball, basketball and football cards as well as pure silver coins, makeup kits, gift cards for restaurants and stores and many other items. The biggest reward however is the knowlege you are making the world you live in a better place and hopefully a place that in the future will have no diseases.

Will this program give me any viruses when I download it? There is no chance of getting a virus while downloading these programs. They are both run by IBM and their home servers are on the campus of Stanford University which is home to some of the smartest people in the world. I have never once heard of anyone getting a virus through the download process and I have personally been using these two software programs for over 20 years.

Will world community grid or folding@home slow down my computer? Nope, the program is actually designed to use the minimum amount of resources from your computer. It know when you are doing more with your CPU and adjusts itself accordingly. Lets say you are chatting on Facebook or watching YouTube videos, these tasks take very little cpu cycles to perform so the software will use more of your unused CPU power. Now lets say you start playing a video game that has very high end graphics, this will take more processing power from your computer so the BOINC software will lower the amount of processing power it takes from your CPU or even shut itself off until you are done playing. Despite all of this the program never uses more than about 10% of your computers resources, you can however adjust the software settings to allow it to use more or less if you want to get more work units done or insure you don't use more than a minimum amount of power.

What does the future of grid computing look like? Computers are becoming faster every day and with two thirds of the world still offline there is plenty of room for growth in the grid computing community. In the coming years we will see an exponential increase in the data crunching capacity of programs like world community grid and folding@home. This will mean that projects can be finished sooner and more research can be done. There is already hope that Stanford researcher have found a cure for a common childhood cancer called neuroblastoma. If a new drug they are developing does turn out to have a positive affect against the disease it will be a big win for us and world community grid will get a ton of media attention. This will bring more people in who are willing to run these programs on their computers which will have a huge impact on data completion time.

How do I Install world community grid or folding@home? You really only want to run one of these programs at once and for the most part we try to concentrate on world community grid on this blog. To be honest this software is so easy to install that you don't really need an installation guide. Over the years I have gotten hundreds of people to sign up and I can tell you that I've always been able to help them get it up and running just by talking to them in a private message or in a forum. If you do need help you can always contact me through my facebook page or post a comment below.

Click on the link below and download the program. This should only take you one or two minutes. Once you are finished you should see the BOINC software running.
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do?teamIDha=2H274R71S1

Then you need to join team Endthedisease. You will need to be on this team to win any future prizes from me and even if you don't want any reward I like getting new members so please join.
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=2H274R71S1

Thursday, July 24, 2014

One Year Ago This Month Talia Joy Castellano Passed Away - A Tribute Post


I have been thinking about doing this post for a long time and I've been putting it off this whole month, partly because couldn't find the time and partly because I didn't know if I could write anything worth reading. Writing about emotionally charged topics like children with cancer and those who have passed away too young is not really something I feel comfortable with. I mean, I've had a lot of experience blogging but most of that has been very technical writing about things and not really about people. I will warn you ahead of time that what I lack in feeling and experience I make up for with walls of text and this will be a long post. If you want something easier to digest scroll towards the bottom of this page and check out the images. They are all screenshots from Talia's youtube videos and clicking them will take you directly to those videos, I'm using screenshots because embedding several videos seems to slowdown this blogs loading time.

Talia Joy Castellano was a young girl that battled from the age of seven. She was diagnosed with neuroblastoma a rare but deadly pediatric cancer on February 14, 2007. The average age of diagnosis for this type of cancer is under age two so it is very possible that she has this growing in her body for years before it was noticed. Many parents who cross paths with this disease see their children pass away at a very early age. Those children that live into their teen years as Talia did have to endure many chemo treatments, countless drugs with horrible side effects and often month long stays in the hospital while enduring these harsh treatments. All of this extends the length of their lives but they often suffer greatly for these extra years. If treatments like this didn't exist there is no doubt these children would die at much earlier ages. Then too, many of them do beat this disease, but often that has to do with the type of neuroblastoma these children have. As I always try to tell people there are hundreds of different types of cancer and even then there are subtypes. It's a very complex problem to solve involving genetic mutation, immune system response and each persons particular biology.

In America alone nearly 1,000 children a year are diagnosed with neuroblastoma every year. About 10 percent of all cancer diagnosis in children worldwide are for neuroblastoma. The survival rate for high risk children is under 50 percent.

This is the same childhood cancer that world community grid has been working on with their data crunching programs and there is a strong optimism among the researchers associated with this project that they may have found a candidate drug that may be the future cure for this form of cancer that kills so many children every year. This is why I try to push people to run the grid program on their computers. In the future many new cures for a variety of disease will be found both by big data and by home based computer users like you that are sharing their cpu power to make the world better.

Talia touched a lot of people in her short life. She started her YouTube channel way back in July of 2011. She started doing makeup tutorial early on with cancer vlogs that update her subscribers with her progress in dealing with her disease. She also had a popular Facebook page that is still growing today and an instagram. Her YouTube channel started out with just a few fans but grew to close to a million subscribers before her death and is still growing today. Her family and friends carry on her legacy through social media and raise money and awareness for her favorite cancer charities.

The Images Below Go Directly To Talia's YouTube Videos

This was the first video Talia uploaded on her channel. She was just a skinny little kid having fun at a school dance just like any girl her age accept she was dealing with a horrible disease and rounds of chemotherapy that no human being should have to endure, much less a 10-11 year old child. I think we know who one this dance off, all you have to do is listen to the crowd response to Talia's moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frP338GNBMY

This was her first ever makeup tutorial video. She showing off her eyeliner skills. She learned most of her early makeup techniques from her mother who is a professional makeup artist, even so you can see the natural talent she was exhibiting for it as well as her positive outlook. Talia almost always had a smile on her face for her fans no matter what she was going through in her struggle with cancer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNnJ-RCjGeY

Talia doing a homecoming or Prom hair tutorial with her sister. Sadly she did not get to enjoy her high school prom or homecoming as she passed away before the age of 14. In fact she did not get to enjoy the experience of high school at all nor do her friends get to enjoy her companionship and exuberant personality as they now move into those wonderful years of growth and first experiences. Really, when you think about it being a teenager is pure joy, the happiest time in your life. We may all say that high school sucks or that we couldn't wait to grow up but if we all take the time to reflect we have to admit to ourselves that our mid to late teen years are the best time in our lives.Talia did not get to experience this time in her life and that is just so wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UepHLvy9I8

I guess this would be Talia's first makeup unboxing video. You can already see that she has a talent for story telling and a very expressive face. Latter on she would gets tons of free makeup from fans and whole kits from major retailers. Pretty much ever well known manufacturer in the industry sent her free kits and samples at one point. She didn't receive these gifts just because she was a kid dealing with cancer but also because of her incredibly charismatic personality. If I was selling a product I would definitely want her pushing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj9YPZGiVOQ

It's hard to believe that Talia would be gone less than a year after making this video. I'm skipping past a lot of her makeup videos here and moving toward the time in her life when she was starting to get a lot of fans and would soon have major media attention. This was also a time when the prognosis for her disease did not look good. She now had two forms of cancer, neuroblastoma and leukemia. She new she didn't have much time left but at the same time she still had hope that she might make it through somehow. There is a lot of weight on her shoulders at this point in her life. It's really difficult to watch this video and not get upset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1slESfh_3M0

Talia asks her fans to help her meet Ellen and they deliver. Thousands of messages and emails are sent through social media and Ellen responds. Talia gets to meet one of her icons and is presented with a twenty thousand dollar check from covergirl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6r0Hu6nCKs


By this point Talia is a well seasoned makeup Guru. She has skills with an eyeliner pencil and eyelash brush that girls twice her age don't possess yet. I think it's safe to say that she would have become a very successful makeup artist had she been allowed to grow up. When you watch her tutorial videos it's hard to believe she is even a kid that's dealing with the horrors of cancer. Makeup seemed to be her best medicine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ZfGQHmZt8

All the fun things Talia got to do while she was on her way to meet Ellen, She rides a plane, enjoys a tour bus and visits the walk of fame. I like this video because I think she is having the most fun I have ever seen her have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiocKTEkt5k

I love this video because it shows Talia enjoying something that every kid that lives in Florida enjoys, going to Disney World. Unfortunately Talia's little British friend pictured beside her in the car passed away not too long after she did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urccwPzy8-I

This is the hardest video to watch because it was the last one Talia made. She would be gone less than two months after she posted it and all that time would be spent in the hospital. There are newer videos on her channel but as I understand it all of that is older material she filmed. This really was the last video she gave to us and I have to think she knew she couldn't do it anymore and didn't want us to see her getting worse. It was incredible that she shared what she did with us though, we got a window into her life and got to see what it is really like for a kid to endure this disease.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxxRaNMKzmM


I won't spam my world community grid links on this post. You can find those all over my blog anyway. Besides, I made this video timeline as more of a tribute to her life but if you aren't doing something to further cancer research you really should. The fact is there really isn't that much money going towards cancer research. We spent way more money on the defense budget than we do on all disease research put together. What's even worse is that less than 4 percent of cancer research funds go to children's cancer research. The main reason for this is probably the fact that most people that get cancer are over 40 years old but I can't help thinking that the numbers should be turned the other way when you see kids like Talia.

I followed this young lady and her family for a long time while she battled with this disease. I pushed her videos and shared them through all my social media. I even donated a small amount of money to the causes she fought for. I did what I could but I know it wasn't much. I think we all need to try and help in this fight. The future is bright no matter what people tell you. It may seem like there are dark times ahead but they never last. Things always get better. Look back 50 years and you will always see you are living in a better time than before, technology and science are not the enemy. Use the tools that are sitting right in front of you. Everyone of us can make a difference in the world and make things better for the next Talia Joy.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Welcome To My World Community Grid And Folding@home Support Blog And An Introduction From Me

First of all I'd like to say hello to anyone that is visiting this blog for the first time. I've had this blogger URL for several years now but I only recently got around to posting actual blog posts related to world community grid and folding@home and the valuable research they do. When I first set up this blog many years I had planned on giving away bluray movies and related movie merchandise but as time went by I realized I might run into a few problems doing this. I also had some financial issues that made me have to sell my whole movie collection.

These days I have another blog project where I am dealing more with sports related items. In these contests you will be able to get football, baseball and basketball cards as well as other items like signed gear and pure silver commemorative coins. Cards For Good is the name of that blog.

So I'm changing gears for this blog. I will still be using it as a support blog for my contest activities but its primary use will be to explain how the world community grid and folding@home projects work and to give updates on finished research. In the future I will have other blogs that give different things away and they will each have a different readerships and pull a variety of users to the projects. This blog will tie everything together and act as a sort of hub for all those blogs and my social media sites.

In addition many of the actual contests will be hosted on this blog. Sometimes they will be through my youtube channel and sometimes through my facebook fanpage. Some of them might be directly run on this blog. No matter how they are run you will find out about them through a secondary blog like cards for good through a link to this blog as well as front page posts on this blog. Just follow all the blogs in my profile and you'll be in the right position to know whats going on when there is a contest being launched.

To get started you will need these two links.

This is a link to download and run WCG
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do?teamIDha=2H274R71S1

Then just join team Endthedisease through this link.
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=2H274R71S1