We'll use this page to show you things on the internet that we think
are cool, interesting, or maybe just useful.
We think our
Legal Guide for Immigrants to Maine is pretty cool. It has sixteen chapters of
information important to immigrants. You can learn about the U.S. System of
government, the courts, becoming a citizen, and much more. There is a section on
the rights and duties of citizenship and sections on various areas of the law that♠
could be important to immigrants. The Guide is in two languages and you can toggle
back and forth from Spanish to English.
We're a little slow getting into the video business, but we hope there will be
more and more of it on our websites. We have two videos we made with the
Portland District Court Magistrate
Pilot Project. Our sister website, the
Campaign for Justice has a long video on legal aid in Maine. It doesn't work well
on a dial up connection, and works best with cable. If you have access to high speed
internet check that out too.
Here are two things that are really cool. VLP attorney Rachelle Parise
and her husband David Mallon have completely redone
Wabanaki Legal News, our
legal newsletter for Maine's Native Americans. It has a new look and
feel and more up to date news. Another cool thing about Wabanaki Legal
news is its RSS news feed. You can subscribe to the Wabanaki Legal News
RSS feed and have it
delivered to your computer in your browser, your
mailbox, or any news feed reader you set up. 
(It is probably easiest
to just subscribe in your browser. It requires Internet Explorer 7.0
or newer, or FireFox 1.5 or newer.) Just click on the RSS icon and
subscribe.
Brooksville, Maine artist Robert Shetterly has created an impressive
portrait gallery
of Americans who tell the truth. The portraits range
from the famous to the not so famous, from Abraham Lincoln and Margaret
Chase Smith to Samantha Smith and (soon to be added) Sister Lucy Poulin.
Along with the portraits are inspiring quotations and biographies of
each of his subjects. Not everyone agrees with all of his choices, but
each of us should find plenty of inspiration here to do good works and
speak the truth.
The Wayback Machine of the Internet
Archive is really cool. It is intended to be a digital library of internet sites.
You can use it to see what the internet looked like clear back into the last
century (or to 1996). For example, here is what the Pine Tree
Legal Assistance website looked like in December 1996. You can put in the url
for any website and see how it developed over the years, or find some piece of
information that's no longer current.
"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". The Edubuntu
Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to schools, through its customised school
environment. The current version of Edubuntu is aimed at classroom use, and future versions
of Edubuntu will expand to other educational usage, such as university use.
The Edubuntu network reports that it has helped a British nursery make use of two
donated PCs. They installed and configured the PC's in a community nursery and breakfast/after schol club
in Lincolnshire, England in about three quarters of an hour, costing the centre nothing! "The
kids absolutely love them...many of them have never used a computer before."
If you have a library card at the Lewiston
Public Library, the
Portland Public Library or the
Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, you can take
Rosetta Stone
language courses on line. These are high powered, high quality courses available
in tweny-eight languages, including English as a second language. You can use these
from any computer but it is much better if you can use a computer with a sound card
and speakers. It's best if you have speakers and a microphone so you can compare your
pronunciation with that of native language speakers. Rosetta Stone will graph
your pronunciation and grade it compared with the native speakers.
If you don't have a card at one of these libraries, you can still take the language
courses directly from Rosetta Stone,
but they are pretty expensive. So far only the Lewiston, Portland and Brunswick
libraries in Maine offer these courses. If you are "from away" many other libraries
around the country offer the courses, as well.
Domestic violence is never cool. But Ginny NiCarthy's new site is.
The site includes online excerpts from the new edition of her popular book "You Can Be Free," including
information for rural victims of abuse, deaf and disabled, and immigrants with religious and other cultural
issues. She also posts an extensive set of links to other good online resources, such as
Hot Peach Pages, which posts information about domestic violence services around the world, including
information in 70 languages.
Although we have also featured Happy News (see next item), some on our staff favor
Ode Magazine, a very cool solutions-oriented monthly published in the Netherlands.
Do you find the news depressing. Maybe negative stories sell more papers and bring in
more viewers. Maybe they're easier to report.
HappyNews.com is a full service on-line news outlet presenting news with a positive
slant. It draws its positive news from the wire services, staff reporters and Happy
News "Citizen Journalists." If you want a more upbeat look at the news, or if you
have a happy news story to report, check it out.
We really like Google News. We use it most
every day to find relevant news items to post in the many "news boxes" on most of
the websites we manage. You can search more than 4,500 English language news sources
around the world. News topics are updated every fifteen minutes and each news item
is stamped with the date and time it was posted. You can even create your own
customized internet newspaper.
One of the most popular features of the Pine Tree Legal Assistance website
is our interactive
forms section. More than 350,000 of our forms were downloaded in 2004, most
of them interactive family law forms. For years people have been asking us for
the ability to save completed, or partially completed, forms. Adobe Reader,
the free PDF file reader available on most computers, will only allow you to
print completed forms, or save the blank form, but not to save the form with
the infomation you type into it. Solutions from Adobe have either been withdrawn
or are too expensive.
The best solution currently available appears to be CutePDF's Form
Filler. This easy to use product allows you to save our interactive
forms with the data you have filled in, and edit or change it later. It costs
only $29.95, and there is a free evaluation version available. On some
computers you can access our interactive forms directly on our website through
CutePDF, merely by typing the url as the file name into the "open file"
window. On other computers you need to download the form to your computer and
then open it in CutePDF Form Filler. Either way, this is great software, and
very useful.
Pine Tree has completely redone its "Food Stamp
Estimator" which will help people get an idea whether they are eligible for
food stamps and how much they would likely get each month. Before the new version
you had to fill out a complicated six page form that did the calculations. Now,
the new version asks a few questions and prints out a short one-page form
that estimates eligibility and allotment amount. You can still choose to have it
print out the long form that shows all the calculations that go into the answers.
The food stamp estimator uses the powerful HotDocs
document assembly engine given to the legal aid community by Lexis-Nexis. We hope to
have other tools produced by HotDocs available soon.
GIS mapping is everywhere. Here's a recent favorite. The Modern Language Association posts
a Map of Languages Spoken in the United States
. You can view color-coded maps by state, by county, by zip code. The Maine maps
show 33 languages (including some "language groups") spoken at home. Based on 2000 census data.
We think Toby Hollander is pretty cool. So does the American Bar Association. They awarded Toby
the 2004 Ann Liechty Probo Award for his outstanding pro bono services to children
in child custody cases. The ABA also produced an
inspiring video
about Toby's work with the Volunteer Lawyers Project, KIDS Legal Aid, and Maine's children
caught in custody cases. Read Toby's remarks in acceptance
of the award.
You'll need RealPlayer to view the video. You probably have it on your computer already,
but if you don't you can download it from RealPlayer's web site
They'll keep trying to get you to buy something or try their fancier product for two weeks, but
you don't need anything more than the free Basic Player.
Children in Poverty is definitely not cool stuff. However, the National Center for Children
in Poverty has developed a number of "Data Wizards"
that neatly and effectively display and compare state policies, demographics and economic condition
as they affect children in poverty.
Their Income Converter shows where a family stands with respect to the Federal Poverty Guidelines or
their state's median income. The Family Resource Simulator shows (for a few states) what happens to
a family's financial resources as they get more earned income and gradually lose benefits and incurr
more child care and transportation expenses.
Using GIS mapping tools, the
Brookings Institution has posted a series of state maps, showing
where low-wage workers are benefitting the most from the Earned Income Credit. Scroll to
the bottom of the page to find the links to these very cool (and informative) maps.
Nobody thinks income tax is cool. The I-CAN project is pretty cool, though. It can help
you get your tax refund and earned income credit faster and easier. Many people who are
eligible don't get their earned income credit, which could mean more than $4,000 in their
pockets. Many people get tax refund anticipation loans from commercial tax preparers, not
realizing that they could be paying interest at a yearly rate of up to 200% on their own
money.
Anyone who had earned income of less than $33,692 (if they had children) or $12,230
(with no children) should check out the I-CAN
program developed by Orange County Legal Aid, and offered on the Pine Tree Legal
Assistance web site.
If you cannot use the I-CAN program, the IRS, through a
partnership with the Free File Alliance, has links to sixteen on-line tax preparation
services that are free to taxpayers who meet certain criteria. Of course you won't get
to meet the very nice video helper on I-CAN.
According to the Pennsylvania Department
of Public Welfare, its new
COMPASS site is the one-stop shop that
many state and local application developers aspire to create.
The site integrates many different services, like Medicaid and food stamps, into one application.
They offer English and Spanish versions, with abbreviated instructions in 10 additional languages.
Depending on the success of this approach, perhaps Maine can develop a similar simplified
on-line application process.
Noah Adams' National Public Radio series on low-wage workers in America featured Maine workers in September,
October and November 2003. The September profile featured restaurant workers at TJ's in Auburn. The October
profile featured Kedra Johns, an Augusta mother raising two kids by herself and working two low-wage
jobs. The report from Maine concludes with the story of Portland single mother Joanna Veres and her
three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Janallie. If
you have a sound card and speakers, you can listen to this important series on your computer.
In America, it is possible to work full time but not make a living. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 20 million workers earn less than $9 an hour.
At those wage levels, many people have trouble affording the basics -- housing, food,
clothing, transportation and health care.
In this year-long series of special reports, NPR's Noah Adams travels throughout
the country to profile the low-income workforce, talking with people about their jobs,
their families and their hopes for the future.
Here's another cool site for your kids. It has a few
advertisments for the Discovery Channel, but they aren't offensive. Your kids can
learn the science behind all sorts of gross things like roaches and worms, scabs and pus,
ear wax and dandruff, and lots more. There are plenty of games, recipies, crafts, experiments
and other activities. The site is available in two versions, plain and extra slimy, which requires
a flash player you can download if it isn't already on your computer.
The
Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC)
is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the
National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). "IFCC's mission is to address fraud
committed over the Internet. For victims
of Internet fraud, IFCC provides a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism
that alerts authorities of a suspected criminal or civil violation." The site includes
an online complaint form and annual reports about the most widespread abuses and
how to avoid being scammed.
The Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of
Agriculture has developed a "Food Stamp Pre-Screening Eligibility Tool".
This is a benefits calculator that will give you a rough idea if you are eligible for
food stamps, and what your food stamp benefit amount might be. It isn't always correct
for everyone in Maine, because Maine has some special eligibility rules that other states
don't have. It could give you a general idea, though, whether you might be eligible. Pine
Tree Legal Assistance hopes to help develop a similar calculator that includes Maine's
special rules. In the mean time, you can also use our
self-calculating food stamp worksheet
to get a better idea of eligibility and benefit amounts in Maine.
More Cool Stuff
