The spread of online information isn't just good for charities. It's also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there's a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.

I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But many others were also in the same place. The difference was that I took action.

The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.

Whenever you have a few setbacks, the idea that half as many children are dying now as back in 1990 and so... it was over 12 million a year, now it's less than 6 million a year. We have a clear path to get that under 3 million a year and we know what to do. And this generation of young Africans is a very large group.

Good stuff tends to happen gradually, whereas violence or catastrophes are deemed more newsworthy.