Public companies send shareholders thick packets called "proxy votes" to vote for things like the board of directors and compensation practices.

The problem is that individuals aren't voting their proxies.

Mark Schlegel started moxyvote.com to get individuals more active in decision making at public companies.

The site allows shareholders to vote online, and it also provides guidance from other organizations — such as environmental groups — on how to vote.

Steven Balsam, a professor at Temple University's business school, said voting is not necessarily hard, but can be confusing.

"That is something new, where there is advice for the street investor," said Balsam. "That could potentially get people more interested."

But Balsam said individuals usually have a small voice even if they vote, because they own few shares.

Moxy's growth depends on companies allowing it to process proxy votes…and some companies are shutting out the new venture.

The investments that start up companies typically rely on have been scarce in recent years. And for expensive work like coming up with a new drug, that has meant tough times for biotech.

$52 million of a billion dollar package will head to Garden State firms developing drugs for conditions like Parkinson's, heart disease, and erectile dysfunction. Debbie Hart, the president of the industry organization Bio New Jersey, says in recent years companies like these have struggled to attract investors.

Hart: This is really significant. These companies, it's a difficult road to bring a biotech drug to market and it's difficult enough in regular times and in this economy it's been that much worse. So this came at the right time.

These grants from the IRS and the Department of Health and Human Services provide anywhere from 10,000 to more than a million dollars to keep companies afloat.

Allston: It certainly is a godsend.

Johanna Allston is the CEO of Biocapture in Doylestown. Her company received close to $200,000 to improve its technology that makes stem cells ready for injection into humans.

Allston: In general it's going to allow us to hire people sooner, get our program going faster and have an impact on health care more quickly than we could have without the grant.

Dozens of Pennsylvania and New Jersey companies will split about one hundred million dollars. The size of each individual grant is small compared to the total cost it takes to get a drug to market. But Hart says the money will serve as a bridge to keep companies afloat as the economy recovers and investment money flows more freely.

Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection conducted a short-term study of emissions at natural gas operations, including compression stations and a wastewater site. None of the possible pollutants exceeded federal standards for safety, but DEP's secretary John Hanger cautions that the study is limited. It didn't look at the cumulative effect of the industry, but just a few sites in Washington County.

Hanger: The infrastructure used to move gas from the drill site to the marketplace has emissions itself, and this industry is going to be huge in Pennsylvania and there will be literally thousands of compression stations and thousands of emissions sources that are required to move the gas.

Joe Minott, the executive director of the Philadelphia-based environmental group Clean Air Council, says the impact is likely to be different as the industry expands.

Minott: The question I have is, whatever it tells us, if we multiply that by 100, 500, by 1000, which is the number of drills that will be in a fairly limited area, what does that mean for the community.

Hanger says he'd like to see long-term studies of emission impacts. But that could depend on the priorities of the next Governor.

Raymond Schofield has been homeless for six years.

He now lives in a group home in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, but his polling place remains in Chinatown.

He says that if volunteers from Project HOME hadn't driven him to the polls he wouldn't have voted.

"I voted for the people I think are going to look out for me. For my situation. Look our for the homeless people so I voted for who I think will help me out in that regards."

Project HOME has registered more than 14,000 voters in the past decade. Volunteer Delphina Avin is riding along with voters and walking them into each election site.

"Earlier, I went to this gentleman's group home and I got there and the man said, I told them to take my name off the list. And I said, wait a minute, you're homeless, if you expect change you have to vote. He just looked at me and said I'm going to get my coat!"

Two to three hundred homeless voters will get transportation through Project Home today. Project HOME says about 4,000 homeless people will cast ballots in Philadelphia.

People do not need a permanent residence to register to vote in Pennsylvania, just a place where they can receive mail.

Photographer Ryan Donnell's project 'Behind the Curtain' captures many of the more interesting polling places in Philadelphia. Click the image to see more.

By the time voters come, Joseph Shell will have cleared out the clutter to make room for a pair of voting machines and a handful of poll workers. He also installs extra lighting and a space heater to keep the workers warm with the garage door open all day.

Shell: Fortunately we've been blessed that on most election days the weather's cooperated. I only remember maybe twice in all the years we've had it here that it's rained.

Shell's home in Germantown has welcomed voters for more than a decade. He volunteered after a local official asked neighbors to offer an alternative site to the unstable front porch that had been used.

In Southwest Philadelphia, Harry Palmer, speaking in the quiet and soothing tones of a funeral director, rearranges chairs and couches to make room for voting machines.

Palmer: We try to arrange the funeral home during election day where it doesn't look like a funeral home. We've even went as far as in the past have balloons out front on the awning. Little red, white and blue streamers so people know yes this is the right place. This is the polling place.

Voters cast ballots in the chapel of the Williams and Palmer Funeral Home. Palmer says he never hears complaints from residents about voting there.

Palmer: Normally what people say when they come in, especially is this is their first time, they say, you know this is pretty nice. We like the colors. They're soft, they're comfortable and they're relaxing.

Restaurants, basements, car repair shops, you name it, the city has probably tried it out.

Lee: We would love nothing more than to have a brand new, fully accessible public building in every voting district. It would make our life a lot easier…But unfortunately it's not a reality.

Robert Lee is Philadelphia's voter registration administrator. Voting districts can have no more than 900 registered voters. Lee says it's good for the large number of people who walk to the polls.

Lee: If they were any larger than that it would be very difficult and it may lead to long lines and lead to people not waiting to vote and disenfranchisement.

So Lee has to turn to private homes and businesses to host election day. One of the biggest challenges is finding places that can accommodate voters with disabilities. Many sites don't. He's bought 10,000 door stops, 130 aluminum ramps, and numerous threshold mats and wedges over the years.

Lee: We have probably I believe over 100 buildings fully accessible even with the parking. There are quite a few polling places we've modified to be accessible. We're working on it.

It creates a perennial headache for Lee to find people willing to rearrange their home or business for the ninety dollar election site payment. But he knows that polling hosts do it for more than the money.

Alcides Franceschini is the owner of Consider it Done barbershop, a polling site in north Philly.

Franceschini: I remember the best turnout was the presidential election with Obama…The line was long and everybody was like, oh my god we're going to have the first black President. It was an amazing time. To be part of that was payment enough.

The elections also give Franceschini a bit of free advertising. He says he's gained a few clients who first came through his shop to vote. He says a barbershop makes sense as a polling site, because people come here to talk neighborhood issues or find out what's going on.

Franceschini: The barbershop is where everything happens sometimes. You know what I mean? You hear everything in the area.

My own polling place is another frequent scene for community gossip, activity and heated discussion.

Burns: Back here is the back room of my bar. Pool table, shuffle board, video game, pin ball. Piano.

Terri Burns owns Luke's Back Room in Kensington. Voting machines have cluttered up her lounge since before she started working here twenty seven years ago. The walls are filled with posters and dusty art, green plastic ash trays line the bar. Burns says a few people make comments about coming to the bar to vote.

Burns: The older older like the 80 years old. They say something.
Grens: What do they say?

Burns: Oh, why do we got to go to a bar and vote for this stuff? Why in there? Just come on in, you probably drank in here your whole life.

And they may have been voting in here just as long, too.

For $4.99 a month, the Text Zapper app will shut down texting capabilities when a phone is moving more than ten miles per hour. The idea is to give parents reassurance their teens aren't distracted while driving. The Text Zapper program can be turned on and off through a secure website, so passengers can continue to message while on board cars. Larry Wenger is the president of TMG Systems, which developed the app.

Wenger: Our business goal is to help reduce the risk of teen driving. Teen driving is a serious issue in our country right now. Distractions. We gear this towards teenagers and new drivers but the application would perform for any demographic.

A study last month out of the University of North Texas Health Science Center attributed more than 16,000 deaths between 2001 and 2007 to texting while driving.

A Pew survey earlier this year found that parents often monitor or regulate their child's behavior on the phone. That includes surveilling what's on the phone and using it to monitor a child's location. Amanda Lenhart is the senior research specialist who conducted the study.

Lenhart: It's not every parent, but it's a substantial number of those parents that do engage in that behavior. And I think partly it's because in many cases parents do struggle with how to manage the phone in the lives of their families. Teens are very wedded to it they do an enormous amount of texting.

Lenhart's study found nearly one third of teens had texted while behind the wheel. Interestingly, she says, adults had about the same rate.

Finding a dentist in parts of Philadelphia can be difficult — especially for low-income patients who have Medicaid insurance and for those who are uninsured.

Community health centers are considered the safety net for people who otherwise can't access care. And Temple's new training program for dentists will provide the leadership for these centers as they expand across the US.

Amid Ismail, the dean of the dental school, says the quality of care should be the same as in private practice.

Ismail: But managing the clinic in terms of how you receive the patients, your scheduling system, your financial management system, the open door policy that you have to follow in the clinic are different because you have a different population with different needs and different pressures on them.

Judith Lave is co-director of the Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh. She says the program should help address problems people have getting to a dentist.

Lave: There are problems not only on the supply side but on the demand side so one has to make sure the environment of the clinic is conducive for patients to come and there are strong outreach activities involved.

Lave says dental work is usually a low priority for people without insurance.

Students will train at a new community dental clinic that will open on campus next year. Patients will pay on a sliding scale, and no one will be turned away based on their insurance, or lack of it.

Within weeks of each other last month, two women — one from Hackensack and one from Millville — received hand transplants at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Combined, the two comprise half the female hand transplant recipients in the world.

Jessica Arrigo from Millville became the third woman in the world to receive a hand transplant. The 27 year old had lost her hands and legs to a viral infection. Arrigo is six weeks into therapy after her surgery.

Arrigo: I can hold coffee cups, and shake up my daughter's bottle and I can write now. I have splint that allows me to a write a little bit. So I'm making progress.

Arrigo had to weigh the benefits of the transplant against the side effects from her anti-rejection medication. It elevates her risk for diabetes and cancer. But she says holding her daughter's hand and fixing her own hair is worth it.

One of their surgeons, Vijay Gorantla, says just 17 modern transplants have been done in the US…ever. He says it's difficult to find patients who are good candidates for the surgery, and to find donor hands that not only match structurally, but cosmetically for skin color, tone, and shape.

Gorantla: Basically patients are waking up every day and looking at this hand and for them to really adapt and integrate it into their body image it really shouldn't look different. The more different it looks the more difficulty they'll have psychologically integrating it into their own body.

Just a few centers perform hand transplants in the world. The University of Pennsylvania recently established its own program but has yet to complete a transplant.

A computer drive containing health information about 280,000 patients slipped out of sight from the health insurer in charge of it — AmeriHealth Mercy. The company says it has no evidence that the data have been accessed. Seven social security numbers and 801 partial social security numbers are stored in the files.

Tena Friery, the research director at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, says about 14 million people have been affected by medical records breaches since 2005.

Friery: Having medical information or any information in electronic format leads to additional opportunities for information to be lost, stolen, compromised.

In this case, AmeriHealth says someone in possession of a flash drive simply misplaced it. Donna Burtanger is the vice president of marketing and communications for AmeriHealth.

Burtanger: It was actually lost in our Philadelphia corporate offices. We've conducted a thorough investigation and have no reason to believe it's nothing other than it's misplaced.

The company is still in the process of notifying affected members.

Location of Athos I spill (courtesy NOAA)

Pete Dunne is the director of natural history information at New Jersey Audubon.

Dunne: I can remember thinking at the time what a terrible time of year for it to happen. The end of November is a period when there's a lot of waterfowl activity in the Bay. There's lots of loons, northern gannet, it's a peak activity period.

New Jersey, which receives the most at $20 million, will restore wetlands in Salem County and seed oyster beds in the Bay. Larry Hajna is a spokesman for New Jersey's department of environmental protection.

Hajna: The project will also create habitat for great numbers of birds, herons, eagles, hawks, various species of ducks, wading birds. So we see this as a win win all the way around, but coming from an unfortunate situation that occurred several years ago.

Though thousands of birds died, Dunne says fortunately the spill was not adjacent to much of the most sensitive bird habitat.

Hajna says the years immediately after the spill were focused on clean up, and planning how to use the compensation funds.