Staying in touch with family and friends can be a challenge for military staffers, especially those serving overseas. With its latest campaign, Google is trying to help.
Google will now offer priority Google Voice accounts to active members of the service, according to the company's official blog. Military staffers with .mil addresses will receive Google Voice invites within 24 hours after requesting them, says Tuesday's blog, written by U.S. Army Sergeant Dale Sweetnam.
In his guest blog, Sweetnam, who works with Google on the U.S. Army's "Training with Industry" program, explained the problem of trying to call military staff overseas.
"I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Army journalist where I flew in Black Hawks over Balad and Baghdad working to generate news coverage about my fellow soldiers," writes Sweetnam. "The whole experience was physically and emotionally draining, but it was especially difficult when I called home at the end of the day and nobody was there to answer."
Using the free Google Voice service, military staffers can set up a single phone number that will automatically ring any phone and also receive voice mail as text transcriptions. Family and friends need only keep track of that one number, a benefit for personnel who may jump from one location to another. People can also dial the Google Voice number to leave voice mail for soldiers serving overseas, which are then retrieved from mobile trailers with Internet access.
Any active U.S. service member with a .mil email address can sign up for a free account at the Google Voice invitations for military personnel page.
"I signed up for an account when I came to Google, and it's already making communications much easier here in the States" writes Sweetnam. "I know when I return to combat, Google Voice will help make life a little more manageable."
Google Voice had been available only to users of GrandCentral, the service that Google took over in 2007 and transformed into Google Voice. The service was recently opened up to a greater number of people. Still, requests for a Google Voice number can take a long time to fill, which is why a 24-hour response time is a big benefit for military personnel.
Google Voice has also been in the news lately over Apple's refusal to okay a mobile version of the service for the iPhone. Apple's snub prompted a stern letter from the FCC asking Apple and AT&T to explain their actions.
Islam is getting a little help from Britain's Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, which says it plans to train government-approved groups to "flood the Internet" with "positive" interpretations of that religion in an online fight against radicalization.
The OSCT plans to coach moderate Islamic groups on how to manipulate the Google rankings of their Web sites in order to boost the online profile of moderate voices in the Muslim community, reports The Register, a British online investigative newspaper.
(Credit:
International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation )
It is widely understood that terrorists use the Web to radicalize and recruit the vulnerable and disaffected; search engine optimization, or SEO, training is part of the campaign to counter this, a Home Office representative confirmed to The Register. "In order to support mainstream voices, we work with local partners to help develop their communication, representational, and leadership skills."
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith elaborated on the agency's plans.
"We will host a core network of people, who will put forward positive messages from the British Muslim community on the Internet, directly challenging the extremists that set out to groom vulnerable individuals," she said.
SEO strategies that push Web sites to the front of the Google ranking algorithm line are regularly employed by online retailers and news media outlets. How well they will work to divert tech-savvy, disgruntled Muslim youth from adopting a terrorist mentality is questionable, according to at least one think tank.
"Tweaking the results for supposedly extremist terms would be largely ineffectual, not least because it is unlikely that any but the most callow wannabe terrorist would use a mainstream search engine to find banned material," according to a report (PDF) by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR).
Still, it may be a better approach than removing or blocking material altogether. "Any strategy that relies on reducing the availability of content alone is bound to be crude, expensive, and counterproductive," the ICSR reported. "Radicalisation is largely a real-world phenomenon that cannot be dealt with simply by 'pulling the plug.'"
(Credit:
GPS Daily)
If the question "Where am I?" is a recurring issue for you, Ricoh has added a feature to its GPS-ready digital camera that you may want to check out.
The Ricoh 500SE GPS camera now includes something called an SE-3 GPS module, a three-axis compass developed by Honeywell that nails down the position and direction (azimuth), then displays it on the camera's LCD.
The data, in the form of point coordinates, is embedded into an image as it is captured.
This gives the user a 3D "cones-of-view" perspective, indicating the direction the camera was facing. It comes ready to use with mapping applications such as Google Earth and ESRI's ArcGIS (PDF.)
A laser rangefinder connected to the camera via Bluetooth also enables the user to enter accurate distances.
(Credit:
Ricoh)
"Prior to the availability of the SE-3 module, images from the 500SE were simply points on a map with no indication of the direction the camera was facing," Ricoh manager Jeff Lengyel told GPS Daily. "Now we can provide an accurate visual reference of an image's azimuth, as well as the field-of-view the camera could see from that position."
Industries ranging from the military and disaster response to forestry and architecture currently use these features for both aerial and ground-based photography. Sounds like a must-have for any CSI unit.
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