NotePage SMS, Texting and Messaging Blogs

The non-profit, which works to prevent and fight human trafficking, has extended their hotline that allows victims of human trafficking to reach out for help to support text messages. The benefits of this simple change have enormous implications for the thousands of victims of modern day slavery.

How is Texting Impacting Human Trafficking?

Have room to improve your messaging? Keep these tips in mind

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Before implementing a secure text messaging approach, leaders from IT, clinical, security, legal and human resources must collaborate to develop policies and procedures ensuring that all processes and technology involved will be effective and secure. Here are 10 ways to get there, based on research by Spok, a vendor that specializes in messaging applications.

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Georgia officials launched a new service Wednesday allowing residents to register to vote via text message.

To use it to register or to check your current voter status, text GA or Georgia to 2VOTE (28683).

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Teens in Mozambique with questions about sexual health and HIV can turn to an expert in the same way they communicate with friends or family. A text messaging platform in the African country answers questions young people have about sex and relationships, destigmatizing curiosity about reproductive health.

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Texting touches nearly every area of our lives these days, taking an increasingly large role in our social, personal, professional, and romantic lives. With its great impact, and our near obsession with our cell phones, it doesn't seem far-fetched that our texting habit is affecting our brains. But could it be true?

Is Texting Changing Our Brains?

Text message art displays have been housed temporarily across the country in pop-ups at museums, art shows, festivals, and other venues. In all these places they have done service both to the tradition and future of art as well as our technology and its important implications. Perhaps they have left inspiration and hope for the harmonious existence of our ubiquitous technology and our higher pursuits.

Texting Art: How Technology and Tradition Might Be Reconciled

A text message could be the difference between life and death for mothers severely suffering from postpartum depression, and one local medical team is using the technology to save mothers and their newborns.

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Under the new Data Comm system, pilots receive flight plans, landing clearances, and other instructions from air traffic controllers through a text message on a cockpit screen. Pilots confirm receipt with a single button.

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For most Americans, making a phone call is an easy matter. But individuals who are athaf or severely hard of hearing are dependent on adaptive technologies to transmit or translate their text input and enable phone calls to friends, employers, and even emergency responders.

Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted a notice of proposed rulemaking and issued a proposed rule that would require providers and manufacturers to replace the currently mandated but outdated text telephone technology with real-time text technology. Unlike text telephone technology, real-time text works over IP-based wireless services, provides instantaneous communication, and does not require additional hardware.

Female hands touching and using cell in sun filled roomText telephone technology was first developed in the 1970s. It was a remarkable breakthrough in communication for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. But it is now increasingly obsolete. The technology requires the use of a specialized device, a teletypewriter, in order to send messages. The teletypewriter can only send sixty words per minute and employs a limited set of characters, preventing the communication of anything employing special characters or non-English letters. In order to communicate with someone who doesn’t have a teletypewriter, a person needs to employ a third-party translation service.

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There is a whole lot of nuance when it comes to text messaging—especially in the subtleties of punctuation. Obviously, a question mark conveys some sort of inquiry and an exclamation point denotes varying degrees of enthusiasm (depending on how many are actually used), but there is one type of punctuation that, despite its necessity in all other types of communication, invariably conveys something negative when used in a text: the period.

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Text messaging has come to encompass a huge variety of communication, but did you know that it has even been used to publish novels? A rising genre known as the cell phone novel is a type of microfiction-based novel that is written on a cell phone and published in a series of text messages.

The cell phone novel first emerged in Japan, where the first such novel was written in 2003 by a Tokyo author using the name Yoshi. This novel, called "Deep Love," considered the practice of compensated dating in Japan. Many other early text message novels were romantic fiction of some form, addressing a range of themes such as love and relationships.

How Young Authors Are Publishing... by Texting?

One of the first things many of us do in an emergency situation is text our loved ones, but what if we can't? Often, in instances of attacks, abduction, and other violent acts, the impulse to reach for our phones subsides to the impulse to defend ourselves, and scarcely in such situations are victims even able to access their phones. Thankfully, numerous developers and organizations have found ways to put texting to use to help victims of violence, whether or not they are able to reach for their phones.

One powerful use of texting to combat violence is the work of Xin-Chi Chin, a young Malaysian woman who herself survived a violent attack and kidnapping attempt by two men in 2012.

How Texting Is Helping Victims of Violence Across the World