Google Now is pretty useful right out of the box -- the more you use it, the better it will get at serving up useful information in an appropriate way (like pulling traffic and calendar information to figure out how long it'll take you to drive to your next engagement, for example). But if you're finding Google Now's abilities a little limited, try enabling Web history to give it more data to pull from. Visit history.google.com and click "Turn Web history on.” Before too long you'll be able to use Google Now for things such as sports scores and flight information. The service learns pretty quickly, too. For example, you'll find it letting you know what time you need to leave your house in order to make a flight. If the notifications become too distracting, you can adjust the priority level of each one from the Google Now screen. Just tap the three dots on the right side of the card to set it as normal (the phone will alert you with updates), low priority (the information will show up on the Google Now screen, but won't otherwise announce itself), or off.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
