Planet ISKCON

19|1After 22 hours of travel I'm back in the UK. Damage from an irregular diet is starting to heal, my sleeping patterns are slowly getting back to normal, the spontaneous bleeding of my hands has stopped and I'm slowly getting some energy once again.

Most people would consider this temporary relief from suffering true happiness. Suckers!

Take a look at some of the pictures of the Mother Nature's beautiful artistry in Banff, Canada.

Today, over breakfast, I was at a table with various high-powered researchers. One of them has been up all night writing an "emergency paper" for the boss of a friend. The topic of schmoozing came up.

They enlightened me that it is very important to complement even the most senior speaker on their keynote presentation. The may seem like they are all-powerful and supremely intelligent, but, in reality, they are just as insecure as everyone else about whether they did a good job and people liked their talk. The trick is to boost their ego, become their friend and get them to help you out.

Research is mostly funded by various government agencies (EPSRC and JISC in the UK and DARPA and NASA in the US). At big conferences there are invite-only "brainstorming" sessions where the agency??(TM)s officers discuss with the researchers what the next big research grant should focus on. This is a chance for the University professors to argue that their line of research is best and should be funded (even if it isn??(TM)t ??¦ in fact: especially if it isn??(TM)t).

The key in these brainstorming sessions is to injecting one's ideas into as many other peoples??(TM) mind as possible before these meetings. It??(TM)s a horrible thing to do and one may have to have a shower afterwards to wash off the slime, but the more people argue one??(TM)s case, the better the chance of getting the money.

However, in the end, all this is somewhat of a pretense. The actual decision is made in the pub after the session. The grant officers will give the contract to their friends. Their friends are their drinking buddies. The really successful researchers are those that manipulate the social scene to make everyone their friend. For example, people like Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt are primarily famous not because they are brilliant researchers (though, of course, that must also be there), but because they knows everyone and everyone knows them.

What, if you don't drink? Well, better start soon.

It works the same in most industries. Film producers for example spend most of their time in the five year production cycle of a film going to cocktail parties meeting the potential funders, potential actors and potential directors. They negotiate the production crew over a few drinks. Sometimes a key member will pull out of the agreement and they need to go to more parties to recruit new staff.

Ministers in the Greek government spend most of their time at the ministry drinking coffee with one another. The do this because they need to know that they can pick up the phone, talk to a friend, ask for a report and get it delivered to them next morning.

In the UK and USA beer replaces coffee. Each country has its own style.

When one then finally has the grant money one often can't spend it fast enough. If one doesn't spend all of the money one has been granted, then one obviously didn't need it in the first place, so one will get less next time. Some projects therefore need to get very creative in how they can burn money. They will, for example, finance trips overseas for the entire research group. Even then, sometimes one simply cannot spend enough of the government grant money. In such cases one needs to extend the grant due to "staffing issues". In other words, in order to fudge the records one, once again, needs to be in cahoots with the right people.

Today, over breakfast, I was at a table with various high-powered researchers. One of them has been up all night writing an "emergency paper" for the boss of a friend. The topic of schmoozing came up.

They enlightened me that it is very important to complement even the most senior speaker on their keynote presentation. The may seem like they are all-powerful and supremely intelligent, but, in reality, they are just as insecure as everyone else about whether they did a good job and people liked their talk. The trick is to boost their ego, become their friend and get them to help you out.

Research is mostly funded by various government agencies (EPSRC and JISC in the UK and DARPA and NASA in the US). At big conferences there are invite-only "brainstorming" sessions where the agency??(TM)s officers discuss with the researchers what the next big research grant should focus on. This is a chance for the University professors to argue that their line of research is best and should be funded (even if it isn??(TM)t ??¦ in fact: especially if it isn??(TM)t).

The key in these brainstorming sessions is to injecting one's ideas into as many other peoples??(TM) mind as possible before these meetings. It??(TM)s a horrible thing to do and one may have to have a shower afterwards to wash off the slime, but the more people argue one??(TM)s case, the better the chance of getting the money.

However, in the end, all this is somewhat of a pretense. The actual decision is made in the pub after the session. The grant officers will give the contract to their friends. Their friends are their drinking buddies. The really successful researchers are those that manipulate the social scene to make everyone their friend. For example, people like Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt are primarily famous not because they are brilliant researchers (though, of course, that must also be there), but because they knows everyone and everyone knows them.

What, if you don't drink? Well, better start soon.

It works the same in most industries. Film producers for example spend most of their time in the five year production cycle of a film going to cocktail parties meeting the potential funders, potential actors and potential directors. They negotiate the production crew over a few drinks. Sometimes a key member will pull out of the agreement and they need to go to more parties to recruit new staff.

Ministers in the Greek government spend most of their time at the ministry drinking coffee with one another. The do this because they need to know that they can pick up the phone, talk to a friend, ask for a report and get it delivered to them next morning.

In the UK and USA beer replaces coffee. Each country has its own style.

When one then finally has the grant money one often can't spend it fast enough. If one doesn't spend all of the money one has been granted, then one obviously didn't need it in the first place, so one will get less next time. Some projects therefore need to get very creative in how they can burn money. They will, for example, finance trips overseas for the entire research group. Even then, sometimes one simply cannot spend enough of the government grant money. In such cases one needs to extend the grant due to "staffing issues". In other words, in order to fudge the records one, once again, needs to be in cahoots with the right people.

Today Udo Hahn gave an interesting presentation on a new methods of extracting technical terms from a large text corpus. Traditional methods work by statistical analysis of how often a phrase occurs. His new method used limited paradigmatic modifiability to test the frequency of each single word of a given phrase and thereby compute how likely it is that a phrase is part of a term and not just a chance combination of frequently used words. The new p-mod method beat the t-test and c-value methods in testing on the UMLS meta-thesaurus. Supplementary tools used were the GENIA POS tagger, YAMCHA (support vector machine) chunker and a stop-words filter.

Some US Army and IBM researchers were experimenting with ways to detect if a particular speech contained a story. Their vision is to attach small recording devices to every soldier and automatically record the war stories they tell. Stories are the best way to entice people to take up military life, entertain them, keep up their moral and record the "human" side of military service. They used the WEKA toolkit to rapidly try out different machine learning algorithms and ultimately settled on support vector machines with polynomial kernels. The neural net would be used in real time on textual speech data transcribed by IBM ViaVoice 10. Certain kinds of figures of speech indicate a story is being told. The SVM was therefore trained to recognize the structure and grammar of story-speech. Ultimately, they failed in their experiment. The speech recognition was only about 70% accurate, which wasn't high enough to accurately distinguish stories from regular conversation.

Carol Goble from Manchester (the co-leader of the IMG research group) gave the closing keynote presentation. She talked about the Montagues and Capulets, the two families from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The Montagues are equivalent to the logicians and knowledge engineers in the realm of research. Ian Horrocks, for example, falls squarely into this camp. They are interested in the cool technology, advanced tools, logical rigor, writing researcher papers, solving the interesting (though often not practical) problems. The Capulets, in contrast, are the biomedical researchers such as the people that created the Gene Ontology (GO). They don't care about the theory, but do care about solving practical problems. They also tend to be better at the social engineering necessary to get people to actually use the tools they provide. A third camp is the philosophers (like Barry Smith), who say that everyone else is doing everything completely wrong, but don't offer any practical advice or help in how to do it better. Her conclusion: let's not all kill each other and instead try to work together and have a happy ending.

Need: a seemless ontology authoring and annotation tool that lets people annotate data and extend the ontology at the same time. At the moment we not only need to switch between tools to accomplish this talk, we also need to switch between people. Currently only the biologists can do the annotation and only the logicians can build the ontologies.

Jim Hendler's principle: "A little bit of semantics goes a long way". Just using OWL as a common knowledge interchange format is of great benefit to the e-science community.

Today Udo Hahn gave an interesting presentation on a new methods of extracting technical terms from a large text corpus. Traditional methods work by statistical analysis of how often a phrase occurs. His new method used limited paradigmatic modifiability to test the frequency of each single word of a given phrase and thereby compute how likely it is that a phrase is part of a term and not just a chance combination of frequently used words. The new p-mod method beat the t-test and c-value methods in testing on the UMLS meta-thesaurus. Supplementary tools used were the GENIA POS tagger, YAMCHA (support vector machine) chunker and a stop-words filter.

Some US Army and IBM researchers were experimenting with ways to detect if a particular speech contained a story. Their vision is to attach small recording devices to every soldier and automatically record the war stories they tell. Stories are the best way to entice people to take up military life, entertain them, keep up their moral and record the "human" side of military service. They used the WEKA toolkit to rapidly try out different machine learning algorithms and ultimately settled on support vector machines with polynomial kernels. The neural net would be used in real time on textual speech data transcribed by IBM ViaVoice 10. Certain kinds of figures of speech indicate a story is being told. The SVM was therefore trained to recognize the structure and grammar of story-speech. Ultimately, they failed in their experiment. The speech recognition was only about 70% accurate, which wasn't high enough to accurately distinguish stories from regular conversation.

Carol Goble from Manchester (the co-leader of the IMG research group) gave the closing keynote presentation. She talked about the Montagues and Capulets, the two families from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The Montagues are equivalent to the logicians and knowledge engineers in the realm of research. Ian Horrocks, for example, falls squarely into this camp. They are interested in the cool technology, advanced tools, logical rigor, writing researcher papers, solving the interesting (though often not practical) problems. The Capulets, in contrast, are the biomedical researchers such as the people that created the Gene Ontology (GO). They don't care about the theory, but do care about solving practical problems. They also tend to be better at the social engineering necessary to get people to actually use the tools they provide. A third camp is the philosophers (like Barry Smith), who say that everyone else is doing everything completely wrong, but don't offer any practical advice or help in how to do it better. Her conclusion: let's not all kill each other and instead try to work together and have a happy ending.

Need: a seemless ontology authoring and annotation tool that lets people annotate data and extend the ontology at the same time. At the moment we not only need to switch between tools to accomplish this talk, we also need to switch between people. Currently only the biologists can do the annotation and only the logicians can build the ontologies.

Jim Hendler's principle: "A little bit of semantics goes a long way". Just using OWL as a common knowledge interchange format is of great benefit to the e-science community.

This evening was the official conference banquet at a restaurant called "the Keg Steakhouse" (groan). The conference organizers had informed them of one vegan guest within the dinner party. One of the waiters asked me if it was me and joked that he wouldn't tell anybody. He considered it quite a ridicules idea. Nevertheless, they had prepared a special meal for me: tofu in soy sauce appetizer, green salad with tomato and raw peppers, brown rice with little bits of chopped vegetables mixed throughout, no dessert (the idea of a vegan cake/dessert was completely beyond them). These people really need to learn to cook! I guess they specialize in killing innocent animals and distilling poisonous liquids.

More interestingly, I got a chance to talk with a professor from Jena Universit??t in Germany. He is at the forefront of automated text mining and natural language processing (NLP) research. The next day he gave a very interesting presentation on automatically extracting the important technical terms from a large corpus of text.

The professor was talking about his lifestyle. He loved the isolation of the New Zealand South Island, which he has visited three times. Untouched nature. Not a human in sight for miles.

This is very much in contrast to Tokyo, Japan. In Tokyo everything is grey. You cannot tell where you are. Grey concrete everywhere. He was staying on the eighth floor of a hotel and the motor-highway was just three meters away from his window. How so? In Tokyo, due to lack of space, they stack their highways vertically. Outside his window was the fourth level of a super-highway. A true vertical city. Even at 3am there was continuous traffic on a seven lane highway going into the city. After all, the 36 million people in the world's largest city need to somehow be feed every day. Metropolitan life in the very extreme. I wonder what it does to the people?

Still, he was attached to life in Europe. He would never want to live anywhere but there. The cities have so much more history than anywhere else. Each place has a distinct history and personality.

Life as a professor isn't rosy. He travels around the world presenting his research in so many exotic places, but doesn't have any time to enjoy them. Here he is in Canada, but doesn't have time to enjoy any of the sites, because he is too busy preparing his next presentation. Giving a keynote address at a conference is a great honor, but giving five of them per year very quickly turns into a burden. Then there is reviewing other people's papers. Well known researchers need to review their peer's work. For example, he needs to write an elaborate explanation for each research paper from Asian researchers which doesn't meet the western standard of innovative research. Japanese researchers tend to take a too mechanistic approach to research, which doesn't teach anyone anything new. Then there are the many academic funding committees. He needs to help determine if a particular project gets government research grant money. On top of that comes his own research. He needs to write and publish papers of his own to stay in business. Then, of course, comes the job of teaching his students. PhD and Masters students need to be supervised. Undergraduates need to be lectured to and their exams marked. Sometime between all of that there is (maybe) a little thing called family life.

Still, such a life certainly isn't boring. Discovering truly new things and significantly enhancing the knowledge of humanity has its appeal.

This evening was the official conference banquet at a restaurant called "the Keg Steakhouse" (groan). The conference organizers had informed them of one vegan guest within the dinner party. One of the waiters asked me if it was me and joked that he wouldn't tell anybody. He considered it quite a ridicules idea. Nevertheless, they had prepared a special meal for me: tofu in soy sauce appetizer, green salad with tomato and raw peppers, brown rice with little bits of chopped vegetables mixed throughout, no dessert (the idea of a vegan cake/dessert was completely beyond them). These people really need to learn to cook! I guess they specialize in killing innocent animals and distilling poisonous liquids.

More interestingly, I got a chance to talk with a professor from Jena Universit??t in Germany. He is at the forefront of automated text mining and natural language processing (NLP) research. The next day he gave a very interesting presentation on automatically extracting the important technical terms from a large corpus of text.

The professor was talking about his lifestyle. He loved the isolation of the New Zealand South Island, which he has visited three times. Untouched nature. Not a human in sight for miles.

This is very much in contrast to Tokyo, Japan. In Tokyo everything is grey. You cannot tell where you are. Grey concrete everywhere. He was staying on the eighth floor of a hotel and the motor-highway was just three meters away from his window. How so? In Tokyo, due to lack of space, they stack their highways vertically. Outside his window was the fourth level of a super-highway. A true vertical city. Even at 3am there was continuous traffic on a seven lane highway going into the city. After all, the 36 million people in the world's largest city need to somehow be feed every day. Metropolitan life in the very extreme. I wonder what it does to the people?

Still, he was attached to life in Europe. He would never want to live anywhere but there. The cities have so much more history than anywhere else. Each place has a distinct history and personality.

Life as a professor isn't rosy. He travels around the world presenting his research in so many exotic places, but doesn't have any time to enjoy them. Here he is in Canada, but doesn't have time to enjoy any of the sites, because he is too busy preparing his next presentation. Giving a keynote address at a conference is a great honor, but giving five of them per year very quickly turns into a burden. Then there is reviewing other people's papers. Well known researchers need to review their peer's work. For example, he needs to write an elaborate explanation for each research paper from Asian researchers which doesn't meet the western standard of innovative research. Japanese researchers tend to take a too mechanistic approach to research, which doesn't teach anyone anything new. Then there are the many academic funding committees. He needs to help determine if a particular project gets government research grant money. On top of that comes his own research. He needs to write and publish papers of his own to stay in business. Then, of course, comes the job of teaching his students. PhD and Masters students need to be supervised. Undergraduates need to be lectured to and their exams marked. Sometime between all of that there is (maybe) a little thing called family life.

Still, such a life certainly isn't boring. Discovering truly new things and significantly enhancing the knowledge of humanity has its appeal.

Today Nuno, a researcher from Porto, Portugal, asked me about my distinct hairstyle (sikha) and why I seem so peaceful and relaxed. While asking he was constantly apologizing, thinking that I might be offended. I told him a little bit about Krishna consciousness.

One presentations was about image analysis on 3D cell slices. Matlab's image toolkit is very good for this purpose. The researchers from Amsterdam used RuleML to capture shape classification rules from medical image interpretation experts. However, they suggested using SWRL instead, since RuleML is quite a clunky rules engine. Post-presentation questions raised the issue of rules vs. machine learning. Many people preferred the neural net approach, though a few people defined rules as they allow for better provenance, logging and examination.

Pat Hayes presented the COE ontology editor. This was originally a concept map creation tool, but has been expanded into a fully featured graphical OWL ontology editor. The major advantage COE has is that it is very intuitive to use. Like HTML, people can "view source" on ontologies and "steal" other people's designs/modeling tricks. COE doesn't work with ontologies larger than about 2000 classes. This is another area where my segmentation work might come in handy.

Here a list of some top-level ontologies: DOLCE, CYC, OpenCyc, OntoClean, SUMO.

There was a panel discussion about machine learning vs. manual knowledge capture. The conclusion was to do both:

Improve the volume of manual K-CAP by mass-collaboration
Automatically capture knowledge and manually clean up any mistakes (in this case it is very important to use codes that indicate where a particular piece of knowledge data came from)
Use manual methods to guide (but not haul) large knowledge acquisition methods

Revolutionary concept: make knowledge capture fun by making the task into a game. Carol Goble in particular was very impressed by this idea from Tim Chklovski from USC. She intends to build this into her bio-annotation tools.

An interesting presentation was about estimating the health of pigs by the consistency of their feces. The researchers worked with veterinarians to build a Bayesian network of external circumstances and pig disease. The interesting part was their use of a combination of statistical data and expert rules of thumb. They used isotonic regression to bias the statistical data to match their expert's intuitions. Ultimately, the graphical structure of the Bayesian network matters much more than the exact probabilities on the nodes.

Today Nuno, a researcher from Porto, Portugal, asked me about my distinct hairstyle (sikha) and why I seem so peaceful and relaxed. While asking he was constantly apologizing, thinking that I might be offended. I told him a little bit about Krishna consciousness.

One presentations was about image analysis on 3D cell slices. Matlab's image toolkit is very good for this purpose. The researchers from Amsterdam used RuleML to capture shape classification rules from medical image interpretation experts. However, they suggested using SWRL instead, since RuleML is quite a clunky rules engine. Post-presentation questions raised the issue of rules vs. machine learning. Many people preferred the neural net approach, though a few people defined rules as they allow for better provenance, logging and examination.

Pat Hayes presented the COE ontology editor. This was originally a concept map creation tool, but has been expanded into a fully featured graphical OWL ontology editor. The major advantage COE has is that it is very intuitive to use. Like HTML, people can "view source" on ontologies and "steal" other people's designs/modeling tricks. COE doesn't work with ontologies larger than about 2000 classes. This is another area where my segmentation work might come in handy.

Here a list of some top-level ontologies: DOLCE, CYC, OpenCyc, OntoClean, SUMO.

There was a panel discussion about machine learning vs. manual knowledge capture. The conclusion was to do both:

Improve the volume of manual K-CAP by mass-collaboration
Automatically capture knowledge and manually clean up any mistakes (in this case it is very important to use codes that indicate where a particular piece of knowledge data came from)
Use manual methods to guide (but not haul) large knowledge acquisition methods

Revolutionary concept: make knowledge capture fun by making the task into a game. Carol Goble in particular was very impressed by this idea from Tim Chklovski from USC. She intends to build this into her bio-annotation tools.

An interesting presentation was about estimating the health of pigs by the consistency of their feces. The researchers worked with veterinarians to build a Bayesian network of external circumstances and pig disease. The interesting part was their use of a combination of statistical data and expert rules of thumb. They used isotonic regression to bias the statistical data to match their expert's intuitions. Ultimately, the graphical structure of the Bayesian network matters much more than the exact probabilities on the nodes.

Pat Hayes, a famous AI research started off today's conference day. His keynote, while somewhat entertaining and somewhat insightful was extremely scattered and altogether gave the impression that he had prepared it the night before (which indeed he had). He talked about his "9 deadly sins of AI". These are as follows (and yes, I know there are only four):

Not wanting to accept that the ship has sunk: some researchers still hang on to trying to make techniques and ideas work that where bad ideas when they were first invented and have caused no end of trouble since.

Worshipping philosophy (or, for that matter, worshipping anything): philosophy is useful, but it is a different field to knowledge representation. Just because something is important in philosophy doesn't mean that we have to pay any attention to it in KR.

Taking paradoxes too seriously: A logical paradox is just a humorous distraction for a Sunday night. Just because Kurt G??del's incompleteness theorem shook the very foundations of logic and mathematics, doesn't mean that a paradox is something we have to worry about in practical system. Yeah, so OWL-full allows for paradoxes. Just don't create them and stop complaining about it.

Worshipping logic: (first-order) Logic is attractively simple. Everything in the world can be expressed using AND, NOT and FOR-ALL. However, this is too much of an abstraction from real useful things. It requires too large a framework of axioms on top of it to make it do something useful. We should push more expressivity into the logic layer, thereby bringing it closer to the ontology layer.

Other topics of today:

Nokia and Airbus are working together to shorten their product development feedback cycle. They want to create more mature (useable, useful and acceptable) products more quickly. They aim to achieve this using a system of active documentation. Documentation not just for the sake of it, but in order to involve all project stakeholders in the design, prototype, evaluation and requirements capture processes.

Harith Alani uses four measures for ranking ontologies returned from an ontology search engine:

• Class match: the degree to which the searched for terms are present in the ontology
• Centrality: how close the search terms are to the middle of the is-A hierarchy
• Density: how much information context there is on the search terms (restrictions, etc)
• Semantic similarity: how many links need to be followed from one search term in order to reach another

Harith also mentioned that there is a graph query API called JUNG. I'll have to check this out for my work.

Pat Hayes, a famous AI research started off today's conference day. His keynote, while somewhat entertaining and somewhat insightful was extremely scattered and altogether gave the impression that he had prepared it the night before (which indeed he had). He talked about his "9 deadly sins of AI". These are as follows (and yes, I know there are only four):

Not wanting to accept that the ship has sunk: some researchers still hang on to trying to make techniques and ideas work that where bad ideas when they were first invented and have caused no end of trouble since.

Worshipping philosophy (or, for that matter, worshipping anything): philosophy is useful, but it is a different field to knowledge representation. Just because something is important in philosophy doesn't mean that we have to pay any attention to it in KR.

Taking paradoxes too seriously: A logical paradox is just a humorous distraction for a Sunday night. Just because Kurt G??del's incompleteness theorem shook the very foundations of logic and mathematics, doesn't mean that a paradox is something we have to worry about in practical system. Yeah, so OWL-full allows for paradoxes. Just don't create them and stop complaining about it.

Worshipping logic: (first-order) Logic is attractively simple. Everything in the world can be expressed using AND, NOT and FOR-ALL. However, this is too much of an abstraction from real useful things. It requires too large a framework of axioms on top of it to make it do something useful. We should push more expressivity into the logic layer, thereby bringing it closer to the ontology layer.

Other topics of today:

Nokia and Airbus are working together to shorten their product development feedback cycle. They want to create more mature (useable, useful and acceptable) products more quickly. They aim to achieve this using a system of active documentation. Documentation not just for the sake of it, but in order to involve all project stakeholders in the design, prototype, evaluation and requirements capture processes.

Harith Alani uses four measures for ranking ontologies returned from an ontology search engine:

• Class match: the degree to which the searched for terms are present in the ontology
• Centrality: how close the search terms are to the middle of the is-A hierarchy
• Density: how much information context there is on the search terms (restrictions, etc)
• Semantic similarity: how many links need to be followed from one search term in order to reach another

Harith also mentioned that there is a graph query API called JUNG. I'll have to check this out for my work.

I gave a talk today on my research on segmenting ontologies. It went well. There were about 20 people in the audience (in total 60 people attended the conference, but they were distributed between the three different workshops). Some people had specifically come from one of the other workshops just for my presentation.

I started off with a very good opening statement. This caught everyone's attention and got them interested. I said (view my powerpoint presentation for the graphics):

"An ontology is like a labyrinth, very complex and almost impossible to comprehend at first glance. Beneath the ancient city of Knossos on the island of Crete there was a very large and complicated labyrinth, which had a fearsome Minotaur within it. One day the hero Theseus descended into the labyrinth and killed the monster. He then found his way back out by following a trail of red yarn he had laid behind him as he was exploring the maze, thereby reducing the complex labyrinth into a simple corridor. Ontology segmentation aims to do the same thing."

After saying this I could see people nodding and agreeing. This is what Jeremy Wiessman in his book calls the "ah-ha" experience that one should aim for in any talk or presentation.

I also used the powerpoint presenter's display view. A feature which strangely no one else seems to take advantage of. It may be because it is somewhat tricky to set up. It displays a different view on my laptop's screen to what shows up on the projector. In addition to the current slide, I also get a running timer, my notes (though I didn't make any), a preview of the next few slides and the ability to jump to a specific slide immediately without having to scroll through the entire presentation (this was very useful for the Q&A session).

I wasn't particularly nervous, though I um-ed and ah-ed a bit too much for my liking. I did however manage to hold the attention of the audience for the 20 minutes of my talk. No one went to sleep, no one started checking their email, everyone was looking at me throughout. Pretty good, considering my talk was in the graveyard slot: just after lunch.

There were initially some general questions and clarifications from the audience. However, then Chris Welty bombarded me with questions. He misunderstood the filtering segmentation algorithm walkthrough I had presented. I corrected his misunderstanding of the final directed acyclic graph connectivity of my segmentation example. He also didn't understand the need for the reciprocal filtering. I answered that one by explaining that it worked well for GALEN, which is fair enough; however, on reflection, I realize that some reciprocal link filtering is necessary in every segmentation algorithm, since otherwise everything will be connected to everything else and the "segment" will end up becoming the entire ontology.

Harith Alani, one of the workshop organizers from Southampton University, told me afterwards that he liked my presentation and talked me for submitting my paper at such short notice. Another conference chair, Derek Sleeman, also seemed pleased and interested.

All in all, I'm pleased with my first conference presentation.

I gave a talk today on my research on segmenting ontologies. It went well. There were about 20 people in the audience (in total 60 people attended the conference, but they were distributed between the three different workshops). Some people had specifically come from one of the other workshops just for my presentation.

I started off with a very good opening statement. This caught everyone's attention and got them interested. I said (view my powerpoint presentation for the graphics):

"An ontology is like a labyrinth, very complex and almost impossible to comprehend at first glance. Beneath the ancient city of Knossos on the island of Crete there was a very large and complicated labyrinth, which had a fearsome Minotaur within it. One day the hero Theseus descended into the labyrinth and killed the monster. He then found his way back out by following a trail of red yarn he had laid behind him as he was exploring the maze, thereby reducing the complex labyrinth into a simple corridor. Ontology segmentation aims to do the same thing."

After saying this I could see people nodding and agreeing. This is what Jeremy Wiessman in his book calls the "ah-ha" experience that one should aim for in any talk or presentation.

I also used the powerpoint presenter's display view. A feature which strangely no one else seems to take advantage of. It may be because it is somewhat tricky to set up. It displays a different view on my laptop's screen to what shows up on the projector. In addition to the current slide, I also get a running timer, my notes (though I didn't make any), a preview of the next few slides and the ability to jump to a specific slide immediately without having to scroll through the entire presentation (this was very useful for the Q&A session).

I wasn't particularly nervous, though I um-ed and ah-ed a bit too much for my liking. I did however manage to hold the attention of the audience for the 20 minutes of my talk. No one went to sleep, no one started checking their email, everyone was looking at me throughout. Pretty good, considering my talk was in the graveyard slot: just after lunch.

There were initially some general questions and clarifications from the audience. However, then Chris Welty bombarded me with questions. He misunderstood the filtering segmentation algorithm walkthrough I had presented. I corrected his misunderstanding of the final directed acyclic graph connectivity of my segmentation example. He also didn't understand the need for the reciprocal filtering. I answered that one by explaining that it worked well for GALEN, which is fair enough; however, on reflection, I realize that some reciprocal link filtering is necessary in every segmentation algorithm, since otherwise everything will be connected to everything else and the "segment" will end up becoming the entire ontology.

Harith Alani, one of the workshop organizers from Southampton University, told me afterwards that he liked my presentation and talked me for submitting my paper at such short notice. Another conference chair, Derek Sleeman, also seemed pleased and interested.

All in all, I'm pleased with my first conference presentation.

The first day of the conference was split into three workshops. This allows for a more focused discussion. I was in the Ontology Management: Searching, Selection, Ranking and Segmentation Workshop.

Chris Welty from IBM started off the day with a keynote on "Re-learning Ontology Management for the Web". His main point was that that each term in an OWL ontology is a uniquely addressable URI that can exist on the Internet for all eternity and be accessed by anyone, anywhere and at any time. This seemingly obvious fact is the key difference that makes ontologies much more useful anytime in the past. It changes everything. People (and machines) can now start to reuse each other's knowledge on a massive scale. And, very importantly, this reuse can happen will relative ease.

He also made an interesting point that the quality of an ontology matters, but the benefit derived from any ontology, no matter how badly engineered, is much greater than the benefit gained from having the best possible knowledge base.

Ontologies are not object oriented, or frame-based systems, though may people mistake them for these, since they are quite similar on the surface. OWL has the distinction of using URIs for all identifiers and being based on formal description logic, which allows for automated reasoning and classification.

As usual, there were some terrible talks. Some people just cannot explain themselves. They will talks for 20 minutes, giving all kinds of complicated maths, confusing everyone and, in the end, it turns out they have just done some very insignficant, minor new thing. The complexty was just to fool people into publishing the research (why explain something in one page, if you can do it in 20 and get published?).

Some researchers from Zurich presented their iRDQL query language extension that allowed for imprecise query term matching. Useful, though nothing extraordinary.

Derek Sleeman gave a strange talk on the research he plans to do. He didn't really say anything, but then, I guess, he wasn't intending to. One useful bit of information he shared was that when evaluating users' understanding of a system, it is useful to have them "think aloud". Research has proven that this speaking one's thoughts does not interfere with the normal thinking process. It is a very useful technique for understand what someone else's mental model of a situation or computer program is.

Sleeman also gave a talk on "Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web". Southampton University, Aberdeen and Sheffield have built an ontology (ontosearch) search engine that uses a PageRank-style algorithm. This offers an alternative to Jim Hendler's Maryland research group's Swoogle search engine.

F. Mostowfi gave an interesting talk on "Change in Ontology and Ontology of Change". He outlined a complex version system that relies on all changes being recorded in an ontology of change. This ontology provides an audit trail, so that one can always reconstruct the original context of any class by performing a RDQL query. The system is being used by linguists to study and preserve the semantics of all 6000 languages of the world.

The first day of the conference was split into three workshops. This allows for a more focused discussion. I was in the Ontology Management: Searching, Selection, Ranking and Segmentation Workshop.

Chris Welty from IBM started off the day with a keynote on "Re-learning Ontology Management for the Web". His main point was that that each term in an OWL ontology is a uniquely addressable URI that can exist on the Internet for all eternity and be accessed by anyone, anywhere and at any time. This seemingly obvious fact is the key difference that makes ontologies much more useful anytime in the past. It changes everything. People (and machines) can now start to reuse each other's knowledge on a massive scale. And, very importantly, this reuse can happen will relative ease.

He also made an interesting point that the quality of an ontology matters, but the benefit derived from any ontology, no matter how badly engineered, is much greater than the benefit gained from having the best possible knowledge base.

Ontologies are not object oriented, or frame-based systems, though may people mistake them for these, since they are quite similar on the surface. OWL has the distinction of using URIs for all identifiers and being based on formal description logic, which allows for automated reasoning and classification.

As usual, there were some terrible talks. Some people just cannot explain themselves. They will talks for 20 minutes, giving all kinds of complicated maths, confusing everyone and, in the end, it turns out they have just done some very insignficant, minor new thing. The complexty was just to fool people into publishing the research (why explain something in one page, if you can do it in 20 and get published?).

Some researchers from Zurich presented their iRDQL query language extension that allowed for imprecise query term matching. Useful, though nothing extraordinary.

Derek Sleeman gave a strange talk on the research he plans to do. He didn't really say anything, but then, I guess, he wasn't intending to. One useful bit of information he shared was that when evaluating users' understanding of a system, it is useful to have them "think aloud". Research has proven that this speaking one's thoughts does not interfere with the normal thinking process. It is a very useful technique for understand what someone else's mental model of a situation or computer program is.

Sleeman also gave a talk on "Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web". Southampton University, Aberdeen and Sheffield have built an ontology (ontosearch) search engine that uses a PageRank-style algorithm. This offers an alternative to Jim Hendler's Maryland research group's Swoogle search engine.

F. Mostowfi gave an interesting talk on "Change in Ontology and Ontology of Change". He outlined a complex version system that relies on all changes being recorded in an ontology of change. This ontology provides an audit trail, so that one can always reconstruct the original context of any class by performing a RDQL query. The system is being used by linguists to study and preserve the semantics of all 6000 languages of the world.

A long flight from Manchester to Toronto, then 3 hours to get through customs by which time I had missed my connecting flight, then a long flight from Toronto to Calgary, then a long bus ride from Calgary to Banff. After this Odyssey I've finally arrived at the Banff Center hotel and conference center for the K-CAP conference.

Canada seems very much the USA, expect for a slight, but noticeable extra degree of stylishness. Less ugly industrial concrete, but more refined. Still, the American influence is all pervading.

Banff is located in the midst of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 4500 feet (1350 meters). The natural surroundings of the center are beautiful. The Rockies are certainly majestic to behold. The mountain air is refreshing (and cold). I'm finding myself occasionally become light headed, since I'm not yet used to the thinner air at this altitude.

The Banff center staff is very professional, well organized, knowledgably, helpful and personal. They will go out of their way to accommodate almost any request. They also constantly ask if they can get you anything, or assist you in any way. Impressive.

The center also offers a range of services and activities for its guest. Most of them are free. It is equipped a swimming pool (I went swimming to get over the jet lag), classes in Yoga, Pilates, Kick Boxing, Massage; a running track, climbing wall, gym, badminton courts, a number of shops and a choice of dinning facilities. The rooms are huge (unlike the UK, there is lots of empty space in Canada, so the can afford to build stuff big). However, I have no idea why anyone would need a bed that is 2x2 meters in size. That is a bit over the top. Nevertheless, they certainly know how to make a good impression on their guests.

First order of business: Sleep.

A long flight from Manchester to Toronto, then 3 hours to get through customs by which time I had missed my connecting flight, then a long flight from Toronto to Calgary, then a long bus ride from Calgary to Banff. After this Odyssey I've finally arrived at the Banff Center hotel and conference center for the K-CAP conference.

Canada seems very much the USA, expect for a slight, but noticeable extra degree of stylishness. Less ugly industrial concrete, but more refined. Still, the American influence is all pervading.

Banff is located in the midst of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 4500 feet (1350 meters). The natural surroundings of the center are beautiful. The Rockies are certainly majestic to behold. The mountain air is refreshing (and cold). I'm finding myself occasionally become light headed, since I'm not yet used to the thinner air at this altitude.

The Banff center staff is very professional, well organized, knowledgably, helpful and personal. They will go out of their way to accommodate almost any request. They also constantly ask if they can get you anything, or assist you in any way. Impressive.

The center also offers a range of services and activities for its guest. Most of them are free. It is equipped a swimming pool (I went swimming to get over the jet lag), classes in Yoga, Pilates, Kick Boxing, Massage; a running track, climbing wall, gym, badminton courts, a number of shops and a choice of dinning facilities. The rooms are huge (unlike the UK, there is lots of empty space in Canada, so the can afford to build stuff big). However, I have no idea why anyone would need a bed that is 2x2 meters in size. That is a bit over the top. Nevertheless, they certainly know how to make a good impression on their guests.

First order of business: Sleep.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

In 1920 Professor Leonid Vasiliev of the University of Leningrad, Russia performed an experiment where he would monitor a subject in a darkened room, detecting when she would fall asleep. A psychic would then be directed to a special lead-lined room some distance away. There the psychic would find a sealed envelope with instructions written by a neutral third party to either:

1. Remain in the room and issue a command to the subject to fall asleep
2. Exit the room and issue the same command
3. Exit the room and issue no command

The resultant average time it took the subject to fall asleep were:

1. 4:43
2. 4:13
3. 7:24

The experiment suggests that telepathic influences are very real and do not work via electromagnetism, since these waves are blocked by lead. Professor Vasiliev work was eventually canceled by the Russian government, since it was investigating phenomena ??oewhich considering the time and place, cannot be perceived??.

In contrast, these kind of mystic powers are quite common in the Vedic literature. However, they are also condemned, not because they couldn't possibly be true, but because they distract from the path of service to God, which is the true goal of life.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

In 1920 Professor Leonid Vasiliev of the University of Leningrad, Russia performed an experiment where he would monitor a subject in a darkened room, detecting when she would fall asleep. A psychic would then be directed to a special lead-lined room some distance away. There the psychic would find a sealed envelope with instructions written by a neutral third party to either:

1. Remain in the room and issue a command to the subject to fall asleep
2. Exit the room and issue the same command
3. Exit the room and issue no command

The resultant average time it took the subject to fall asleep were:

1. 4:43
2. 4:13
3. 7:24

The experiment suggests that telepathic influences are very real and do not work via electromagnetism, since these waves are blocked by lead. Professor Vasiliev work was eventually canceled by the Russian government, since it was investigating phenomena ??oewhich considering the time and place, cannot be perceived??.

In contrast, these kind of mystic powers are quite common in the Vedic literature. However, they are also condemned, not because they couldn't possibly be true, but because they distract from the path of service to God, which is the true goal of life.

Download MP3
Verse: SB1.16.34
Place: Govinda's Restaurant, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom
Duration: 1:25

In this class to devotees in the Swansea temple Devamrita Swami talk about the how people who are reluctant to take up Krishna conscious because of fear of going "too fast" and many burdensome false obligations are just like someone who has just woken up and doesn't want to get out of bed. Changing one's way is especially difficult for someone over the age of 40, but it can be done. He also talks about how material nature, not the United States, is the only true superpower in the world. The world is overburdened by so much unnecessary economic endeavor. She fights back.

He finished by talking about Vamana-lila. We can only really be happy if we are satisfied with whatever we currently have. We shouldn't struggle for acquiring more and we are destined to get. However, we should endeavor strongly for our Krishna consciousness. He gives the practical example of a devotee couple formally living in Slovenia.

Questions:

• How is the demigods' controlling position is related to simultaneous oneness and difference?
• Are we headed for a new period of serfdom for the people in general?
• What to do if I, due to past conditioning, offend devotees?
• How to not get depressed working in a non-devotee job?
• How to balance health, sadanna and service?
• How to use Yoga to preach?

Download MP3
Verse: SB1.16.34
Place: Govinda's Restaurant, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom
Duration: 1:25

In this class to devotees in the Swansea temple Devamrita Swami talk about the how people who are reluctant to take up Krishna conscious because of fear of going "too fast" and many burdensome false obligations are just like someone who has just woken up and doesn't want to get out of bed. Changing one's way is especially difficult for someone over the age of 40, but it can be done. He also talks about how material nature, not the United States, is the only true superpower in the world. The world is overburdened by so much unnecessary economic endeavor. She fights back.

He finished by talking about Vamana-lila. We can only really be happy if we are satisfied with whatever we currently have. We shouldn't struggle for acquiring more and we are destined to get. However, we should endeavor strongly for our Krishna consciousness. He gives the practical example of a devotee couple formally living in Slovenia.

Questions:

• How is the demigods' controlling position is related to simultaneous oneness and difference?
• Are we headed for a new period of serfdom for the people in general?
• What to do if I, due to past conditioning, offend devotees?
• How to not get depressed working in a non-devotee job?
• How to balance health, sadanna and service?
• How to use Yoga to preach?

Download MP3
Place: The Soul Centre, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Duration: 1:17

Summary:
In this discussion between guests at the Cardiff Soul Centre and Devamrita Swami, the swami asks them where they think they will be at in 15 years time. Guests ranging in age from 17 to 50 give their thoughts. They discuss how they think they will have progressed and/or want to progress spiritually.

Download MP3
Place: The Soul Centre, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Duration: 1:17

Summary:
In this discussion between guests at the Cardiff Soul Centre and Devamrita Swami, the swami asks them where they think they will be at in 15 years time. Guests ranging in age from 17 to 50 give their thoughts. They discuss how they think they will have progressed and/or want to progress spiritually.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Artificial life scientists aim to create intelligent machines that will eventually replace humans by a natural evolutionary process. Some researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory project that this will happen within one hundred years.

The Vedic literature also contains stories of robots. Sanskritist V. Raghavan has written a treatise on machines in ancient India. King Samarangana Sutradhara in the twelfth century, for example, was said to have wooden human-shaped automata that would perform simple menial tasks like fanning, sprinkling water, or playing musical instruments. The Buddhist Bhaisajya-vastu tells of a country where complex automata existed that behaved and looked just like humans. These stories are however most probably just fantasy.

Yantras, as machines are called in Sanskrit, are most often used in analogies explaining how our own bodies are merely machines and we, the consciousness, are the machines controller. Similarly, the Universe is a large clockwork-like machine, with God as the ultimate controller.

Other machines were used for military purposes. For example, in the battle between Krishna and Salva, Salva boarded an airplane that could turn invisible. Later in the battle Krishna shot this airplane down using a sound-seeking arrow that was attracted by sound of the invisible airplane in the sky.

These weapons worked because they are sentient. They had living beings embedded within them with whom the warrior can communicate telepathically to issue commands. These cybernetic weapons are exactly what Los Alamos researchers postulate. They prove that sentient machines are indeed possible.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Artificial life scientists aim to create intelligent machines that will eventually replace humans by a natural evolutionary process. Some researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory project that this will happen within one hundred years.

The Vedic literature also contains stories of robots. Sanskritist V. Raghavan has written a treatise on machines in ancient India. King Samarangana Sutradhara in the twelfth century, for example, was said to have wooden human-shaped automata that would perform simple menial tasks like fanning, sprinkling water, or playing musical instruments. The Buddhist Bhaisajya-vastu tells of a country where complex automata existed that behaved and looked just like humans. These stories are however most probably just fantasy.

Yantras, as machines are called in Sanskrit, are most often used in analogies explaining how our own bodies are merely machines and we, the consciousness, are the machines controller. Similarly, the Universe is a large clockwork-like machine, with God as the ultimate controller.

Other machines were used for military purposes. For example, in the battle between Krishna and Salva, Salva boarded an airplane that could turn invisible. Later in the battle Krishna shot this airplane down using a sound-seeking arrow that was attracted by sound of the invisible airplane in the sky.

These weapons worked because they are sentient. They had living beings embedded within them with whom the warrior can communicate telepathically to issue commands. These cybernetic weapons are exactly what Los Alamos researchers postulate. They prove that sentient machines are indeed possible.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran proposes that the idea of a "little man" sitting in our brain observing our sense input is nonsense. Such a figure would require another "little man" sitting in his brain, and then yet another, ad infinitum. Obviously nonsense. So instead the brain must understand things at an abstract symbolic level.

The brain takes in input in a neural net similar to the logic gates of a computer chip. However, a computer chip is not consciousness. It isn't aware that it is experiencing anything. Scientists use the fact that the brain very complex (it 10 billion neuros) as an excuse. The large complexity must be where the consciousness is coming from. But how does scaling a simple pattern change anything? The brain is still fundamentally like the computer chip.

Maybe there is such a thing as a soul that sits inside the brain, reading the data it interprets and processes just like we might read a book.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran proposes that the idea of a "little man" sitting in our brain observing our sense input is nonsense. Such a figure would require another "little man" sitting in his brain, and then yet another, ad infinitum. Obviously nonsense. So instead the brain must understand things at an abstract symbolic level.

The brain takes in input in a neural net similar to the logic gates of a computer chip. However, a computer chip is not consciousness. It isn't aware that it is experiencing anything. Scientists use the fact that the brain very complex (it 10 billion neuros) as an excuse. The large complexity must be where the consciousness is coming from. But how does scaling a simple pattern change anything? The brain is still fundamentally like the computer chip.

Maybe there is such a thing as a soul that sits inside the brain, reading the data it interprets and processes just like we might read a book.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Researches at Los Alamos National Laboratories study artificial life. They hope to one day build a sophisticated computer simulation that exactly mimics the real world. Even today they can hook a person's eyes up to TV-screens, feed their nose and mouth smell and taste generators, equip their hands with data-gloves and put headphones on their ears.

Researcher Tommaso Toffoli from MIT argues that a simulated collapse of a simulated bridge that is indistinguishable from a real event, is just as much "life" as "real life", as we know it.

Indeed, the Vedic literature paints a similar picture. It describes how, just like the person liked into the computer simulation by way of artificial senses, "real life" is actually an illusion and our real self is linked into it via the interface of the false ego.

Whether or not computers can even develop real consciousness is an open question. However, we can learn a lesion about so-called reality from the computer scientists' experiments.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Researches at Los Alamos National Laboratories study artificial life. They hope to one day build a sophisticated computer simulation that exactly mimics the real world. Even today they can hook a person's eyes up to TV-screens, feed their nose and mouth smell and taste generators, equip their hands with data-gloves and put headphones on their ears.

Researcher Tommaso Toffoli from MIT argues that a simulated collapse of a simulated bridge that is indistinguishable from a real event, is just as much "life" as "real life", as we know it.

Indeed, the Vedic literature paints a similar picture. It describes how, just like the person liked into the computer simulation by way of artificial senses, "real life" is actually an illusion and our real self is linked into it via the interface of the false ego.

Whether or not computers can even develop real consciousness is an open question. However, we can learn a lesion about so-called reality from the computer scientists' experiments.

Just had the first session of Vedicsoc in the new University term. It went rather well.

A total of 25 young students attended (male/female ratio was about 1/4). There was barely enough space in the room. I taught a very crowded power-yoga mini class, which seemed to be well received. However, I forgot to get people to do Ardha Matsyendrasana. Also, I need to work on speaking more slowly, clearly and loudly to a large group of people like that. Then we chanted some Vedic mantras together (Nitai Gauranga and Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya) for about 15 minutes (the Hare Krishna mantra comes next time).

Following that, everyone had some cookies I made. After people had finished their (first) cookie, I asked: "Who's a pleasure lover?" and explained that spirituality means happiness. Then I asked people to share some happy experience. After a few stories I explained how that happiness is conditional: i.e. dependent on external circumstances and temporary. Better to go for Krishna consciousness and get spiritual happiness. Any questions?

Someone asked about the difference between the mind and consciousness and how to tell which is which. Another person wanted to know if anyone can take up the practice. Someone else asked what it means to "free the mind". Another person questioned me about how conscious animals are. One half-German girl asked how "mind" translates into German, since "der Geist" means "the soul" (actually, I couldn't properly answer that one - anyone care to offer some help?). More questions gave me the opportunity to talk about, among other things, the relationship of physical yoga to Krishna consciousness and how I came to this spiritual practice 5 years ago.

I ended by announcing all the topics and activities we would cover in the upcoming term, offering people good deals on yoga equipment (Universities and non-profits get wholesale prices) and asking for donations to finance the society (I choose not to charge any fee for sessions). Also, anyone that gave a sufficiently large donation got a small book of their choice. This resulted in my selling 12 books and collecting enough money to cover my costs for the session.

Oh yes, and more cookies for anyone that wanted them. Some people took as many as five. Ah, the power of prasadam.

I'm happy. We shall see how many people return for the next session.

Just had the first session of Vedicsoc in the new University term. It went rather well.

A total of 25 young students attended (male/female ratio was about 1/4). There was barely enough space in the room. I taught a very crowded power-yoga mini class, which seemed to be well received. However, I forgot to get people to do Ardha Matsyendrasana. Also, I need to work on speaking more slowly, clearly and loudly to a large group of people like that. Then we chanted some Vedic mantras together (Nitai Gauranga and Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya) for about 15 minutes (the Hare Krishna mantra comes next time).

Following that, everyone had some cookies I made. After people had finished their (first) cookie, I asked: "Who's a pleasure lover?" and explained that spirituality means happiness. Then I asked people to share some happy experience. After a few stories I explained how that happiness is conditional: i.e. dependent on external circumstances and temporary. Better to go for Krishna consciousness and get spiritual happiness. Any questions?

Someone asked about the difference between the mind and consciousness and how to tell which is which. Another person wanted to know if anyone can take up the practice. Someone else asked what it means to "free the mind". Another person questioned me about how conscious animals are. One half-German girl asked how "mind" translates into German, since "der Geist" means "the soul" (actually, I couldn't properly answer that one - anyone care to offer some help?). More questions gave me the opportunity to talk about, among other things, the relationship of physical yoga to Krishna consciousness and how I came to this spiritual practice 5 years ago.

I ended by announcing all the topics and activities we would cover in the upcoming term, offering people good deals on yoga equipment (Universities and non-profits get wholesale prices) and asking for donations to finance the society (I choose not to charge any fee for sessions). Also, anyone that gave a sufficiently large donation got a small book of their choice. This resulted in my selling 12 books and collecting enough money to cover my costs for the session.

Oh yes, and more cookies for anyone that wanted them. Some people took as many as five. Ah, the power of prasadam.

I'm happy. We shall see how many people return for the next session.

Download MP3
Verse: Bhagavad-Gita 8.16
Place: Govinda's Restaurant, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom
Duration: 1:44 hours

Summary:
In this morning class to devotees in the Swansea temple Devamrita Swami talks about how everywhere in the world is a place of misery. He specifically highlights the recent Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. We tend to quickly forget the miseries we encounter. Indeed, he says, there is an organized effort to prevent people from thinking too deeply about their lives. Krishna consciousness puts one into a special dimension, a different atmosphere. We should make it our lifetime career goal and prioritize accordingly.

Questions:

• How to convince young people to plan so far ahead?
• How do devotees influence the material energy?
• Are disasters the direct result of sinful activities?
• Is there really a conspiracy of world leaders?
• Regarding the Christian church minister getting a $0.5 million salary per year, how much should our leaders be paid?
• How to give Krishna consciousness to people we meet only once on the street?
• What is the a fine line between giving people too much truth and massaging their ego?

Download MP3
Verse: Bhagavad-Gita 8.16
Place: Govinda's Restaurant, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom
Duration: 1:44 hours

Summary:
In this morning class to devotees in the Swansea temple Devamrita Swami talks about how everywhere in the world is a place of misery. He specifically highlights the recent Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. We tend to quickly forget the miseries we encounter. Indeed, he says, there is an organized effort to prevent people from thinking too deeply about their lives. Krishna consciousness puts one into a special dimension, a different atmosphere. We should make it our lifetime career goal and prioritize accordingly.

Questions:

• How to convince young people to plan so far ahead?
• How do devotees influence the material energy?
• Are disasters the direct result of sinful activities?
• Is there really a conspiracy of world leaders?
• Regarding the Christian church minister getting a $0.5 million salary per year, how much should our leaders be paid?
• How to give Krishna consciousness to people we meet only once on the street?
• What is the a fine line between giving people too much truth and massaging their ego?

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Einstein??(TM)s Theory of Relativity shows how time slows down for someone traveling close to the speed of light. This effect is known as time dilation. Time dilation also occurs when large gravitational forces are present. A person traveling into the event horizon of a black hole, for example, will, to an external observer, appear to slow down more and more as he approaches the horizon, but never actually enter it. The traveler will not notice any change in the passage of time, but the light showing his actions cannot escape the gravitational pull of the black hole, so the observer sees him in super-slow motion.

The Vedic literature has account of these kinds of relativistic time dilation effects. There is the story of King Kakudmi, who visits Lord Brahma for one hour to ask a question and find that 27 catur-yugas (27 x 4,320,000 earth years) have passed. The Brahma-vimohana-lila describes a similar time stretching pastime.

Lord Brahma is said to live near the outer shell of the Universe, near the border to the spiritual world. Could it be that the passage to the spiritual world is like the event horizon of a black hole? The closer one gets to it, the slower time passes and once one actually enters it, time ceases to exist completely.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Einstein??(TM)s Theory of Relativity shows how time slows down for someone traveling close to the speed of light. This effect is known as time dilation. Time dilation also occurs when large gravitational forces are present. A person traveling into the event horizon of a black hole, for example, will, to an external observer, appear to slow down more and more as he approaches the horizon, but never actually enter it. The traveler will not notice any change in the passage of time, but the light showing his actions cannot escape the gravitational pull of the black hole, so the observer sees him in super-slow motion.

The Vedic literature has account of these kinds of relativistic time dilation effects. There is the story of King Kakudmi, who visits Lord Brahma for one hour to ask a question and find that 27 catur-yugas (27 x 4,320,000 earth years) have passed. The Brahma-vimohana-lila describes a similar time stretching pastime.

Lord Brahma is said to live near the outer shell of the Universe, near the border to the spiritual world. Could it be that the passage to the spiritual world is like the event horizon of a black hole? The closer one gets to it, the slower time passes and once one actually enters it, time ceases to exist completely.

The most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in the world is World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment.

Blizzard recently announced that they now have over 4 million subscribers worldwide, making WoW the most popular online RPG in existence. In comparison, the XBox Live online playing system (with which people can play any number of online-enabled Xbox games) only has 2 million subscribers.

A World of Warcraft subscriber pays a monthly fee of $15 per month (a XBox Live player pays only $6 per month) and the retail box costs an additional $40.

This equals: US$ 880 million per year income for Blizzard.

That amount of money is on par with to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of several small countries, like Bhutan, Mongolia, Rwanda or the Central African Republic.

The most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in the world is World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment.

Blizzard recently announced that they now have over 4 million subscribers worldwide, making WoW the most popular online RPG in existence. In comparison, the XBox Live online playing system (with which people can play any number of online-enabled Xbox games) only has 2 million subscribers.

A World of Warcraft subscriber pays a monthly fee of $15 per month (a XBox Live player pays only $6 per month) and the retail box costs an additional $40.

This equals: US$ 880 million per year income for Blizzard.

That amount of money is on par with to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of several small countries, like Bhutan, Mongolia, Rwanda or the Central African Republic.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Researches at Syracuse University have demonstrated that light beams distorted by frosted glass can be reversed and restored to their original form. Similarly, a drop of ink in glycerin can be blurred and recreated by rotation. This leads to the idea that one supreme consciousness could be distributed throughout all of matter while simultaneously being a unified whole. Indeed, physicists David Bohm hints at the possibility of the structure of the Universe has we see it, being a direct result of this distributed consciousness.

The Vedic scripture called Brahma-Samhita gives an account of exactly the simultaneous oneness and difference Bohm postulates. Moreover, Srimad Bhagavatam gives accounts of subtle sound vibrations causing the space itself to unfold from an unmanifest state called pradhana. God directly causes this unfolding, but his presence is hidden in the seemingly random resultant effect (maya).

Alfred Russell Wallace, co-inventor of the theory of evolution, made a similar point to Bohm. He also believes that natural selection isn??(TM)t the whole store. Some superior intelligence must have been involved. Unifying physics and meta-physics requires an open mind, like that of these forward-thinking researchers.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Researches at Syracuse University have demonstrated that light beams distorted by frosted glass can be reversed and restored to their original form. Similarly, a drop of ink in glycerin can be blurred and recreated by rotation. This leads to the idea that one supreme consciousness could be distributed throughout all of matter while simultaneously being a unified whole. Indeed, physicists David Bohm hints at the possibility of the structure of the Universe has we see it, being a direct result of this distributed consciousness.

The Vedic scripture called Brahma-Samhita gives an account of exactly the simultaneous oneness and difference Bohm postulates. Moreover, Srimad Bhagavatam gives accounts of subtle sound vibrations causing the space itself to unfold from an unmanifest state called pradhana. God directly causes this unfolding, but his presence is hidden in the seemingly random resultant effect (maya).

Alfred Russell Wallace, co-inventor of the theory of evolution, made a similar point to Bohm. He also believes that natural selection isn??(TM)t the whole store. Some superior intelligence must have been involved. Unifying physics and meta-physics requires an open mind, like that of these forward-thinking researchers.

The University Fresher??(TM)s Fair finished today. In the first week of University, the new students get a whole load of events, advertising from various clubs and societies, free stuff and so much sense stimulus that they practically loose all intelligence and discrimination. Indeed, most of the men looked totally spaced-out, walking around with a dazed look on their faces and most of the women looked angry and frustrated.

The young first-year students also didn??(TM)t look nearly as young and innocent as I remember them looking just three years ago. 18-year olds looked more like they were approaching 30. Excess indulgence in sense gratification is so degrading. A sad state of affairs.

This event marked the rebirth of Vedicsoc after the summer break. The Vedic society is a university club that aims to teach things related to the Vedic literature (like e.g. Krishna consciousness).

We distributed 1500 flyers and 400 prasadam sweets (coconut ice) throughout the two days we were allocated a stall. ??oeWe?? included Ben, Felix, Shilpa and myself. Ben was really getting into it towards the end of the last day. He was stopping nearly everyone and getting them to sign up for the email newsletter. Felix used his sankirtan skills to induce people to join-up without them even realizing. Shilpa was also very good. She quickly made friends with people and got them interested in that way. She attributed her natural sankirtan abilities to her long-time retail sales experience (selling iPods in Selfridges). Besides distributing flyers, I managed to distribute one POY and one SSR to interested students.

The most common question I got was: "This isn't a religion, is it?"
Could anyone offer some advice for what is a good response?

My body, though improved in health, still is no where near suited for sankirtan-like activity. Distributing Vedicsoc material from 10am till 4pm for two days wiped me out completely. It was pretty intense being in a huge hall, with blaring music, trash everywhere, wall-to-wall people, 160 other societies and countless commerical companies competing for the students??(TM) attention. Time to get some rest.