So, it’s possible to spell words with Flickr photos, eh?

Kastner‘s created a little gizmo to do just this from the photos of Flickr’s countless users.

» Respell Dharmasphere, or…

Spell your own: (on Kastner’s Flickrtext site)

Today is the first full moon in May, a traditionally auspicious day known as “Ananda Purnima” (the blissful full-moon). On this day in 1921, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar was born in Jamalpur, India.

His early work as a railway clerk betrayed little of the storm that was soon to occur around him…

Sarkar started teaching yogic meditation to a growing band of followers, later forming the socio-spiritual organisation Ananda Marga. He became known by his spiritual name Shrii Shrii Anandamurti.

In 1959, he propounded a humanistic socio-economic theory, Prout, to challenge both Capitalism and Communism. I remember hearing his comment that society had been unable to fully accept humanism until it had witnessed the horrors of World War Two.

He formed a relief organisation, AMURT, which was the first global NGO founded in the Third World. AMURT has recently been working in the Tsunami region.

Sarkar went on to form a global cultural organisation, RAWA, for the realignment of the arts with the spirit of service and mysticism. And just to show how it was done, he composed a staggering 5018 songs in the last eight years of his life, before passing away in 1990. His collection of songs is called Prabhata Samgiita.

He went on to propound a new concept in science and psychology, called Microvita, and a holistic system of education based on his principles of Neo-Humanism.

Sarkar was a fountain of wisdom on ecology, womens’ issues, linguistics, history, farming and just about everything else that I can think of!

A strict moralist, and a tireless exposer of corruption, he fell on the wrong side of Indira Gandhi’s increasingly authoritarian government. Refusing to keep quiet about social exploitation and his Prout theory, he spent seven years as a political prisoner and survived a poisoning attempt while in jail.

By the time he re-emerged, his ideas had spread throughout the world, and continue to do so today.

So much in one lifetime…

I’ll be thinking of you today. Happy Birthday!

He said that while many scientists and linguists have attempted to teach bots to speak, they have, until now at least, failed to do it successfully.

He explained that this is because there is certain intuitive knowledge that humans use when we are speaking. There are some things that we know, due to our life experience that enhances our communication skills.

This is without even mentioning the emotional factor that affects the way humans express themselves and interact with others.

One example the professor gave was the lame attempt that have taken place to programme computers to translate texts from one language into another. If you have ever done this on the internet you will know what a complete failure it is. Thus any computer generated translation has to be checked and corrected by a person, therefore defeating the purpose of the task.

He wasn’t saying that it is an impossible task. In fact he referred to the Babel Fish in the Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and said that one day that might well be a reality!

What seems apparent to me is that though a bot might possess a complex lexicon (i.e. the store of words in one’s mind), it cannot process meaning in the same way that a human can. The meaning it can derive will merely be some kind of dictionary definition that has no link to concepts in the outside world.

Isn’t language incredible?! The human mouth and vocal cords can be manipulated with such precision to emit sound waves that another individual can discern and then decipher, to comprehend the feelings and ideas of the speaker.

And the written word – a collection of ordered squiggles on a page – can be recorded to convey exactly the same meaning, via the visual organs of another.
Subjects for research:

• The method by which a newborn baby can start to make sense of communications. How it can reinforce the links it finds between words, concepts, ideas so that it can be competent in understanding others and in communicating to them.
• How this learning by reinforcement can be used as a model for artificial intelligence.

Some links:

• WordNet – a project by Princeton University to collect and cross-reference all the verbs, nouns and adjectives in the English language. Can be used as a database for linguistic software, dictionary searches, etc.
• The Artificial Intelligence Chatterbox Challenge, along with some classic quotes from conversations with the best of the bots. The different bots in the contest use different techniques – some are explicitly programmed with responses and some of them actually learn from the users they converse with.