Category: Lab

A Presentation Proposal for the Crossing Boundaries Symposium

The Crossing Boundaries Symposium is mobilizing STEAM to tackle climate change. I submitted the following presentation proposal:

For millennia, meditation has been a pathway to inner calm, self-awareness, and reduced suffering—insights crucial for psychological evolution and peaceful coexistence. However, mastering advanced meditative states often takes decades. Given the urgency of the climate crisis and the growing need for effective methods of fostering peace, new approaches to meditation training are necessary.

This presentation explores the potential of electroencephalogram (EEG) technology and brainwave entrainment as tools for accelerating meditative learning. EEG can measure the neural activity of experienced meditators, offering a tangible representation of advanced states of consciousness. By translating these brainwave patterns into auditory and visual formats, learners can directly observe and engage with expert brain states. Furthermore, entrainment—a process where external rhythmic stimuli synchronize brain activity—offers a novel teaching method, potentially guiding beginners into deeper meditative states more efficiently.

By integrating EEG analysis, audiovisual feedback, and entrainment techniques, this approach aims to bridge the gap between novice and expert meditation experiences. The presentation will discuss practical applications, potential benefits, and challenges of using these methods to enhance the teaching of meditation. Ultimately, this research suggests that modern technology can play a critical role in fostering peace and self-awareness on a larger scale, making profound meditative states more accessible in an era where they are urgently needed.

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I was recently contacted by an independent Canadian news publisher who is using Share News on Facebook. The tool allows them to get around Facebook’s filter on Canadian news. They came to me with an issue sharing new posts that I resolve here.

Problem. The publisher created a new post. The tool generated a Bing search link featuring just one result, a link to the news story. However, it was observed that the one result was to the publisher’s homepage instead of the specific news story. The result auto-corrected later that day.

Cause. Search engines like Bing may have a delay in indexing a new post, especially if it is on a website that is not Search Engine Optimized. The delay can be seconds, hours, or days.

Resolution 1. The publisher can perform SEO to speed up indexing, or they can index a new page manually by submitting it to the Bing URL Submission Tool. To use the tool, the publisher must sign-up for Bing’s Webmaster Tools and upload an XML file to their root directory. See this article for detailed steps.

Resolution 2. The tool has new option to generate a search link using Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” function. The advantage of using this option is that Google tends to index pages more quickly. However, the Lucky function uses a redirect to the first search results – redirects may generate warnings.

The Kindle and other e-readers are generally terrific for sharing quotes and text snippets for research, but they have unfortunate limitations too. The Kindle does not allow a reader to select or share footnotes. It also blocks you from sharing text if the selection is too long or if you have shared too much from a given book.

You can snap and share a photo of the screen with your camera, but the photo is greyscale and unsuited to editing for research. An effective workaround is a Optical Character Recognition app. I use the free Google Lens Text mode on my Android phone.

1. Open the Google Lens app on your phone (or tap the Google Lens icon inside your phone’s camera app if available).
2. Point your camera at the text you want to copy.
3. Tap the “Text” button at the bottom of the screen.
4. The text will be highlighted on the screen. You can then select a larger section by dragging the circles at the ends of the highlighted text.
5. Tap “Copy” from the menu that appears above the highlighted section.
6. The copied text can be shared and edited.