Spacehack, Discovery of Jupiter's belts, ELIZA: talking to a computer

[Nostromics Newsletter]

Nostromics Newsletter

Nostromics science gifts product news, educational resources & science tidbits

Nostromics Newsletter, 30 March 2011 - You are welcome to share this mail, see newsletter back issues

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Spacehack

Spacehack is a directory of space and astronomy related citizen science projects. The site lists scientific research and educational projects in the fields of space and astronomy, to which the general public can contribute with a wide range of activities involving data collection and analysis. Contributions may be as simple as inspecting and classifying images taken by telescopes or spacecrafts, or more involved like outdoor observations and activities.

No formal scientific training is required, anybody can join projects. If you are a teacher, your students may want to contribute to these citizen science projects to learn about research and data analysis in the context of an actual project. If you are a parent, Spacehack provides many ideas for fun and interesting science and technology activities for your kids.

The discovery of Jupiter's belts

The Nostromics Jupiter Moon View Mouse Pad features a vintage fictional view of Jupiter from one of its moons, an illustration of a popular astronomy book published in 1900. The artist who created it included the typical dark belts and light zones of the planet's atmosphere that can be seen with small telescopes.

Jupiter's belts were first observed in 1630 by Giovani Battista Zupi and Francesco Fontana. Zupi was an Italian Jesuit priest and astronomer, Fontana an Italian lawyer and astronomer. They both lived and worked in Naples, Italy.

See also our Jupiter Moon View mugs and posters in the History of Astronomy section of Nostromics Store. More science gifts and products at Nostromics Store.

ELIZA: talking to a computer

ELIZA was an early influential Artificial Intelligence computer program that simulated a psychotherapy session. Completed in 1966 by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, it let a user at a computer terminal communicate in apparent natural language with a simulathed therapist of the Rogerian school. Although users were aware that ELIZA was a program, Weizenbaum found that the emotional reactions of many of them went beyond and considered ELIZA a sort of confident, which the researcher found disturbing.

ELIZA didn't understand what the user typed at the terminal. The program simply scanned input text searching for common conversation patterns stored in a database, and used other patterns to rewrote them as answers. For example, if the user entered the text "Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother", ELIZA recognized a word indicating a family context, "mother", and answered "Tell me more about your family". At the dawn of the computer era, this looked impressive.

-- Paolo Amoroso & Mauro Arpino (Nostromics), science educators - Milan, Italy

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Copyright (C) 2011 by Paolo Amoroso and Mauro Arpino