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HOME  - Various Director Designate Bomar
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Written by Scott Silver
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Thursday, 28 September 2006 |
Mary A. Bomar will soon become the next Director of the National Park Service. As part of her confirmation process, Bomar provided responses to 62 questions asked of her by a handful of Senators. There questions and Bomar's responses can be found at www.wildwilderness.org/docs/bomar.doc
The document makes interesting reading.
Several Senators asked flagrantly leading questions that left no doubt about the response they wanted to hear. On only the rarest of occasions did Bomar indicate she held views different than those expressed by the Senators. For the most part, this document reads like a script from that classic 1966 artificial intelligence computer program known as ELISA. A brief explanation of ELISA follows.
Scott
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
ELIZA is a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which
parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the
patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Thus,
for example, the response to "My head hurts" might be "Why do you say
your head hurts?" The response to "My mother hates me" might be "Who
else in your family hates you?"
It is sometimes inaccurately said that ELIZA "simulates" (or worse,
"emulates") a therapist. Weizenbaum said that ELIZA provided a "parody"
of "the responses of a nondirectional psychotherapist in an initial
psychiatric interview." He chose the context of psychotherapy to
"sidestep the problem of giving the program a data base of real-world
knowledge", the therapeutic situation being one of the few real human
situations in which a human being can reply to a statement with a
question that indicates very little specific knowledge of the topic
under discussion. For example, it is a context in which the question
"Who is your favorite composer?" can be answered acceptably with
responses such as "What about your own favorite composer?" or "Does
that question interest you?"
Eliza worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into
canned phrases. Depending upon the initial entries by the user the
illusion of a human writer could be instantly dispelled, or could
continue through several interchanges. It was sometimes so convincing
that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally
caught up in dealing with ELIZA for several minutes until the machine's
true lack of understanding became apparent. All this was due to
people's tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never
put there...
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