Pandora
(pan-dor -ă, -doh -ră) A small irregularly shaped satellite of Saturn, discovered in 1980 from photographs taken by Voyager 1. It appears to be heavily cratered, the two largest craters being some 30 km in diameter. Together with Prometheus, Pandora is a shepherd satellite for Saturn's F ring. See Saturn's rings; Table 2, backmatter.)
Pandora
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)Pandora is the name of two distinct celestial bodies: A moon of Saturn and an asteroid. Pandora, the recently discovered (1980) moon in the Saturnian system, is about 55 miles in diameter and orbits Saturn in less than two-thirds of a terrestrial day at an average distance of 88,200 miles. Pandora, asteroid 55 (the 55th asteroid to be discovered, on September 10, 1858), has an orbital period a bit longer than 4½ years, and it is almost 113 kilometers in diameter. Both celestial bodies were named after the mythological Greek woman who released the ills of humanity by opening a box that the gods had sent her but had forbidden her from unsealing. Only the asteroid has been investigated by astrologers.
Pandora is one of the more recent asteroids to be investigated by astrologers. Preliminary material on Pandora can be found in Demetra George and Douglas Bloch’s Astrology for Yourself, and an ephemeris (table of celestial locations) for Pandora can be found in the second edition of George and Bloch’s Asteroid Goddesses. Unlike the planets, which are associated with a wide range of phenomena, the smaller asteroids are said to represent a single principle. George and Bloch give Pandora’s principle as “curiosity that initiates change.” Zipporah Dobyns also associates Pandora with curiosity and has found it prominent in the charts of many astrologers. J. Lee Lehman sees the effect of Pandora as twofold: “to stir a person into doing something, and to produce unintended options of the person.” Jacob Schwartz gives this asteroid’s significance as “encountering unanticipated ramifications and options of a larger process, caught off-guard, curiosity initiating change.”
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Pandora
[pan′dȯr·ə]Pandora
Pandora
(language)["Pandora: Non-Deterministic Parallel Logic Programming", R. Bahgat et al, Proc 6th Intl Conf Logic Programming, MIT Press 1989 pp. 471-486].
Pandora
A leading music streaming and Internet radio service from Pandora Media, Inc. (www.pandora.com). Pandora lets users create their own personalized radio stations by selecting a favorite artist and voting thumbs up or down on each song that is delivered. The more songs listened to and voted on, the more Pandora fine tunes the station to the user's music preferences. Songs can be heard on the computer or a mobile device.The Music Genome Project
The heart of Pandora is the Music Genome Project that was started in 2000 by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft and Tim Westergren. It is a musicological study analyzing 400 attributes of a song, including melody, harmony, the singer's voice and instruments. Pandora uses its history of billions of thumbs up and down in combination with the music DNA to recommend songs. It should be noted that the "music DNA" has no relationship to the acoustic fingerprints used to identify a song (see acoustic fingerprint). See Last.fm, music recommendation service and music search.
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| By voting yeah or nay on the songs Pandora recommends, the system is able to fine tune subsequent selections for each user. In addition, all the "those-who-like-this-also-like-that" history that Pandora collects helps make recommendations to other users better. |
Pandora
in classical Greek mythology, a woman created by Hephaestus at the order of Zeus to punish mortals for Prometheus’ abduction of fire from the gods. According to the myth, Hephaestus fashioned Pandora from water and earth, endowing her with the appearance of a goddess and the voice of a mortal. Aphrodite gave Pandora irresistible charm, and Hermes gave her cunning, deceitfulness, and treachery. Athena wove beautiful garments for her.
With her beauty, Pandora captivated the brother of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and became his wife. In Epimetheus’ house was a box, which had never been opened because it contained all the woes of mankind. Pandora, curious, opened the box and released all the misfortunes that have afflicted men ever since. In accordance with the will of Zeus, the lid slammed shut with only hope remaining at the bottom of the box. P. P. Rubens and other artists have created works dealing with the myth of Pandora.