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Obama considering trip to Iraq

(CNN) — Sen. Barack Obama says he may travel to Iraq between winning the Democratic nomination and the November general election.

The Illinois Democrat told reporters that Iraq would obviously be at the top of the list of stops.

I think that if I’m going to Iraq, then I’m there to talk to troops and talk to commanders. I’m not there to try to score political points or perform, Obama said Wednesday. The work they’re doing there is too important.

Obama said he was considering visiting Iraq after Sen. John McCain had suggested that the two should make a joint trip to the country, a proposal Obama dismissed Tuesday as nothing more than a political stunt.

McCain Wednesday night said he is happy his likely general election opponent is considering a trip and believes that Obama would change his views on Iraq after spending some time there.

It’s long overdue, McCain said during a fundraiser in Beverly Hills, California. It’s been 871 days since he was there, and I’m confident that when he goes he will then change his position on the conflict in Iraq because he will see the success that has been achieved on the ground.

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and his fellow Republicans have strongly criticized Obama for not visiting Iraq since January 2006. The Republican National Committee has a running count of the days since his last trip to the country on its Web site. Watch how McCain is going after Obama

Sen. Obama has been to Iraq once — a little over two years ago he went — and he has never seized the opportunity except in a hearing to meet with Gen. Petraeus, McCain said at a campaign event in Reno, Nevada. My friends, this is about leadership and learning.

He wants to sit down with the president of Iran but hasn’t yet sat down with Gen. Petraeus, the leader of our troops in Iraq? McCain said.

Gen. David Petraeus is the top U.S. commander in Iraq and will soon be promoted to the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East.

McCain has criticized Obama for expressing a willingness to engage Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in diplomatic negotiations.

The Arizona Republican said Obama’s rejection of his proposal for a joint trip showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the gravity of this issue. Watch McCain say he will ‘never surrender’ in Iraq

But Bill Burton, Obama’s spokesman, said it seems odd that Sen. McCain, who bought the flawed rationale for war so readily, would be lecturing others on their depth of understanding about Iraq.

found here.

Obama played hardball in first Chicago campaign

(CNN) — When the Democratic National Committee meets Saturday on the thorny issue of seating the Florida and Michigan delegations at its August convention, party officials will have to fashion a solution that satisfies supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton and presidential nominee front-runner Sen. Barack Obama.

It may take a Solomon-like decision to appease both candidates.

Clinton has argued the primary results of two of the nation’s largest states should count because otherwise millions of voters are being disenfranchised. Obama has said he is willing to work out some compromise.

But he is insistent the primary results are invalid since the two states failed to follow party rules and the rules are the rules.

The DNC has not seated the Florida and Michigan delegates because the two states violated party edicts in holding their primaries early.

Although neither candidate campaigned in the two states, Clinton won about 50 percent of the Florida vote, compared to 33 percent for Obama. She won 55 percent of the vote in Michigan, where Obama’s name was not on the ballot.

In his first race for office, seeking a state Senate seat on Chicago’s gritty South Side in 1996, Obama effectively used election rules to eliminate his Democratic competition.

As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of new voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

That was Chicago politics, said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? Kass said. It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race he made sure voters had just one choice.

Obama’s challenge was perfectly legal, said Jay Stewart, with the Chicago’s Better Government Association. While records of the challenges are no longer on file for review with the election board, Stewart said Obama is not the only politician to resort to petition challenges to eliminate the competition.

He came from Chicago politics, Stewart said. Politics ain’t beanbag as they say in Chicago. You play with your elbows up and you’re pretty tough and ruthless when you have to be. Sen. Obama felt that’s what was necessary at the time, that’s what he did. Does it fit in with the rhetoric now? Perhaps not.

The Obama campaign called this report a hit job. They insisted CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. But when we called her she said she can’t recall details of petition challenges, who engineered them for the Obama campaign or why all the candidates were challenged.

But Will Burns does. Now running himself for a seat in the Illinois legislature, Burns was a young Obama volunteer during the presidential candidate’s first race.

Burns was one of the contingents of volunteers and lawyers who had the tedious task of going over each and every petition submitted by the other candidates, including those of Alice Palmer.

The rules are there for a reason, Burns told CNN.

He said challenging petitions is a smart way to avoid having to run a full-blown expensive race.

One of the first things you do whenever you’re in the middle of a primary race, especially in primaries in Chicago, because if you don’t have signatures to get on the ballot, you save yourself a lot of time and effort from having to raise money and have a full blown campaign effort against an incumbent, Burns said.

found here.

Creepy or cute? Robot creature to study touch

(CNN) — Steve Yohanan loved having a cat around while he worked at home, enjoying how she put her head against his hand or purred in his lap. After his allergies acted up and he had to give the cat away, he missed the touch interaction he had with her and started thinking about how he could study these emotional responses to touch.

Now, Yohanan, 40, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has come up with a prototype for a robotic creature he’ll use to figure out how humans use touch to communicate. A touch-based device like this could mediate communication between people in different places, he said. Although the research could have implications for robot pets, and that’s close to what Yohanan is doing, he’s more interested using it to understand human-to-human communication. I hope that this opens up interaction when you’re dealing with social interaction, specifically kind of in a more general robotics sense, but also if you’re dealing with mediated interaction, so if you’re using technology to interact with another person, he said.

The furry robot looks somewhat like a rabbit with no eyes, nose or mouth. Yohanan left off facial features because he wanted to exclusively study how people respond to the creature through touch.

Although the creature can’t move around, a person can feel it breathing and purring. The creature’s bunny ears will also stiffen or relax, depending on how it feels in response to a human’s touch.

When the project is complete, it will be able to recognize the type of interaction — petting, poking, squeezing — and respond according to how it feels, Yohanan said.

For instance, if the creature is happy, it will breathe in a fast, rhythmic motion, and its ears will become stiff and perk up. The purring response does not involve animal-like sound but rather vibrations that can be felt. The creature’s high-resolution sensors will pick up information about how and when touch occurs, as well as how forcefully and in response to what, said professor Karon MacLean, Yohanan’s adviser at the University of British Columbia. When finished, the creature will be fully autonomous: It will be plugged into a computer, but it will generate responses without the researchers dictating its moods.

Yohanan imagines that the creature might lead to the development of a robotic pet that could connect couples who don’t see each other often. For example, a wife who works different hours than her husband could convey her mood through touch to the creature, and the husband would sense that mood through the robot when he came home. The person knows, oh, well, Steve’s in a good mood today, he said.

In technology, the field of haptics, or the study of touch, has been an active research area. It typically deals with copying the feel of an object onto a computer display, said Jochen Lang, associate professor at the University of Ottawa, who studies haptics.

Although a lot of work has been done on simulating the way objects feel, Yohanan’s project seems novel in its approach toward emotions and touch.

That’s a fresh idea to look at it from an emotional point, how you could form a bond from what kind of haptics you displayed, Lang said.

found here.

Opposite sex drives you crazy — the causes

(LifeWire) — As Walter Christensen, a 53-year-old physics professor from Pomona, California, discovered, when it comes to cuddling, women know what they want. When he and his lover spend the night together, he’s usually awoken around 3 a.m. with a familiar request.

She calls out, ‘Spoon, spoon!’ he says. He willingly obliges with front-to-back cuddling — even though he admits he probably wouldn’t do so without being asked.

I like the feeling of her wanting to do that, he says, so I do it out of a sense of responsibility.

His lover, 32-year-old art-history scholar Natalie Valle, appreciates the attention.

While the differences between the sexes drive some couples to distraction, being aware of them enhances relationships, as Christensen and Valle can attest. Is there hope for the rest of us? Researchers have found that science can be used to explain a lot of behavior that widens the gender gap, and in so doing may help couples understand each other better.

1. Women want to cuddle

What you think: Women love to cuddle after sex, whereas men just want to fall asleep.

What the experts say: During sexual intercourse, oxytocin is released in both men and women, and that encourages bonding within the couple, says Dr. Marianne J. Legato, founder of the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University and author of Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget.

Oxytocin is a hormone often associated with love because its levels increase during intimate acts like hugging, kissing and intercourse. However, testosterone neutralizes the effect of oxytocin, so men are less likely to want to prolong contact after orgasm.

2. Men hate shopping

What you think: Men hate to go shopping with their mate because they think it’s a waste of time.

What the experts say: Men do enjoy shopping when they get to hunt for a specific item, whereas women enjoy grazing for items. This goes back to our hunting and gathering days, when losing focus could mean losing the week’s meal.

Men are much more task-oriented, says Robert Schwarz, a psychologist and director of the Mars and Venus Counseling and Wellness Center in Haverford, Pennsylvania. They hunt it, they kill it, they buy it and they go out.

In the aptly titled 2007 study Men Buy, Women Shop, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that factors having to do with speed and convenience were the most important for men. Of the 1,250 male and female shoppers surveyed by phone, finding parking near the store or mall entrance was the No. 1 problem men said they encountered when shopping (29 percent of respondents), whereas women cited lack of help as their chief complaint (also 29 percent).

3. Women make mountains out of molehills

What you think: Women obsess about every little thing; men seem to have it all under control.

What the experts say: Men are problem-solvers and tend to bring up a problem only in order to search for its solution, says Schwarz. The eureka moment of problem-solving increases the level of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical, in the brain. (This also explains why men will wait until it’s absolutely necessary to stop and ask for directions.)

Women relieve stress by talking and relating their problems to others, which produces serotonin, said to enhance moods and ward off depression.

4. Men are impervious to cold

What you think: Men are content to freeze, while women always want to turn up the thermostat.

What the experts say: According to the Mayo Clinic, women are more sensitive to cold than men are, but not because they like to feel warm and cozy. Because women on average are smaller than men, their metabolic rate tends to be lower. This means their bodies generate less heat. They also tend to have less fat, which acts as insulation, on their upper bodies and around their waists, as well as less muscle mass, which also helps keep the body warm.

5. Women Love ‘chick flicks’

What you think: Women prefer romantic movies (aka chick flicks) while men like action and adventure. Watch how troops like chick flicks

What the experts say: Women may like romantic movies better than men, but in a 2007 study at Kansas State University, men rated romantic movies higher than most people would have guessed, says psychology professor Richard Harris, who led the survey of 265 Kansas State students. On a scale of 1 to 7, men gave the movies a 4.8, while women rated them a 6.

However, we found that when seeing the film on a date … if one party makes the decision, then they stay true to those stereotypes, with guys choosing to go to a violent film and women choosing a romantic film, Harris told the Reuters news agency in January.

Jose Ferraro can relate. He spent New Year’s Day at the theater, dozing through the romantic drama Atonement with his wife, Kyle.

found here.

In-flight entertainment in your hands

(CNN) — Fighting boredom in the skies is big business.

Last year airlines around the world spent about $1.4 billion on in-flight entertainment hardware and more than $400 million on content, according to research firm IMDC.

It’s ironic, then, to see their offerings often being ignored by passengers with iPods or other personal entertainment devices. Such passengers carry their own videos, music and games.

But as long as there’s a larger screen on the seat-back right in front of them, why not let them use it?

Many stiff-necked iPod users have pondered that question, especially on long flights. Prison Break episodes downloaded from iTunes would be so much more enjoyable without having to squint down at them on a tiny screen.

Increasingly, airlines are getting the picture.

Since mid-May passengers flying on Singapore Airlines between Newark and Singapore have been able to link their iPods to the in-flight entertainment systems. Other airlines around the world are lining up similar offerings.

Supporting passengers’ own devices is one way for an airline to enhance their product and gain an advantage, says Robert Smith, a senior market analyst at IMDC.

Consumers are carrying increasingly powerful devices, and some will want the option of having power, a bigger screen, and somewhere to put their iPod.

Airlines are not alone in adjusting to the new currents. Some hotels now offer special ports so guests can hook up their iPods (or other devices) to the audiovisual equipment in the room.

And some car makers are building USB ports directly into dashboards so drivers or passengers can easily access their MP3s and such while on the road.

But it’s in the skies — or more accurately in cramped metal tubes in the skies — where the battle against boredom gets particularly desperate, which is why Internet access, cell phone reception and satellite radio are also being offered to entertain passengers.

Just about every airline we speak with has asked us to demonstrate this feature, says Theresa Yeoh, a spokesperson for Panasonic Avionics.

Her company makes the eX2 in-flight entertainment system used by Singapore Airlines on its Newark-Singapore route.

It works like this: An export jack is built into the airline seat. Passengers plug their iPods or iPhones into this jack to enjoy their content — videos, music, games, photos — through the system’s seat-back screen and headphones. The eX2 also powers the iPod, so customers can leave the plane with a fully charged device.

There are downsides to such systems, though. The biggest, perhaps, is compatibility. Inevitably, the same kind of compatibility hitches that plague consumers in the tech world are now cropping up in the airline cabin.

For instance on the Singapore-Newark flight, Microsoft’s Zune player, and many other personal media devices, will not work with the eX2’s export jack.

That’s clearly a marketing advantage for Apple (with the airplane becoming a giant iPod accessory in the sky), but passengers with other devices might get annoyed.

Yeoh wouldn’t disclose details on the business arrangement with Apple but says that under Apple’s Made for iPod program, this is the first solution designed specifically for the commercial airline market.

found here.