For Obama, a campaign money swing with star power

President Barack Obama stops for a snack at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles, Monday, Oct. 24, 2011. Obama, who was joined by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., is on a three-day trip to the West Coast. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

President Barack Obama stops for a snack at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles, Monday, Oct. 24, 2011. Obama, who was joined by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., is on a three-day trip to the West Coast. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

President Barack Obama orders a snack on a stop at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles, Monday, Oct. 24, 2011. Obama is on a three-day trip to the West Coast. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

(AP) ? Some glitz, some glamor and plenty of campaign cash. President Barack Obama is hitting a reliable fundraising trail in California, tapping star donors and trading quips with Jay Leno in what is for him a well-worn path.

The president will tape an appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" on Tuesday, his second as sitting president and fourth appearance overall. Monday evening he joined actor Will Smith and basketball legend Earvin "Magic" Johnson at a dinner at the home of producer James Lassiter. Then he mingled with Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas over canap?s at the movie star couple's home just a few blocks away.

Tuesday's schedule includes a fundraiser in San Francisco featuring a performance by folk rock singer-songwriter Jack Johnson. Obama also has fundraisers scheduled in Denver later Tuesday, all part of a three-day, three-state swing through the west.

Obama was in California for money events last month, and this marks the president's eighth trip to Los Angeles since elected president. The state ranks as Obama's top donor state, and he raised about $1 million in the Los Angeles area alone during the last two fundraising quarters, according to an Associated Press review of contributions above $200.

The western tour is one of Obama's busiest donor outreach trips of the season. Celebrities are tried and true fundraising draw, particularly for Democratic presidents. Both the president and the stars bask in their reflected fame and the endorsement of stars can be a useful asset.

Not that he needs the votes here. California is a solidly Democratic state, though Sacramento-based Democratic consultant Roger Salazar said the president, echoing national trends, is less popular now in the state than he was when he was elected.

"Democrats by their nature are going to give the president the benefit of the doubt," said Salazar, a veteran of California and national political campaigns. "But they want him to do something about it. They want to see some movement."

Obama is promising some movement. He has been promoting his $447 billion jobs bill, which has been broken up into its component parts in hopes Congress can pass some of them.

Addressing about 240 donors at the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas Monday, Obama said the pieces that Republicans reject would likely linger as campaign issues in 2012.

"This is the fight that we're going to have right now, and I suspect this is the fight that we're going to have to have over the next year," Obama said. "The Republicans in Congress and the Republican candidates for president have made their agenda very clear."

Addressing donors in Los Angeles, Obama ticked off his administration's accomplishments, eager to reinvigorate supporters whose enthusiasm has flagged since his 2008 election.

"Sometimes I think people forget how much has gotten done," the president said, as Smith and Johnson looked on. He urged his backers to rally once again, at the same time joking, as he often does, that he is older and grayer now. "This election won't be as sexy as the first one."

At Banderas' and Griffith's house, its entrance path lined with rose petals and votive candles, Obama told about 120 mostly Latino contributors that he has kept a list of his campaign promises and that, by his count, he has accomplished about 60 percent of them.

"I'm pretty confident we can get the other 40 percent done in the next five years," he said to loud applause.

The Griffith-Banderas event was Obama's first Latino fundraiser, with donors giving at least $5,000 per person to attend. It featured guests such as actress Eva Longoria, comedian George Lopez, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and mayors Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Julian Castro of San Antonio.

Obama drew the loudest applause when he vowed to tackle an overhaul of immigration laws, a promise from 2008 that has gone unfulfilled in the face of Republican opposition.

The Las Vegas fundraiser attracted about 240 people who paid from $1,000 to $35,800 toward Obama's re-election campaign and to the Democratic National Committee. The bigger donors met the president personally. Guests at Lassiter's home contributed $35,800.

Obama has been displaying campaign-style vigor. At a Las Vegas subdivision where he promoted housing proposals, Obama waded into the neighborhood crowd to shake hands, sign autographs, even lift a baby.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Obama headed to a diverse neighborhood minutes from Lassiter's home south of Hollywood and stopped at Roscoe's, a popular Los Angeles chicken restaurant chain. Obama roved through the dining booths greeting customers, leaving at least one awestruck young boy holding his hand aloft after shaking the president's hand. One man gave him a hug and a Hispanic man told his daughter that if she studied hard "you'll be like him."

_____

Associated Press writer Jack Gillum contributed to this article.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2011-10-25-Obama/id-224077f0a20945a6a95a9a6a65f4458e

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New MacBook Pros Updated with Faster Processors, Better Graphics and Bigger Hard Drives [Apple]

We've been waiting for this quiet MacBook Pro refresh and it's just like what we expected: slightly better. All across the board, the processors are a tick faster, the graphics are a wee better and the hard drive storage is bigger. More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/76yMzQ-Sy8s/new-macbook-pros-updated-with-faster-processors-better-graphics-and-bigger-hard-drives

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Hurricane Rina becomes a Category 2 storm (AP)

MIAMI ? Hurricane Rina has strengthened to a Category 2 storm as it swirls off Central America's Caribbean coast.

A hurricane watch is in effect Tuesday for the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula from north of Punta Gruesa to Cancun. A tropical storm watch is in effect from Chetumal to Punta Gruesa.

Rina's forecast track shows it possibly curving toward Cuba in the next few days, but senior hurricane specialist Michael Brennan at the U.S. National Hurricane Center says it could also move toward southern Florida.

Rina's maximum sustained winds are near 100 mph (160 kph). Additional strengthening is forecast and it could become a major hurricane Tuesday night or early Wednesday.

The hurricane is centered about 305 miles (490 kilometers) east-southeast of Chetumal and is moving west-northwest near 3 mph (6 kph).

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/weather/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111025/ap_on_re_us/tropical_weather

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Computer scientist cracks mysterious 'Copiale Cipher'

[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 25-Oct-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Suzanne Wu
suzanne.wu@usc.edu
213-740-0252
University of Southern California

Translation expert turning insights and computing power on other coded messages

The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.

Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character "Copiale Cipher" has finally been broken.

The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of a 18th-century secret society in Germany. The rituals detailed in the document indicate the secret society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the secret society were not themselves eye doctors.

"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," said computer scientist Kevin Knight of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, part of the international team that finally cracked the Copiale Cipher. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

To break the Copiale Cipher, Knight and colleagues Beta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden tracked down the original manuscript, which was found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and is now in a private collection. They then transcribed a machine-readable version of the text, using a computer program created by Knight to help quantify the co-occurrences of certain symbols and other patterns.

"When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer."

With the Copiale Cipher, the codebreaking team began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. But they had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, so they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

"It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight says.

After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were "nulls," intended to mislead to reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.

The team then tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter, or groups of letters. Eventually, the first meaningful words of German emerged: "Ceremonies of Initiation," followed by "Secret Section."

For more information about the method of decipherment, visit http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/%7Ebea/copiale/

Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught. Knight is also applying his computer-assisted codebreaking software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of "Kryptos," an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.

But for Knight, the trickiest language puzzle of all is still everyday speech. A senior research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of the USC Information Sciences Institute, Knight is one of the world's leading experts on machine translation -- teaching computers to turn Chinese into English or Arabic into Korean. "Translation remains a tough challenge for artificial intelligence," said Knight, whose translation software has been adopted by companies such as Apple and Intel.

With researcher Sujith Ravi, who received a PhD in computer science from USC in 2011, Knight has been approaching translation as a cryptographic problem, which could not only improve human language translation but could also be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and animal communication.

###

A related video can be viewed here.

The National Science Foundation funds Knight's cryptography and translation research. The Copiale Cipher work was presented as part of an invited presentation at the 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics meeting.

For more information about the video or to arrange an interview with Professor Kevin Knight, contact Suzanne Wu at suzanne.wu@usc.edu.



[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 25-Oct-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Suzanne Wu
suzanne.wu@usc.edu
213-740-0252
University of Southern California

Translation expert turning insights and computing power on other coded messages

The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.

Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character "Copiale Cipher" has finally been broken.

The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of a 18th-century secret society in Germany. The rituals detailed in the document indicate the secret society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the secret society were not themselves eye doctors.

"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," said computer scientist Kevin Knight of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, part of the international team that finally cracked the Copiale Cipher. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

To break the Copiale Cipher, Knight and colleagues Beta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden tracked down the original manuscript, which was found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and is now in a private collection. They then transcribed a machine-readable version of the text, using a computer program created by Knight to help quantify the co-occurrences of certain symbols and other patterns.

"When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer."

With the Copiale Cipher, the codebreaking team began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. But they had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, so they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

"It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight says.

After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were "nulls," intended to mislead to reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.

The team then tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter, or groups of letters. Eventually, the first meaningful words of German emerged: "Ceremonies of Initiation," followed by "Secret Section."

For more information about the method of decipherment, visit http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/%7Ebea/copiale/

Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught. Knight is also applying his computer-assisted codebreaking software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of "Kryptos," an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.

But for Knight, the trickiest language puzzle of all is still everyday speech. A senior research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of the USC Information Sciences Institute, Knight is one of the world's leading experts on machine translation -- teaching computers to turn Chinese into English or Arabic into Korean. "Translation remains a tough challenge for artificial intelligence," said Knight, whose translation software has been adopted by companies such as Apple and Intel.

With researcher Sujith Ravi, who received a PhD in computer science from USC in 2011, Knight has been approaching translation as a cryptographic problem, which could not only improve human language translation but could also be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and animal communication.

###

A related video can be viewed here.

The National Science Foundation funds Knight's cryptography and translation research. The Copiale Cipher work was presented as part of an invited presentation at the 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics meeting.

For more information about the video or to arrange an interview with Professor Kevin Knight, contact Suzanne Wu at suzanne.wu@usc.edu.



[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/uosc-csc102411.php

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Stanford builds super-stretchy skin sensor out of carbon nanotubes (video)

An artificial skin that senses pressure, pinches and touch sounds like a macguffin from The Outer Limits (the episode "Valerie 23" if we recall correctly), but that's what a team from Stanford University has cooked up on the back of its pick-up truck. Sensors made of silicon films with a matrix of liquid carbon nanotubes ensure the material snaps back to its original shape no matter how frequently it's pulled about. When compressed, the electrical conductivity of the skin changes, and by measuring where and by how much, it knows the location and pressure of where you jab your fingers. The team wants to combine this super stretchy film with a much more sensitive sensor and if it can do it, then the technology could end up as an artificial skin for burn victims, covering prosthetic limbs or even replacing your multitouch display -- just be careful, you might hurt Siri if you pinch-to-zoom her too hard.

Continue reading Stanford builds super-stretchy skin sensor out of carbon nanotubes (video)

Stanford builds super-stretchy skin sensor out of carbon nanotubes (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink EurekAlert  |  sourceStanford University  | Email this | Comments


Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/ipyfzJpWnsc/

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John Mayer Undergoes Throat Surgery

Grammy winner announces granuloma diagnosis following series of concert cancellations
By Gil Kaufman


John Mayer
Photo: Getty Images

Singer/guitarist John Mayer has enjoyed a long, Grammy-filled career thanks to his bluesy rasp. But after canceling a series of recent performances to rest his voice, Mayer announced that he had gone under the knife to correct a throat problem that had laid him low.

Mayer was diagnosed with granuloma (throat inflammation) just above his vocal cord last month and has been ordered to take complete vocal rest for at least a month following the surgery.

"I wanted to give you an update on the granuloma just above my vocal cord," Mayer wrote on his Tumblr. "I had surgery this afternoon to remove it and am now on complete vocal rest for a month or more. It's been a very long process in waiting to see if time was an alternative to surgery, but even given two weeks' voice rest (along with many other approaches), there was no change for the better."

Mayer canceled some performances last month, including an appearance at the first-ever iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas as well as a show with Tony Bennett in Los Angeles. In addition, his upcoming fifth album, Born and Raised, which was originally slated for release this fall, has been pushed back to next year.

"I should be frustrated but I can't seem to stop thinking about beautiful things," Mayer continued. "I never thought I'd be wishing I could do what I love again; I stay in at night, picking guitar parts off of records and dreaming of playing on the big stage. The only difference between now and when I was 18 is that now I have this beautiful, meaningful record waiting for me when I can sing it."

Related Artists

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1673021/john-mayer-throat-surgery.jhtml

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Napoli in middle of Rangers' fourth in WS loss (AP)

ARLINGTON, Texas ? A wild throw home. A close play at the plate. The missed call at first base.

Mike Napoli was in the middle of almost everything that went wrong in the fourth inning for the Texas Rangers in a 16-7 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals on Saturday night.

Playing first base for the first time in this World Series, Napoli made a rushed throw home in the fourth that sailed past catcher Yorvit Torrealba for an error that allowed two runs to score by the Cardinals in Game 3.

"I just yanked it," Napoli said. "Got a groundball we needed and didn't make the play."

The Cardinals' four-run outburst in the fourth began when second baseman Ian Kinsler made a wide throw to first to finish what should've been a double play. Napoli reached wide to his left to snag the ball, then with a sweeping motion tagged the approaching runner squarely on the shoulder.

Almost as quickly, Napoli was holding his glove up in front of first base umpire Ron Kulpa in utter disbelief after Matt Holliday was ruled safe to take away what would have been a double play.

"Call him safe, there's nothing you can do about it," Napoli said. "We had a chance to minimize the inning and we let it snowball a little bit."

After the game, Kulpa acknowledged he missed the call.

"At the time of the play, I had him on the base at the time of his tag," Kulpa said. "I saw a replay when I walked off the field, and the tag was applied before his foot hit the bag."

The Rangers lost because of more than the blown call and Napoli's error. There were other fielding blunders, and all six Texas pitchers allowed runs.

Shortstop Elvis Andrus had a fielding error that led to an unearned run in the sixth when the Cards scored four more runs ? the third of four innings in a row they scored multiple runs.

And while Kinsler's throw to Napoli wasn't officially an error, there would have been no need for a swiping tag if the throw had been on target. Kinsler had an earlier fielding error that didn't cost the Rangers.

Among the pitchers allowing runs were the former starters who have been so reliable out of the bullpen this postseason. Scott Feldman had pitched 10 1-3 scoreless innings in the playoffs before allowing three runs in 1 1-3 inning while Alexi Ogando gave up four runs while getting only one out. Ogando had allowed only one run in 11 innings over nine playoff appearances.

Still, a lot happened in that fourth inning.

In the bottom of the fourth, the Rangers got three runs in a span of five pitches when Michael Young homered, Adrian Beltre singled and Nelson Cruz hit his seventh homer of the postseason. Napoli followed with a single, but the inning ended when he was thrown out at home trying to score on Kinsler's flyball to left.

Napoli was thrown out by Holliday.

"He made a perfect throw," Napoli said. "You try to put pressure on the defense and make bad throws, and he made a perfect throw."

Albert Pujols, who later hit three home runs, had a leadoff single in the fourth before Holliday hit a perfect double-play ball toward shortstop Elvis Andrus. Second baseman Kinsler took the throw to force Pujols, but his throw toward first was high and a bit up the line. Napoli, who has been primarily the Rangers catcher, made a nice stretch to grab the ball and make a tag in one quick swoop.

Napoli and manager Ron Washington argued to no avail.

"Well, he missed the play, and I knew he missed the play when I went out there," Washington said. "We still had an opportunity to get off that field with maybe them just pushing one run across the plate. We just didn't make the plays."

After David Frese's double that scored Holliday, the Rangers intentionally walked Yadier Molina to load the bases with one out. Jon Jay hit a grounder toward Napoli, who snagged the ball and then threw on the run toward home.

Two runs scored on the play, giving St. Louis a 4-0 lead.

Team president Nolan Ryan held his hands to his temple while watching from his first-row seat near the Rangers dugout.

"I don't think you can just start all of a sudden making excuses about things," Washington said. "We had a chance to get off the field with them scoring one run in that inning right there, and we just threw the ball around in that inning, and it really messed up (Matt) Harrison's outing because he was throwing the ball well."

During a pitching change a couple of batters later, Napoli and Kinsler stood together halfway between first and second base.

"Just normal talk," Napoli insisted. "We knew we had a chance to get out of that inning, and didn't do it."

Rangers have taken to chanting "Nap-o-li!, Nap-o-li!" each time he bats at home in the postseason. They did it even after his throwing error, and he delivered a single and two sacrifice flyballs after that.

The primary catcher during the postseason, and most of the second half of the year, Napoli was at first base with the Rangers back at home with American League rules. Washington inserted Torrealba at catcher while Young was the designated hitter, a lineup Texas has used many other times.

When asked if he would consider a change at first base for Game 4, Washington quickly responded, "Whey would I have to make a change? ... Any baseball player in the world could have made that bad throw."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/sports/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111023/ap_on_sp_ba_ne/bbo_world_series_rangers_napoli

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