Alfred's shared items

The latest episode of the Robots podcast features interviews with two experts in self-reconfiguring and modular robotics. Kasper Støy, famous for his pioneering work with robots such as the CONRO (also see previous post), shares his recent experience at the ICRA Contingency Challenge. This competition allows only a few hours to construct a robot capable of solving an unexpected problem in a planetary environment. Støy's team integrated the homogeneous ATRON robot and the heterogeneous ODIN robot with bits of LEGO and duct tape to solve the challenge. Robert Fitch, currently research fellow with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, presents his latest self-reconfiguring robot. In simulation, millions of robotic modules assemble to form a large cube robot able to locomote in many types of environments. Fitch presents the envisioned applications and hardware implementations for his self-reconfigurable modular robots. Details and videos on the Robots website and Robots forum.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Benny Morris is a prominent mainstream Israeli historian so his words matter. And, according to what I hear, the views expressed here reflect what many Israelis think. So we better pay attention.

Morris predicts that Israel will attack Iran sometime between the Presidential election and Inauguration Day. He says that we all (including the Iranians) better hope that the Israeli attack succeeds in eliminating Iran's nuclear program because, if it doesn't, Israel will have to resort to using a nuclear weapon.

For Morris, there is no alternative (he dismisses the idea of negotiations). For Morris it is simple. Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. It won't be stopped by sanctions. The United States is too chicken to attack Iran. So....Israel has to do the job.

In passing he mentions that the war he envisions will destroy the global economy, spew radioactive pollution everywhere, and cause terrorist attacks in the US but, what the hay, we can't let them have nukes and we can't negotiate so....if we die, we die.

I'd say Morris is certifiable but for the fact that he is expressing a view common in Israel and in neocon circles here.

I was up at the Senate the other day, talking to a top aide to an important Democratic Senator. He thought that Senate Dems would push for impeachment if the US attacked Iran. When I agreed but said that if Israel attacks, the same Senators will come down to the floor to offer congratulations, he agreed.

We better pay attention to this. An attack by Israel will have the same consequences for America as an attack by the US. Unfortunately, we don't have a say on whether Israel attacks or not. We'll just pay the price (along with Israel, Iran, and the world).

How many days left until Jan. 20?

UPDATE:  There appears to be a coding problem with the YouTube.  The original video is at John McCain’s campaign website.  

Or try this:  Download | Play   Download | Play  (h/t BillW)

Did you catch it?  At the beginning of the ad, the title burns onto a picture of Obama, but the order is striking.

A L   Q   D   C MT RY

(screengrab courtesy of JedReport)

al Qaeda Commentary?  al Qaeda Cemetary? al Qaeda Documentary? Who knows?  But it’s not accidental.   In fact, Alex Castellanos is reportedly now working for the McCain campaign.  Who is Alex Castellanos?

There is speculation in the blogosphere that Alex Castellanos is behind this video. Who? This guy:

The Republican media consultant Alex Castellanos has been called the father of the modern political attack ad — an appellation he might not offer up himself, though we suspect he’s kinda proud of it. Although Castellanos has served on the GOP media team in every general election since 1988, his most infamous spot ran in the 1990 North Carolina Senate race between Jesse Helms and Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, who also happened to be an African-American. The commercial was called “Hands,” and it showed a white guy sitting at a table, the camera trained on his mitts as he crumpled up a job-rejection notice. “You needed that job and you were the best qualified,” intoned the voice-over. “But they gave it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Ugly? Sure. But it won reelection for Helms. In this year’s Republican race, Castellanos worked on Mitt Romney’s primary bid, but today he sits on what’s known as the McCain Ad Council, a group of A-list Republican admen serving as outside media advisers to the GOP standard-bearer.

  FDL offers some more on Castellanos

Back when Rudy Giuliani was a presidential candidate, he used to knock his Senate rivals, in both parties, for never having “run” anything. People like John McCain and Barack Obama, Giuliani said, had been lawmakers, not executives.

Now, as it turns out, the public didn’t much care, and voters in both parties for the first time in U.S. history nominated sitting senators to face off in the general election.

But in some ways, Giuliani’s criticism underestimated something: Obama is effectively the CEO of a massive national enterprise, with a huge budget and enormous staff.

Behind the headlines about the unprecedented success of Democrat Barack Obama’s fund-raising machine lies a more prosaic truth — his campaign will need every penny of its $300 million goal to bankroll an unprecedented 50-state general election campaign with a massive army on the ground.

His campaign already has by far the largest full-time paid staff in presidential campaign history, and unlike Republican rival John McCain’s, continues to grow by the day.

National polls show the race remains close between Obama and McCain, but the Obama campaign is paying closer attention to polls in more than a dozen states that show Obama has a chance of winning in November. The states were won four years ago by President Bush, in many cases by huge margins. In theory, at least, Obama’s effort could nudge states such as Virginia, Indiana, and North Dakota into the Democratic column and produce a surprising Electoral College boost. […]

Obama, meanwhile, is already running uncontested television advertising in seven of the historically Republican states and is sending in large paid staffs.

“Between the Obama staff and the Democratic Party staff there will be several thousand” paid operatives on the ground deployed across the country, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand told the Boston Globe. “I don’t want to get too specific; it gives away strategy.”

The “50-state strategy” includes paid staff in literally every state, but it’s not surprising that the Obama campaign will emphasize key battlegrounds, meaning a campaign with “large-scale operations in 22 states, medium operations in many others, and small staffs in only a handful of states.”

Obama and the Democratic Party have about 200 paid staffers working in Florida and more on the way, 90 in Michigan with plans to expand to 200 by August, at least 200 each eventually in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and 50 in Missouri with plans to expand to 150, according to published reports and interviews with Obama campaign officials. Hildebrand said state organizations should be at full strength by the end of August.

Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that in May the campaign had a payroll of about 900, not counting nearly 500 part-time workers who were paid stipends. As of May 31, the Obama campaign staff was well over twice the size of the Bush reelection campaign staff in 2004 and nearly three times the size of McCain’s current staff, and has expanded significantly since.

Through the end of May, the Obama campaign had spent $35.7 million on salaries and benefits, triple the $11.9 million spent by the McCain campaign, according to tabulations by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group.

“The climate has made millions of Americans who haven’t been involved in a political campaign ever in their lifetimes very active,” Hildebrand said. “We estimate that 70 percent of our grass-roots volunteers haven’t worked in a campaign before…. We’re somewhere just shy of 2 million volunteers, and we think we can potentially triple that on Election Day.”

There’s never been anything like this. Time will tell if translates into a victory, but Obama has clearly put together an unprecedented operation.

Veteran Democratic operative John Sasso, who backed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, explained the benefits of Obama’s model: “People tend to believe information delivered by people they know and who live in their neighborhood more than an ad they see on television or what some third party from out of their state is telling them. It can really change the electoral map.”

Stay tuned.

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BY TAYLOR MARSH

John McCain has been caught in some monumental carelessness. Reuters has now done a follow up, so TMP Wire is the easiest source for the original McCain quote:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Friday that his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, is likely to be in Iraq over the weekend. The Obama campaign has tried to cloak the Illinois senator’s trip in some measure of secrecy for security reasons. The White House, State Department and Pentagon do not announce senior officials’ visits to Iraq in advance. "I believe that either today or tomorrow -- and I’m not privy to his schedule -- Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators" who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon...

As TPM quotes an insider with the bottom line:

If it is true that Obama is going to Iraq this weekend, it is a very serious mistake for McCain to have disclosed it publically. Even for run-of-the-mill CODELs the military gives guidance like, "Please strongly discourage Congressional offices from issuing press releases prior to their trips which mention their intent to travel to the AOR and/or the dates of that travel or their scheduled meetings. Such releases are a serious compromise to OPSEC." If Obama is going to Iraq this weekend, I can not begin to imagine how much this is complicating the security planning for the trip.

Reuters’s other version of the TPM Wire story is up, with McCain’s team backtracking as fast as they can.

McCain’s campaign spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan insisted to reporters later: "He doesn’t know when he’s going. He’s not privy to that information. He was speaking in broader terms, about when Obama does land in Iraq."

Seems all that vaunted experience of John McCain’s plum slipped his mind.

Gore’s site, We Can Solve It, has more on Gore’s answers to our energy challenge.

Berlin gears up for Obama (via Memeorandum, a great place for the day’s blogging buzz).

Consider this an open thread. Oh, and to add, jazz will be at 8:00 p.m. eastern - 5:00 p.m. pacific, instead of 7:00 p.m., as first announced in the comments. Cocktail and jazz hour is up tonight on suggestion of reader ZMulls, but also because it’s a great idea.