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Rosa Golijan

Pets can be frustrating.?

Sometimes they just stare and stare?at you???as if you’re supposed to?magically know exactly what they’re thinking.

Well, an amusing (and free)?iPhone app helps defuse those awkward moments by suggesting what might be on your beloved pet’s mind.

The app’s called CrossTuner and it can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. All you have to do in order to use it is point your iPhone’s back-facing camera at the confusing creature near you, select what it is (currently the only options are dog, cat and zombie), and speak.

As soon as the app detects sound, you’ll see what it believes your pet is thinking.

Since I didn’t have a cat, dog, or zombie on hand to test this app, I borrowed my co-worker’s stuffed unicorn. CrossTuner happily revealed what the fluffy creature is thinking?? no matter what I claimed it was?? so I suppose it could work on anything or anyone, whether there’s actual brain-activity involved or not.

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You’ll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts, or circling her?on?Google+.

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AP Baseball Writer

Associated Press Sports

updated 6:47 p.m. ET May 18, 2012

DETROIT (AP) – Jim Leyland can handle a little criticism, and the way his Detroit Tigers are playing, he expects it.

“I’m a grown man, and I’m a realist, and I think if you’ve seen me over the six years that I’ve been here, I get a little snippy once in a while when I think people are unfair,” Leyland said. “They’re not being unfair right now. I can take it. I’m a man. We have to take it. We’re not performing well.”

The Tigers were 18-20 entering Friday night’s game against Pittsburgh, a strikingly mediocre mark for a team that won the AL Central by 15 games in 2011 and added Prince Fielder in the offseason. Although there’s plenty of time for Detroit to turn things around, first-place Cleveland had a four-game lead on the Tigers heading into Friday night’s action.

Patience is running a bit thin while Motown waits and hopes its team will hit its stride. Leyland understands the negativity.

“That’s part of this business,” Leyland said. “You don’t snap at reporters and everything if you’ve got it coming. Right now, I have nothing to come back with, because we haven’t been very good. It’s that simple. You’ve got to take it when you’ve got it coming, and right now, we’ve got it coming.”

The Tigers were only 20-18 at this point last year, and they didn’t pull away from the division until August and September. But they ended up in the AL championship series, and although designated hitter Victor Martinez has been out with a knee injury, they signed Fielder to a massive contract in January.

“When you have the expectations that we have, and you perform the way we have up to this point, you expect severe criticism, and if you don’t, you’re not very smart,” Leyland said.

So the longer Detroit lingers around .500, the more the frustration builds among fans. Ace Justin Verlander – Friday night’s starter – has been outstanding. Fielder and Miguel Cabrera form a potent middle of the order. But there have been problems throughout the rest of the roster.

Closer Jose Valverde has struggled after going the entire 2011 season without a blown save, starters Max Scherzer and Rick Porcello have been inconsistent and the team has gotten little production from its second basemen.

One thing Leyland isn’t about to do is stage a contrived temper tantrum to shake things up.

“The yelling and screaming and throwing (stuff) like I did 20 years ago. That doesn’t work anymore. Forget it. … That doesn’t help anybody hit a slider. That doesn’t help anybody throw one over the plate,” Leyland said. “If people are waiting for me to start throwing stuff and yelling and screaming, to put on a show for the media, I’m not going to do that. That’s not going to happen. I’m not going to put on some phony show.”

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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You’ve might have heard the story of Phineas Gage, the 19th century construction foreman who was impaled through the brain with a tamping rod, but lived a relatively normal life. Researchers at UCLA have a new twist: Gage’s brain was damaged far more severely than we thought. More »

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In this year’s campaign, his opponents are determined to turn the tables.

Republican political operatives, some with deep financial backing from the billionaire Koch brothers and others, are unleashing about a half dozen major projects that take advantage of advanced database technologies to manage campaigns and target voters with personalized messages.

Few doubt that political parties and factions that can gain an edge in the data wars will be in a good position on election day – and could potentially build institutional advantages that will pay dividends for years to come.

IPhone apps, Web-based campaign management and micro-targeting of voters with personalized messages are a few of the services built around database technology that the left has used to find and motivate voters, most impressively in 2008.

People in the increasingly competitive political technology business say the industry is still in an early phase, with the massive data-collection potential of social media and mobile computing only beginning to be tapped.

Nevertheless the field is already creating tension between grassroots activists suspicious of big, centralized databases and political professionals who say they are essential.

“If you are talking to anybody on the ground, Tea Party activists, they are tired of centralized control,” said Steven Kuivenhoven, a Michigan Tea Party organizer who is avoiding Washington-based tech groups.

The Republican and Democratic parties have passed the banner of technological leadership back and forth over the past decade. The Republican Party built a massive database of voters for the 2004 election, then Democrats in the last presidential election pulled together an independent database called Catalist that improved cooperation among allied groups. This year outside groups are leading the charge, especially on the conservative side, a nod to the rising power of political action committees and advocacy groups.

Shoestring startups are competing with efforts funded by billionaires, which some conservatives embrace as a triumph of laissez-faire. “God bless the free market,” said Constantin Querard, an Arizona political consultant who uses one of the startups, rVotes, for managing volunteers and voter data. “We are probably two two-year cycles from weeding out the software that was well done and the software that wasn’t as well executed.”

THE KOCH COUNTERPUNCH

In 2008, Catalist helped the left win the technology battle. The database allowed unions and the Obama campaign to manage volunteers without stepping on each other’s toes. Meanwhile, analysts could look for patterns in oceans of data that had been held in small pools by separate groups.

Now, Charles and David Koch, who have quietly bankrolled libertarian organizations such as the Cato Institute and the influential Mercatus Center at George Mason University, are behind an effort that aims to do for the right what Catalist did for the left.

Called Themis, the independent group is the most ambitious of the many conservative political technology projects now in development. People with direct knowledge of the group as well as political technology industry veterans say it is backed by the Koch brothers, although their names do not appear on an annual regulatory filing and Koch Industries spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

The Kochs own Koch Industries, the Wichita, Kansas-based natural resources conglomerate that refines oil, produces chemicals and owns the paper products company Georgia-Pacific. Chief Executive Officer Charles Koch and his brother David are worth $25 billion each, according to Forbes.

Themis staffers in their twenties and thirties, clad in jeans and checked shirts, work out of a suite in a nondescript office building in Alexandria, Virginia. City records indicate that the company expanded recently, and a federal filing shows millions of dollars in the bank.

Themis operates like many other Koch projects – in secrecy. A reporter retrieving a federal filing from the company was not allowed inside the unmarked front door, and Themis executives declined or did not respond to requests for comment.

Themis raised $7.7 million in its first year, according to its 2010 return to the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt 501 c(4) organization, which it released this year after successfully petitioning for the maximum possible delay. As a 501 c(4), Themis can work with advocacy groups but cannot coordinate with candidates.

The federal filing does not list financial backers, but people with direct knowledge of the group say it is backed by the Kochs. Ben Pratt, the chief operating officer, describes himself on LinkedIn as a former Koch Industries executive who is now a management consultant and executive coach teaching the business theories developed by Charles Koch.

Themis’s ambition to become an analytical powerhouse for the right is clear from its list of business partners, including several heavy hitters in the computer analytics world. Its top contractor in 2010, paid $1.1 million, was voter database company Intell360, which employed former Republican National Committee Network and Online Services Director Steve Ellis at the time, according to LinkedIn.

Intell360′s website describes services ranging from finding email and phone numbers for voters to “data mining” for voters likely to respond to tailored messages to targeting ads “down to the zip code, census block or individual level.” Neither the company nor Koch Industries responded to requests for comment. Pratt declined to speak when reached by phone.

Despite the vast resources behind it, Themis may find it difficult to reach its goal this year. One person close to the group predicts it will not catch up to the left in the current campaign cycle; the Obama campaign is engaged in complex modeling and scouring social media data for information, people in the industry say. Another conservative data industry person said there is no sign of high-end modeling by Themis.

Themis does not have to catch up to make an impact, though. It is building its database and signing up advocacy groups to use its services and contribute data. The person close to Themis said its work focuses on identifying active supporters – those with a propensity to attend rallies or engage their representatives, for instance – and discovering the “cream of the crop” – persons active in several allied groups.

AN ALTERNATIVE SOURCE

The other major database effort on the right is a for-profit group called Data Trust, which is updating the Republican Party’s somewhat dusty national file of voters. Modeled on Catalist, Data Trust hopes to make a profit by selling data to advocacy groups, candidates and business groups, incorporating clients’ information into its database when they agree.

The party will keep its database, but Data Trust will be able to pay for updating and expanding the data in a way that Republicans have not had the resources to do in recent years, people familiar with the project say. However, it will leave the high-end analysis of data to clients.

Themis and Data Trust will be competitors at times. But there may be room for both: Themis caters to a conservative crowd that distrusts what it sees as the politically expedient instincts of the Republican Party. And some groups may want more than one database provider. “Never trust any one source 100 percent,” said Gary Marx, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a religious group in Duluth, Georgia, that is planning to find and contact 27 million potential conservative Christian voters in swing states this election cycle.

American Crossroads, a Washington D.C.-based conservative advocacy group led by former Republican Party officials and associated with Karl Rove, is not choosing sides, even though its chairman, former Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan, helps run Data Trust.

“We plan to be a client of Data Trust. We also have a good relationship with Themis,” said Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio.

GROUND GAMES

Themis and Data Trust may have trouble getting some potential allies on board. Plenty of grassroots groups say they don’t need the help of a big, Washington-based database outfit and say they have what Republicans need most: real-time data. They are turning to new technology systems that let campaigns and groups manage volunteers and donors.

A plethora of new tech tools with names like Gravity, rVotes and NationBuilder can help organize door-to-door campaigns, harvesting the type of information that feeds a successful database. All the companies behind them are for-profit.

“If the local county group is knocking on people’s doors, and identifying pro-life or anti-immigrant or anti-health-care voters, they could be flagging that information on the database and instead of having that information be in an activists’ basement somewhere, it’s flagged back on this master file and available to other organizations, which are wanting to organize around those issues,” said Ken Strasma, head of data analysis firm Strategic Telemetry, which works for Democrats. “That’s what could make this a very powerful tool.”

Many grassroots activists are wary of big databases, however, especially if they are linked with Washington. Conservatives, like liberals, are not a monolithic group. Some factions would prefer to retain control of their data.

“I wish I had the Koch brothers’ money, but I don’t want to be beholden to them,” said Peter Wolf, an Ohio Tea Party organizer. He supports rVotes, a program marketed to the right that intends to offer a national database in which campaigns control data they add.

Smaller groups may also be immune to the lure of the big databases because they can get low-cost help from companies such as Aristotle, an unaligned commercial vendor that sells voter records for 3 cents each and offers analytics and social media as well.

Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch failed to win his party’s endorsement at the recent state caucus after a Tea Party campaign against him. He now faces a run-off primary battle. FreedomWorks, a group that has severed Koch ties, was a major instigator of the anti-Hatch effort. It used commercial database and analytics vendors to find likely caucus delegates. “What it took Orrin Hatch a year to do in terms of preparation for the caucus, we were able to do in a month and a half,” said Russ Walker, vice president of political and grassroots campaigns for FreedomWorks for America. “I really do think the commercial world is ahead of us.”

Whether the Kochs or any other group make a major leap forward will depend on how many allies they find. Querard, the Arizona political consultant, sees the technology race as a question of critical mass.

“Whoever’s got the most users will probably see the most improvement,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Alexander Cohen in Washington, DC; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Douglas Royalty)

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Warning that the survival of the euro was now in question, Cameron showed growing alarm and frustration that the crisis was spinning out of control, threatening Britain‘s $2.5 trillion (1.58 trillion pounds) economy and his own electoral prospects in 2015.

“Greece is on the brink, the survival of the euro in question,” Cameron told business leaders on a grey and damp morning in the northern English city of Manchester.

“Faced with this, I have a clear task: to keep Britain safe. Not to take the easy course – but the right course,” he added.

Echoing the words of Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, Cameron said the crisis in the European Union – Britain’s biggest trading partner – had lasted more than two years but the “storm” was far from over.

“We are in uncharted territory which carries huge risks for everybody. As I have consistently said, it is in Britain’s interest for the euro zone to sort out its problems.”

He said Europe’s problems showed the dangers of scrapping his government’s attempt to cut Britain’s vast budget deficit, though he called on the European Central Bank to stimulate demand to help peripheral euro members.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that they are less likely to be able to sustain that necessary adjustment economically or politically unless the core of the euro zone, including through the ECB, does more to support demand and share the burden of adjustment,” Cameron said.

He added that the Bank could do more to support the economy if inflation fell below its target, a barbed way of asking Governor King to help boost demand.

After snubbing Francois Hollande when the Socialist candidate came to London weeks before the French election, the Conservative Cameron said he now welcomed the new French president’s idea of launching project bonds to drive demand by funding big infrastructure deals.

But since Cameron refused to sign up to an EU economic pact last year that was supposed to help shore up the euro zone, his comments may have more resonance in euro sceptic Britain and his own divided party than in the EU’s 26 other member states.

STORM TIME?

For Cameron, the gale winds from Europe threaten to undermine the central purpose of the coalition government he has headed since 2010: to nurture Britain back to growth after the most serious crisis since the Great Depression.

Turmoil in Europe could deepen Britain’s recession by crippling the European banking system and dampening already battered demand.

“People are holding back from investment decisions because of that uncertainty – it’s the worst enemy for business, uncertainty is the big killer,” said Les Harvey, a business consultant who specialises in construction and infrastructure and who attended Cameron’s speech.

“It’s a concern. It’s such a major trading partner – whatever affects them is going to affect us.”

Cameron said the storm showed Britain must continue to cut the deficit, which in 2009-2010 reached a record 11 percent of gross domestic product, rather than throwing money into the economy in an attempt to kick-start growth.

“We must resist dangerous voices calling on us to retreat,” Cameron said. “If markets don’t believe you are serious about dealing with your debts, your interest rates rocket and your economy shrinks.”

But even the government’s own figures show Britain’s public sector net debt will rise over the next four years, hitting a record of 1.48 trillion pounds in 2016, while the deficit cannot shrink as fast as expected if the economy continues to contract.

Opponents said the government had failed to stoke growth.

“The fact is we are paying a long-term price for these failures,” the Labour Party’s shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, told parliament.

“National debt higher, living standards down, long-term youth unemployment becoming entrenched, over 24,000 companies out of business…investment plans cancelled or diverted overseas, our economy weaker, capacity lost,” Balls said.

That economic minefield makes Cameron’s position even more precarious as he faces an electorate upset at the gloom of recession and an unruly anti-European Union wing of his Conservative party that wants Britain to leave the club.

(Additional reporting by Sven Egenter and Estelle Shirbon; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

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The dugong, one of Michael Hearst’s “unusual creatures.” Credit: Julien Willem/Creative Commons

Michael Hearst seems to enjoy making music with a purpose. About five years ago the Brooklyn, N.Y., musician made headlines with a pretty self-explanatory record called Songs for Ice Cream Trucks. Since then, he and his band One Ring Zero have released an album-long ode to the planets (including Pluto), as well as a record of recipes?from Mario Batali, David Chang and other celebrity chefs?set to music.

Now comes Hearst?s Songs for Unusual Creatures, a new album honoring some of the quirkier fauna of the globe. Each of the tracks is inspired by a particular animal, from the microscopic extremophile the tardigrade to the aptly named blobfish, from the legendarily tough honey badger to the water-walking reptile known as the Jesus lizard (not to be confused with the band of the same name). Released last week on Hearst?s Urbangeek Records, Songs for Unusual Creatures was funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

The final track on the album, ?Weddell Seal,? features performances by the Kronos Quartet as well as field recordings of the otherworldly underwater calls of the deep-diving Antarctic seals themselves. Other tracks feature instruments such as the theremin, the claviola and the Stylophone, a handheld synthesizer played with an electronic stylus. Both the theremin and the Stylophone are on display in Hearst?s video, embedded below, for ?Chinese Giant Salamander.?

The musical tributes to our strange-looking companions aboard spaceship Earth are more impressionistic than informative, although the CD does come with color illustrations of the subject animals by Jelmer Noordeman. For those craving more information on the oddball critters, a companion book is forthcoming in the fall from Chronicle Books.

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“X Factor” judges L.A. Reid, Demi Lovato, Simon Cowell and Britney Spears at the FOX Upfront
Photo: Desiree Navarro/ Getty Images

Britney Spears seems poised and ready to sit beside her fellow “X Factor” judges on the revamped second season of the show. At the Fox upfront this week, the singer appeared alongside fellow newbie Demi Lovato, as well as returning judges Simon Cowell and L.A. Reid, and gushed about the Fox reality show.

“Just really being able to be there and inspire the other contestants … they’re so young and they’re trying to fulfill their dreams,” she said at the event. “It’s just a whole beautiful concept. It’s just really cool.”

While her negotiations with the show had been making headlines in the weeks leading up to the official announcement, Cowell brushed off all the hoopla, which includes a rumored $15 million payday for joining the show. “A force of nature, I was somewhere in the middle, but I’m thrilled. I love these guys,” he said of getting everyone, including Spears, on board. “I charmed her.”

Spears seemed equally taken with the prickly Brit. “He’s adorable. He’s completely adorable. He didn’t have to try hard,” she admitted.

Spears’ addition to the show is hardly the only casting making news: Lovato also opened up about having the “X Factor.” While little is known about the final hours going into locking Lovato in for the show, she’s rumored to be taking in $1 million, according to Gossip Cop.

Lovato was on a short list of possible contenders to appear on the show that also reportedly included Miley Cyrus and Avril Lavigne. “I’m so excited to be here,” she said. “I guess you called,” she added with Simon by her side. “And that’s how it got set up, just a phone call.” In addition to getting warm and fuzzy about each other in the interview, Cowell shared that the judges will be filming in the next couple weeks when they hit up Austin, Texas, to begin scoping out talent. And if you think the claws might come out then, Reid assured viewers that that won’t be the case. “Oh no, we’re gonna be really sweet to each other,” he said. “Nothing controversial. It’ll be perfect.”

Related Artists

• Britney Spears

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