al-mofhariz

“We have taken the liberty to add to this manual, a kind of classic legislative tablet, or memorandum. It will serve for private use, by methodising the most interesting points of the legislature. You may help your memory and do good, if you can thereby shew the necessity of filling the blanks in the assembly with a due portion of the classic information and assistance requisite for the business of the day: sometimes you will find you have too few commercial men, or too few agriculturalists, and often too few LIBERAL AMERICANS , who may embrace correct views for the interest of the whole of the union…” [ More ] With that introduction, Samuel Blodget Jr. introduced his readers (in 1806) to the first Congressional scorecard: Source: Samuel Blodget Jr., Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America  (Washington, D.C., 1806) from hathitrust.org Although, really, it’s more an account book than a scorecard. Blodget hoped to rationalize his nation’s government by ...

Moran Cerf is a computer hacker turned neuroscientist . Security companies once paid him to break into banks. Now he hacks the human brain . Using electrodes implanted deep inside the craniums of patients undergoing neurosurgery, Dr. Cerf and his colleagues are studying “thought” as it’s never been studied before . . . He asks: How do we control our perceptions,  thoughts and emotions? What does the brain look like when it’s most intrigued? What is the future of brain-machine interfaces? Could brain-powered prosthetics not only replace lost limbs, but even enhance the human body? Dr. Cerf runs the C-Lab  (Curiosity, Creativity, Cognition, Complexity, Consciousness, Consumer Behavior, Computation) and is assistant professor of neuroscience and marketing at Northwestern University, visiting professor in neurosurgery at UCLA, and Alfred P. Sloan professor of screenwriting at the American Film Institute. He is also a Moth storytelling GrandSlam champion . Before & Af...

I asked my friend and colleague,  Andrew Russell , to give us his take on Snowden, the NSA, and Internet politics, especially focusing on recent discussions amongst members of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Andy's book,  Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks , will be published by Cambridge University Press in early 2014. Readers can contact Andy at  arussell@stevens.edu. “Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.” -- Bruce Schneier, September 5, 2013 As details of the NSA PRISM program continue to be published, public intere...