Author: Leon

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Fiscal cliff calculator

Here’s a handy interactive graph that shows your personal “fiscal cliff” before and after figures.

Will Your Paycheck Fall Off The Fiscal Cliff?

The Fiscal Cliff is a collection of Federal tax and spending changes that will affect the tax liability of nearly everyone in America. In payroll, potential increases in withholding percentages and the number of allowances you can claim for your tax situation will directly affect your take home pay. To see the potential increase in the amount of federal tax that will come out of your paycheck, select the filing status from your Form W-4 (single or married) and the number of federal allowances you claim. Hover your mouse over the bar that corresponds to your approximate income level. Check the summary bar below the graph to see the estimated impact the fiscal cliff could possibly have on your federal taxes.

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Special-interest combatants

Are Anonymous special-interest combatants? The SIG (special interest group) is a well-worn concept in hacker culture. What happens when a SIG is willing to attack organization to promote the subject they hold most dear? They become 21st century soldiers who open up a third front in a war without the backing of a government. The changing dynamics are fascinating so long as you can set aside the horror associated with thinking about how the other two sides are killing people.

Let’s not make the mistake some would encourage us to make: don’t anthropomorphize Anonymous. We know there is no collective consciousness. Not for a religion. Not for a nation. Not for for an army. There only individuals cooperating. The particular Anonymous philosophy makes it even harder to think of the group as a person. Maybe it will help people see governments as (merely) people too.

When the people in Anonymous cooperate for a cause, we can’t ignore a significant difference in motivations. People in a government cooperate to preserve a system of slavery. (How free range the slaves are is not significant.) The people in Anonymous seem to be cooperating to preserve an idea: the Internet and its implied freedom. This will continue to be difficult for governments to address because while governments have relied on indoctrination, presumably everyone in Anonymous joined by choice.

Anonymous Attacks Israel to defend Palestinians in Gaza

But when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way – we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch.

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Electrical grid vulnerable to attack

I have to think that if people working for public utilities didn’t expect the federal government to bail them out, security of the infrastructure would be a top concern.

One Per Cent: Attack on US grid would be worse than hurricane Sandy

Late to the party, but still talking sense. In a report written in 2007 but released only this week, the National Research Council – an independent organisation that advises the US government on science and technology policy – warns that the national power grid is inherently vulnerable to terrorist attack. Such an attack could cause more damage than hurricane Sandy, say the authors, “blacking out large regions of the country for weeks or months and costing many billions of dollars”.

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Engineered assassin viruses

The power available to us is awesome and terrifying. Are we headed to a future where Anonymous attacks leaders and organizations with biological means rather than via the Internet?

Hacking the President’s DNA

The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace.

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Moneyball is shorthand for science-based

It seems so simple, but using the scientific method helps you win. Lately it’s been getting my attention that there’s a cultural divide between those people who accept Aristotle’s (or Bacon’s) method of discovery.

Science-Based Medicine » “Moneyball,” the 2012 election, and science- and evidence-based medicine

Moneyball has also entered politics in a big way over the election cycles of 2008, 2010, 2012. In the run-up to the 2012 election, I, like many others, became hooked on FiveThirtyEight, a blog devoted to applying rigorous statistical analysis to the polls. (FiveThirtyEight refers to the number of votes in the Electoral College.) As political junkies (and even many casual observers) know, the man responsible for the blog, Nate Silver, got his start as a “moneyball”-style sabermetrics baseball analyst. In 2002, he developed a model to assess and predict a baseball player’s performance over time, known as PECOTA, which stands for “Players Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.” Silver brought his model to the Baseball Prospectus. Several years later, he was applying his statistical methods to the 2008 election, and the rest is history. Indeed, in this year’s election, Silver correctly called all 50 states.