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ECP NetHappenings: Education how handwriting shapes the human brain

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Brian Reed @BReed83314
The whole world is still horrified that country club Republicans conned hillbillies from the holler to get them to vote Republican and elect the worst President in the history of the USA.

EDUCATION

ESSAY
Massimo @Rainmaker1973

For more than 20 years, Norwegian neuroscientist Audrey van der Meer has investigated how handwriting shapes the human brain.

In a landmark 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, her team used high-density EEG caps to monitor brain activity in students while they either wrote by hand with a digital pen or typed on a keyboard.

The difference was dramatic. Handwriting produced a powerful, synchronized burst of neural activity across widespread regions of the brain, linking areas involved in memory formation, sensory processing, and deep learning. In contrast, typing the exact same content caused this rich cognitive network to largely shut down. Because typing uses repetitive, uniform keystrokes, it demands little spatial or cognitive effort, leaving key learning centers quiet and disengaged.

These neurological differences have a direct effect on how we process and remember information. Earlier research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton University reached similar conclusions. Students who took notes by hand consistently outperformed those using laptops on conceptual understanding tests. Handwriting forces active listening, critical thinking, and real-time summarization, while typing often leads to verbatim transcription with minimal processing.

Our brains function as part of an embodied biological system. Replacing rich physical actions with effortless digital keystrokes may deliver short-term convenience, but it comes at the expense of deeper cognitive engagement.

The solution is simple and timeless: pick up a pen.

[Van der Meer, A. L. H., et al. (2024). Handwriting versus typing: A neurophysiological comparison of brain activity during learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1234567]

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ECP NetHappenings Kids’ shows used to be this calm on purpose

Education

We didn’t realize it then, but kids’ shows used to be this calm on purpose.

ESSAY
Anish Moonka
@anishmoonka
Jun 15

Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child’s nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.

The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children’s Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child’s nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.

What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan’s FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children’s programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.

Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.

In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.

ESSAY

Anish Moonka
@anishmoonka

A 5,300-year-old man was found frozen in the Alps in 1991. He had 61 tattoos, all made by rubbing carbon soot into cuts. The vast majority were placed on joints where he had severe arthritis: knees, ankles, lower back. He was using them to treat chronic pain.

His name was Otzi, and his tattoos come roughly 2,000 years before the oldest surviving written records of acupuncture in China. A 2015 analysis of his tattoo placements found that around 80% correspond to acupuncture points, the exact spots traditional Chinese medicine targets for pain. The person who made those marks knew exactly where the pain lived.

The word “tattoo” didn’t enter the English language until 1769, when Captain James Cook brought it back from Polynesia. Polynesian communities had called the practice tatau for centuries. Before Cook, English had no name for it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world had been tattooing for thousands of years. It meant something different wherever it appeared. Ancient Egyptian mummies from around 2000 BCE had tattoos of dots and dashes across their abdomens and thighs, which researchers connect to protective rituals around fertility and childbirth.

In Siberia, a group of mummies called the Pazyryk, dated to around 500 BCE, had elaborate animal tattoos covering their arms and shoulders: horses, deer, fish, mythical creatures. The more complex the tattoos, the higher the social rank. Their chief had the most intricate designs. Rome took tattooing in a completely different direction, using it purely as punishment.

Slaves were marked on their faces with the Latin word “stigma.” Criminals were tattooed the same way. Emperor Constantine banned facial tattooing in 316 CE, arguing that faces were made in God’s image and shouldn’t be defaced. The practice shifted to hands and arms.

The Maori of New Zealand built one of the most sophisticated tattoo systems ever documented. Each person’s ta moko, the facial tattoo unique to them, encoded lineage, rank, personal history, and military achievement. When Maori chiefs signed treaties with European settlers in the 19th century, some drew their ta moko instead of their names. Each design worked as a legal signature.

As for the cannibalism theory: anthropologists have suggested that in Pacific Island cultures where ritual cannibalism occurred, tribal tattoos marked group membership. Consuming someone who carried your group’s marks was considered taboo. Evidence for it is indirect, but researchers in Polynesian history still cite it as a real secondary reason.

Samuel O’Reilly patented the first electric tattoo machine in 1891, adapting a design from Edison’s electric pen. For 5,300 years before that, people in the Alps, Egypt, Siberia, New Zealand, and Rome were making the same marks by hand, for reasons that barely overlapped.

ECP NetHappenings Congress Insider Trading Must Stop

Blanche devised and signed an immunity deal shielding Trump and his family from “all claims” arising out of “any matters” — then Trump nominated him attorney general.

Robert De Niro just blasted Donald Trump yesterday, saying for him to: “Shut the fuck up.”

The Oligarch’s are not reading the room
David Sirota @davidsirota
There’s a real late-stage-feudalism vibe with the current king holding gladiatorial events at his castle… …the past king marveling at his new self-portrait in the shrine he built for himself… …and all of the serfs being unable to afford food.
“The rising tide of 401(k) hardship withdrawals isn’t happening in a vacuum; it’s a direct symptom of broader economic pressures squeezing American households. Persistent inflation, which has eroded purchasing power over the past few years…”

Rep. John Larson @RepJohnLarson
‘DOGE’ was never about efficiency. They want to steal your data and slash your benefits. That’s what Trump, Musk, and the billionaires are demanding.
Social Security is an EARNED BENEFIT that YOU paid for. It doesn’t belong to Elon Musk or any of his buddies on Wall Street.

Coinbase announces the first, 1:1 backed tokenized stocks are coming, stating “No derivatives, no IOUs.” @brian_armstrong said on X, users can “own an actual chunk of the company onchain.” Armstrong adds, it’s a “great step towards unlocking global access to U.S. markets.”

Heart protection from COVID shots remains amid updates, study finds
Despite continued benefits, anti-vaccine rhetoric has driven down vaccination.

Jane Fonda: It’s not about Democrat or Republican or left or right.
It’s about right or wrong, and it is wrong for people to be attacked and called terrorists for exercising their rights and freedoms. It’s time for Americans all across the country, all across the political spectrum who care about these freedoms to stand up creatively, non-violently, to defend these rights while we can. We must do this now. Because if we don’t, we’re not going to have any rights to defend.

We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code. —David Clark, 1992
said during a plenary presentation at the 24th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference.
This motto encapsulates the technical and political values of the Internet engineering community during the Internet-OSI Standards War, a period of intense competition between the informal, pragmatic TCP/IP approach and the formal, bureaucratic Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model.
Clark graduated from Swarthmore College in 1966. In 1968, he received his master’s and engineer’s degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, where he worked on the I/O architecture of Multics under Jerry Saltzer. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1973.

Oklahoma Democrats recently forced a vote to ban child marriage.
36 Republicans voted no …damn perverts!

Fox News’ top Defense Correspondent just admitted that Donald Trump’s deal will not end Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This is terrible. Iranian media says the U.S. agreed to present reconstruction plans for Iran amounting to at least 300 billion dollars.

The reason you know we lost the war and surrendered to Iran is the fact that the terms of the “Deal” are secret. Such agreements are never secret, except in the Trump administration. Trump has to keep it secret to avoid disclosing how much he paid to get oil flowing before the midterms.
$300,000,000,000 for Iran
$0 for you
America First!
The golden age!
If this was the Obama Deal, MAGA would be LOSING THEIR MINDS. And rightfully so.

Bill Kristol @BillKristol
“America lost the war…We will exit the war with none of those goals achieved, and in order to end the war, America had to submit to a host of Iranian conditions. We lost and there is no reasonable way to hide this fact.”

@CMPunk: “No, I wouldn’t go to the White House — If David Duke invites me over for tacos I’m not going. A racist is a racist. I call it like I see it.”

Dana White says he can’t afford another UFC event at the trailer park…I mean the White House.

Surveillance: YouTube could be banned for 16 & 17-year-olds overnight under the U.K.’s proposed social media curfew.

Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has reportedly taken a $1 billion stake in SpaceX.

SpaceX’s surge added approximately $165,000,000,000.00 to Elon Musk’s net worth today — larger than Bill Gates’ entire fortune.

Epstein didn’t just own Zorro Ranch – he turned thousands of acres of public grazing land into a giant moat around his compound. No livestock, just privacy and control.
Once those girls were inside, there was nowhere to run.
#Justice #EpsteinTrumpCoverUp #DemsUnited

So this piece of shit coward is in the hospital.
According to news reports, He’s not doing well.
He refused to impeach Trump for the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Yet he blamed Trump for the Jan 6th attack.
He could have prevented a 2nd Trump term.
He could have prevented all the bullshit Trump and his family are putting the American people through.
He’s a fucking coward.
He doesn’t even deserve “Thoughts and Prayers”.
@SenMcConnell Fuck You.

PROFESSIONAL LOOTERS

ESSAY
Ricardo @Ric_RTP

This AI just exposed the BIGGEST legal insider trading operation in America.

A platform called GovGreed built a seven-layer machine learning system that cross-references every stock trade disclosed by every sitting politician against the bills their committees control, the campaign donations they receive, and the companies their votes directly impact.

It scored all 540 politicians currently in Congress. And the numbers are crazy:

56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on. That is 6,170 out of 11,016 total purchases.

More than HALF of all congressional stock buys are on companies whose fate that same politician is about to decide.

343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information.

That is 63.8% of the entire legislature making market bets with an informational edge that would put any hedge fund manager in prison.

The AI identified 752 active “Triple Signals” in the current Congress. A Triple Signal fires when three conditions line up at once:

The politician sits on the committee controlling a bill, they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry.

Bills carrying these insider indicators pass at 5.4 TIMES the normal rate.

Now look at the individual leaderboard:

– Nancy Pelosi’s estimated portfolio sits at $194 million with a Greediness score of 98.1 out of 100
– Ro Khanna made 13,231 trades across 800+ different tickers
– Michael McCaul made 32,302 trades and filed 6,670 of them late
– Thomas Suozzi filed 86.4% of his trades late with an average delay of 396 days, meaning his disclosures landed over a YEAR after he made the trade

And then there is Lisa McClain, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. She has made 1,443 trades in three years, more than 98% of all politicians tracked.

She violated the STOCK Act twice in a single year, disclosing up to $900,000 in trades months after the legal deadline. Her husband bought up to $250,000 in Elon Musk’s xAI, which quietly converted into SpaceX equity before last Friday’s $2 trillion IPO.

The penalty for all of this? A $200 fine.

The number of Congress members ever prosecuted under the STOCK Act since it passed in 2012? Zero.

And the cruelest part is this:

A bill to ban congressional stock trading was introduced in January 2026. It has bipartisan support. Over 80% of American voters want it passed.

But Congress is sitting on it, because the people who would have to vote yes are the same people making millions from the system staying exactly the way it is.

They write the insider trading laws, they exempt themselves from enforcement, they trade on the information those laws generate, and when they get caught, they pay a fine that is basically nothing.

The AI didn’t discover anything Congress was hiding. It just organized what was already public into a pattern so obvious that nobody can pretend it isn’t there anymore.

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ECP NetHappenings United States of Surveillance

ESSAY Thomas Drake @Thomas_Drake1

United States of Surveillance

The US government prefers the self-licensed primacy of warrantless mass surveillance under the exception blanket of national security without the ‘inconvenience’ of seeking a judicial warrant as required by the probable cause standard under the 4th Amendment of the Constitution — a bedrock amendment that is central to what it means to live as a person in America and as We the People with fundamental rights.

The 4th Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of US Persons by the government — in order to meet the very high bar when the government wants to conduct surveillance against a US Person suspected of engaging in or about to engage in criminal activities — or suspicious criminal actions that compromise the security of the United States on behalf of or in material support of a foreign actor or entity under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — related or linked to foreign intelligence as in spy-type behavior.

However, Section 702 of FISA creates a huge carve out and bypass exception that allows for secret warrantless interception and seizure of US Person communications and electronic data — effectively a blanket ‘backdoor’ writ of assistance.

And Section 702 of FISA also permits warrantless search of vast secret collection databases that include US Person information — treated as pre-crime data.

I blew the whistle on the epigenesis of the willfully warrantless domestic mass surveillance implemented under the umbrella STELLAR WIND program that violated the 4th Amendment — a key Amendment along with the rest of the 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights that fundamentally define who we are as Americans (with the 1st Amendment as the cornerstone) granting protections against the preemptive annexation of rights of We the People by the central government.

The STELLAR WIND program not only criminally violated the 4th Amendment shortly after 9/11, it also violated FISA.

I later ended up indicted in 2010 under the Espionage Act facing and then facing down 35 years in prison.

Why? Because I would not violate the fidelity of the oath I took to support and defend the Constitution on behalf of We the People — even against my own government violating the Constitution.

Almost 25 years later the government wants to continue with their obsessive compulsive addiction to unfettered ‘backdoor’ warrantless access to any and all US Person persona data and their privacy in abject violation of the Constitution — no matter how they twist and redefine plain language.

Lawlessness and lawfare under reign of rule instead of Rule of Law under the Constitution is now the default normalcy ‘protected’ (err, licensed) by the primacy of national security.

Government has always had the ability to conduct warrantless surveillance on non-US Persons outside the US.

It is now way past time to follow the Constitution as the law of the land and seek a 4th Amendment compliant judicial or FISA warrant to surveil Americans/US Persons and restrain the predations and pathologies of government in their abuse of power against We the People — given the base human condition.

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Education

PROFESSIONAL LOOTERS

ESSAY Ricardo @Ric_RTP

This AI just exposed the BIGGEST legal insider trading operation in America.

The penalty for all of this? A $200 fine.

The number of Congress members ever prosecuted under the STOCK Act since it passed in 2012? Zero.

A bill to ban congressional stock trading was introduced in January 2026. It has bipartisan support. Over 80% of American voters want it passed.

The AI didn’t discover anything Congress was hiding. It just organized what was already public into a pattern so obvious that nobody can pretend it isn’t there anymore.

United States of Surveillance

ESSAY
Ricardo @Ric_RTP