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22 results for “Mapping”
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I made an interactive map for the upcoming election.
As House districts flip to democratic (yea!) or to republican (boo!) the district that flipped will be prominently highlighted in blue or red. However, after I tweak the map for that change you will then have to reload the map to see the flipped district.
No promise on how late I will stay up on Tuesday evening. But since I live in the PNW I expect to be able to show a number of flipped districts before I have trouble staying awake.
If you open the map and click a district then a popup will appear with some info including the name and party of the current representative. The map displays data that is hosted on a federal GIS server. So if any of the data such as district boundaries is wrong, there is not anything I can do about that.
The following link is the same one that will work on election day.
Open GISsurfer map:
https://mappingsupport.com/p2/gissurfer.php?center=37.405727,-95.958983&zoom=4&basemap=USA_basemap&overlay=Democratic_districts,Republican_districts,District_lines_yellow,District_lines_black,Flip_to_democratic,Flip_to_republican,All_districts&data=https://mappingsupport.com/p2/political/119th_congress_before_2026_election.txt
#Midterms #Elections #MidTerms2026 -
Spatial mapping reveals how human urogenital organs codevelop during organogenesis
https://phys.org/news/2026-10-spatial-reveals-human-urogenital-codevelop.html
A new study has mapped human urogenital development in its native spatial context, revealing how neighboring organs coordinate their development through cellular communication and molecular signaling…
#science #biology #development -
Moderne Datenzugriffslösungen mit Entity Framework Core 10.0: Datenbankprogrammierung / Objekt-Relationales Mapping mit C# in .NET 10.0 by Dr. Holger Schwichtenberg 📖 on Leanpub!
Dies ist die top-aktuelle Version 14.9 dieses Fachbuchs vom 16.10.2026 auf dem Stand Entity Framework Core 10.0.13.
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Happy Geoween 2026!!
#GIS #GISchat #geospatial #esri #arcgis #mapping #Halloween2026 @esri @urisa
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Chinese research ships map Taiwan’s undersea infrastructure | Taiwan News
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — China has ramped up undersea mapping operations in waters east and south of Taiwan to…
#Conflict #Conflicts #War #China #ChinaTaiwanConflicts #Taiwan
https://www.europesays.com/3345829/ -
Back from #MozFest in Barcelona. One of the workshops addressed the (lack of) data regarding the data centers currently being built, as well as demonstrating an open data mapping solution. The tone of the entire presentation was quite combative—essentially taking an “anti-data center” stance—with a strong focus on opposing AI; the sentiment was that nobody wants these facilities, especially given the general dislike for figures like Altman, Musk, and the rest of that tech-oligarch crowd. Fair enough, everyone can agree on that.
But I had to ask: “Are you aware that there is an EU mandate to repatriate data and applications currently running on AWS, Azure, and others? So, do we need new data centers in Europe or not?” The room fell silent. It’s easy to advocate against massive, multi-megawatt data centers, but all of them? Where are we supposed to store our photos and emails? What’s the alternative?
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Shot cyclist testifies in capital murder trial, says image of defendant 'burned in my head'
Prosecutors will continue to present evidence mapping out the timeline of the Dec. 5, 2023 shootings that took the lives of six people and injured three others.
https://www.kxan.com/news/crime/shane-james-capital-murder-trial-day-3/
#Crime #Austin #Local #TopStories -
SOME SHARED SPATIAL/GIS ROLES & OPPORTUNITIES
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w/e October 30th, 2026 | GLOBAL but North-America-focused (as currently based there)
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https://earthstuff.substack.com/p/some-shared-spatialgis-roles-and-f96
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• I am NOT associated with HR/recruiting in ANY way
• Therefore, these are NOT endorsements, and there are no ‘referrals’ or the like for me
• I am simply sharing SOME roles I have seen – in the hope that they are of use to someone
• As such, I am not (and indeed can not) in any way ‘vet’ these roles (i.e., you are advised to conduct your own due diligence due to hideous, potential risks like fraudulent postings, ‘ghost jobs’, résumé/ATS ‘improvement’ scammers, etc, the listings that seem 'a little fluffy', the same (±) listings that appear week after week after week, whether a role is actually Remote (or if it is a 'Bait & Switch', used 'in a different way' or some such) or an overly confident/cynical 'fishing expedition; that is, Be Confident - but also be somewhat cynical yourself of course.)
• Further, roles listed are in no specific order (i.e., a ‘running list’ as I ‘encountered’ them during the week)
• There is ZERO cost to access this list of spatial / GIS roles
• I am not (really) ‘mining’ US Federal government roles - with the ‘hiring freeze’, uncertainty, etc
• You can subscribe to the (free) weekly LinkedIn newsletter www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7397678824928366594 or also for free at earthstuff.Substack.com - if so inclined#fridayjobs #gischat #jobsonfriday #GIS #spatial #mapping #cartography #geography #job #jobopenings #hiring #newjob #employment #roles #GISJobs #NotARecruiter #fridayspatialjobs #scholarship #PhD #PostDoc #CareersInSpatial #career #openroles #Geomatics #GIS #Innovation #Growth #caveatNONemptor #LetsGetYouHired #GISCareer #GISStudents #PhD #postdoc #hiringalert #GISjobs #careeropportunity #NowHiring #spatialanalysis #GIS #Geospatial #GISSpecialist #Geomatics #OpenToWork
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Personal hardships - After thinking about a few things that didn’t go well, I’ve started applying blameless post-mortems to personal hardships. Mapping timelines, analyzing systemic triggers, and writing notes on what went wrong, how, and how to fix it, instead of hunting for someone to blame. This allows technical analysis instead of emotional noise. Another pro is that it prevents rumination and mental looping when you extract the things to structured data and documentation, and then it’s done. One thing is that even if you’ve been hit hard, you’ll probably realize that the failure mode is survivable. Direct presence, zero hiding, and radical ownership!
#PostMortem #Personal #Life #PersonalGrowth #SystemsThinking
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Been playing DnD-style games on paper & computers since middle-school.
I've designed new software where I can map it all digitally now really fast and easily. No ads, no subscriptions, no tracking.
RPG Mapper - Learn more:
>> https://youtu.be/rr5jcTChGpE
or
https://www.rpgmapper.com/ -
DETECT - Seismological Data From Multiple Dense Arrays Deployed Across The Irpinia Fault System In Southern Italy
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https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-7751-2026 <-- shared paper
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https://geofon.gfz.de/doi/network/ZK/2021 <-- shared associated seismological dataset
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https://doi.org/10.14470/MX7576871994 <-- shared details of 200 temporary station
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H/T @dino bindi | Seismologist at GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences
“📡 New open dataset: DETECT
200 seismic stations, arranged in 20 dense arrays, recorded continuously for one year (2021–2022) above the faults of the 1980 Ms 6.9 Irpinia earthquake. This is one of Italy’s most hazardous regions.
🔹 ~5.2 TB of continuous waveforms (200 Hz)
🔹 Broadband, 1 Hz and 4.5 Hz sensors in every array
🔹 Enhanced catalog of ~3,600 events down to Ml −1.2
🔹 Open via GEOFON/EIDA (network ZK, FDSN services, CC BY 4.0)
A near-fault resource for microseismicity, fault imaging, attenuation and ML studies…”
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“[The authors] present a large seismological dataset [2nd link above] composed of continuous recordings from 200 temporary stations (seismic network ZK,[third link above]), which operated continuously for approximately one year in the Southern Apennines (Southern Italy) as part of the DETECT experiment. The dataset is compliant with the seismological standards for the archiving of data and metadata, and with standardized tools for disseminating them, e.g., the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) web services. The data set was collected during the DETECT experiment in the Irpinia area (southern Italy), which is one of the regions with the highest seismic hazard in Italy. From August 2021 to August 2022, a constellation of 20 seismic arrays, with a total of 200 seismic stations, was installed above the fault segments responsible for the Mw 6.8, 1980 Irpinia earthquake, the strongest and most destructive seismic event in Italy in the last century. Each seismic array had a maximum aperture of ∼2 km and was composed of one broad-band sensor, one short- period sensor with 1 Hz and eight 4.5 Hz natural frequency geophones. Data and metadata were managed in accordance with the GIPP/GEOFON policy using SeisComP (Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and GEMPA GmbH, 2008), and the final archive size is approximately 5.2 TB. In this contribution, [they] provide details on how to download waveform data and station metadata, as well as information on data availability and quality…”
#seismology #earthquake #Italy #opendata #dataset #instrumentation #IrpiniaFaultSystem #Campania #SouthernApennines #SouthernItaly #DETECT #seismicstations #seismicarrays #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #GIS #spatial #mapping #geology #fault #faulting #engineeringgeology #geophysics #microseismicity #faultimaging #attenuation #MLstudies #metadata #FDSN -
Today Seattle fell back an hour. Vancouver didn't. So now you drive 200 km north (and a bit west) from Seattle and set your watch an hour *ahead*, as if you'd gone east.
I was curious if this happens to neighboring cities elsewhere in the world, so for the #30DayMapChallenge (Day 1 topic: "Points"), I looked for more wrong-way clocks around the world and found 18 pairs.
See them all here: https://mappingmashups.github.io/time-zone-inversions/
#DST #DaylightSavingTime #FallBack #PNW #Seattle #Vancouver #BritishColumbia
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Unpacking ATT&CK With MalChela v4.4
I came home from ATT&CKcon with a full notebook and a head full of technique IDs. So, fair warning: this release is on a bit of a MITRE kick. But it’s not the only thing in here. v4.4 has three headliners: a brand-new unpacker, ATT&CK mapping across the whole toolkit, and a move to YARA-X that makes installing MalChela a lot less painful.
Unpack
This one came straight out of conversations at the conference.
@dwmetz How can I extract the details strings from packed malware sample. Can Malchela support malware unpacked feature?Up to now the honest answer was “go get another tool.” Not anymore.
Unpack detects packers, installers, and bundlers in PE, ELF, and Mach-O files and pulls out the payload statically. It never runs the sample. Every call it makes comes with the evidence behind it, and anything it recovers goes right back through Unpack again, so a dropper inside an installer inside a UPX stub comes out as a layer tree instead of just the outer shell.
- UPX, including the mangled headers Mirai and friends use to make
upx -dgive up. Unpack repairs a working copy and records every byte it touched. - PyInstaller, and then it keeps going into the Python bytecode itself (3.7 through 3.14), peeling off the obfuscation wrappers stealers love: xz, zlib, base64, rot13, the works. The strings land in mStrings automatically.
- .NET / Costura resources, NSIS, Inno Setup, fat Mach-O, overlays, and executables embedded in other executables.
Point Analyze at a packed sample and Unpack kicks in on its own. Everything it recovers gets the full MalChela treatment. Running a LunaGrabber build through it was a good test: an obfuscated entry script three layers deep, and out came the Discord webhook it exfiltrates to.
MITRE All the Things
Between Unpack, the Mac tools, File Miner, and Analyze, a single run can turn up ATT&CK findings from a dozen files and half a dozen tools. Reading those as a list gets old fast. So now every Analyze run plots them on the Enterprise matrix.
- Tiles are shaded by how many files hit them. Click one and you get the evidence: which rule, which tool, which file, and the strings that matched.
- Open the matrix for any saved case, and it pulls in every Analyze run and every standalone tool report in that case. Older cases work too.
- Every run also saves an ATT&CK Navigator layer, so you can take it straight into Navigator.
- Everything is on ATT&CK v20: Stealth and Defense Impairment instead of the retired Defense Evasion, and revoked techniques remapped.
- Click a technique ID in mStrings and the built-in MITRE Lookup opens right there. (Cmd/Ctrl-click still takes you to attack.mitre.org.)
YARA-X
If you’ve ever installed MalChela on a Mac, you know the dance:
brew install yara, then exportYARA_LIBRARY_PATH, thenBINDGEN_EXTRA_CLANG_ARGS, then hope. That’s all gone. Every MalChela tool now runs on YARA-X, VirusTotal’s Rust rewrite of YARA, compiled right in. No libyara, no bindgen, no OpenSSL. On Linux the prerequisites are nowbuild-essentialandpkg-config. On a Mac it’s the Xcode command line tools.It also clears the biggest roadblock to running MalChela natively on Windows. WSL2 is still the supported route for now, but native Windows testing is next on my list.
A huge thank-you to Daniel Iwugo (@elementmerc), who did the groundwork on the new YARA backend and closed the gaps between it and libyara. This is what open source is supposed to look like.
YARA Scan
With the engine built in, it would have been silly not to expose it. YARA Scan is a new tool for running your own rules against a file or folder, and it speaks the same language as VirusTotal’s
yr scan: same flags, same output. I tested it side by side withyron the full signature-base rule set and got identical results. It saves reports to your case, and there’s a simplified panel in the web interface. For the deeperyrfeatures like compiled rules and module data, the YARA-X integration is still there.IP Reputation and GreyNoise
Threat Intel Query now looks up IP addresses on VirusTotal, AlienVault OTX, and, new in this release, GreyNoise. There’s a new IP tab, and defanged input is fine. The part I like best: an IP being “found” doesn’t mean much on its own, since 8.8.8.8 is in every source there is. So instead of FOUND, each source tells you what it actually concluded: flagged, clean, a known benign service, or a scanner. Analyze runs the same lookups on the IPs it finds.
mStrings got smarter about IPs too. When dozens of addresses are stored together, like a sandbox blocklist or a C2 pool, they’re reported as one list instead of fifty separate “C2” hits.
Odds and Ends
- The Analyze summary now follows the structure of Lenny Zeltser’s Malware Analysis Report template, and the template is built into the MCP plugin, so Claude can write the full report and save it to your case.
- mStrings recognizes encoded string tables. AMOS keeps its whole AppleScript as about 1,900 encoded strings; now you get one clear finding instead of a wall of matches.
- The API Keys panel has a slot for GreyNoise, and At a Glance counts all 21 tools.
- The docs and the PDF user guide are up to date, with new pages for Unpack and YARA Scan.
- UPX, including the mangled headers Mirai and friends use to make
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The query looks protected. Why does the sort still worry you?
During query review, check that untrusted values are bound rather than concatenated into SQL, and that dynamic identifiers and sort directions come from the query's fixed mapping. Check both before you sign off.
What's the strangest Application Security problem you've debugged?
Source: OWASP Cheat Sheet Series - https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/SQL_Injection_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet.html
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🎯 Threat Intelligence
===================Zscaler ThreatLabz published a technical walkthrough of the infrastructure behind an AI-assisted hacking campaign, building on Recorded Future's earlier report on TAG-217 activity against South Korean banks. The recovered material is heavy on operational detail, and the authors are explicit about what is confirmed versus inferred: model names in the configurations are reproduced as requested IDs and were not independently verified.
🔹 Two servers, one workflow
The work server stored project files, scripts, AI settings and a local ARTEX deployment. The jump server, 38.244.50.120, was set as the default route for connections to targets and also ran additional AI sessions. The operator delegated research tasks to Grok on that server and ran a separate AI session whose job was to review Grok's findings. Work was split between the two servers, with the operator providing oversight and direction.
Three custom scripts kept the environments consistent:
• tools/sync-all.sh: uses SSH and rsync to copy AI instructions, reusable task guides, saved notes and tools to the jump server's root, claude, grok and gemini accounts
• sync-memory.sh: copies saved AI memory files to locations on the jump server
• tools/sync-cc-users.sh: copies shared Claude Code instructions and supporting files to the gemini and glm accounts on the work serverThe scripts also rewrote model references inside specialist agent instructions so shared instructions matched the destination account, and they included backups plus validation checks to avoid overwriting modified files.
🔹 Attack Chain Analysis
No malware infection chain is described in the source. What is documented is the operational chain:
1. Environment provisioning: work server holding project files, scripts and AI settings; jump server 38.244.50.120 as the default route to targets
2. AI orchestration: research delegated to Grok, a separate reviewer session, and sync scripts keeping instructions consistent across accounts
3. Task execution: customized ARTEX with a planner-and-worker structure, extended with web, network and Android tooling
4. Model routing: requests leave through OpenAI-compatible gateways such as xcai.pro, decoupling account names from the models served🔹 Customized ARTEX deployment
ARTEX is an AI-assisted penetration-testing framework. Its planner-and-worker architecture lets an operator define a goal, which AI agents break into tasks, execute with tools and document for review. The recovered deployment extends the framework with additional tools for web, network and Android analysis.
The saved Docker Compose file defines an ARTEX container plus a PostgreSQL 16 database, mapping the interface to host port 8890 and PostgreSQL to 127.0.0.1:5435. The image is tagged artex-local:perf2-20261003. The Dockerfile adds nmap, sqlmap, nuclei, httpx, jadx, apktool and frida-tools, along with Python libraries for web processing and spreadsheet output, and replaces the stock ARTEX program with the operator's local version.
🔹 Model routing and the gateway problem
One detail deserves attention: account names did not always match the configured model, so the client application (such as Claude Code) must be distinguished from the model service receiving requests. The saved ARTEX environment configuration reads:
ARTEX_LLM_PROVIDER=openai
ARTEX_LLM_MODEL=deepseek-v4.1-flash
ARTEX_LLM_BASE_URL=https://xcai.pro/v1Here openai denotes an OpenAI-compatible API format, the model field requests deepseek-v4.1-flash, and the base URL sends traffic to the xcai.pro gateway. The report is careful to stress that this confirms the requested model and endpoint, not the model the gateway actually served. Treat these identifiers as claims, not facts.
🔹 Detection notes
The source does not include detection rules, but the recovered artifacts give concrete hunting options:
• Outbound connections to 38.244.50.120
• API traffic toward xcai.pro
• Filenames such as tools/sync-all.sh, sync-memory.sh and tools/sync-cc-users.sh
• Docker deployments exposing port 8890 with image tag artex-local:perf2-20261003🔹 Caveats
This is an infrastructure teardown, not a complete intrusion report. The article excerpt is truncated, so victim specifics and a timeline are missing here. Attribution context rests on Recorded Future's separate reporting on TAG-217 and South Korean banks.
References: Recorded Future's blog post on TAG-217 activity against South Korean banks; the Zscaler ThreatLabz analysis.
🔹 ThreatIntel #AI #TAG217 #ARTEX #PenetrationTesting
🔗 Source: https://threatlabz.zscaler.com/blogs/security-research/inside-global-ai-assisted-hacking-campaign
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DATE: October 31, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Does a forest matter more than a foreigner? That’s where cultures disagree most.
People around the world tend to rank their moral obligations toward others in a remarkably similar order, placing family and friends at the top and violent criminals at the bottom, according to a new study published in European Journal of Social Psychology. An analysis of university students across 41 cultural groups indicates that this general moral pecking order holds up across a wide range of societies, especially in nations culturally similar to the United States. At the same time, cultures and individuals frequently diverge when deciding whether distant humans deserve more moral consideration than animals and the natural environment.
Moral concern refers to the personal obligation people feel to care for the welfare and interests of another being or object. Psychologists and philosophers often picture this concept as a “moral circle” made up of concentric rings, where entities placed in the innermost ring receive the highest level of protection and personal responsibility, while those left outside the boundary receive none at all. Where those entities sit inside a person’s moral circle shapes everyday choices, from donating to an animal sanctuary to supporting aid for foreign refugees or favoring laws that protect old-growth forests.
To map these priorities systematically, psychologists created the Moral Expansiveness Scale, which asks people to sort 30 human and non-human entities into four rings of moral standing. When several of the same researchers first tested this tool in a 2016 study of American adults, they observed a consistent hierarchy: family and friends came first, followed by community members, then revered figures like charity workers and marginalized people at nearly identical levels, then foreign citizens and political opponents, animals and ecosystems, plants, and finally violent criminals.
Later research linked the overall size of a person’s moral circle to real-world generosity, with a 2024 global study of charitable donors showing that people who pledged at least 10 percent of their income to charity had wider moral circles and greater open-mindedness than typical citizens.
Even within Western societies, however, not everyone follows the exact same ordering when weighing human needs against the natural world. For example, a 2021 study of American adults indicated that although most participants prioritized distant or marginalized humans over animals and ecosystems, roughly one-third reversed that pattern and valued nature above people outside their own social groups. Broader social environments also shape moral boundaries, as a 2022 study across 36 countries, drawn from the same dataset by several of the same researchers, found that high perceived economic inequality and low social trust were associated with smaller moral circles overall.
What remained uncertain was whether the specific hierarchy of who matters most was a widespread feature of human psychology or largely a byproduct of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, since earlier tests of the ranking itself relied almost exclusively on participants from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
To examine whether this moral ordering holds up across diverse societies and individuals, study co-lead authors Işıl Ayça Akkuş and Bastian Jaeger of the Department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, along with their colleagues, analyzed moral rankings across 41 cultural groups.
“There have been quite a lot of studies recently on mapping people’s moral hierarchy, that is, how much concern people show for the welfare and interests of different humans, non-human animals, ecosystems, AI systems, and other entities,” Jaeger told PsyPost. “Most people showed a very similar ranking, and I had the feeling that researchers were starting to treat this pattern as an established fact of how people think about the moral standing of others. But almost all research on this topic was conducted in the US or other Western countries. We wanted to test how often the same, or at least a very similar pattern actually shows up in countries across the world.”
The researchers examined survey responses from 6,561 university students across 41 cultural groups, originally collected in 2018 and 2019, with all but four groups reaching the target of at least 100 students. These groups spanned countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, and Oceania, and separated culturally distinct regions within the same nation, such as English-speaking and French-speaking Canada as well as the Northern and Southern United States. The participants had an average age of 21.6 years, and roughly 63 percent were women, 30 percent were men, and less than 1 percent identified as another gender. On average, the student participants leaned slightly toward the political left and rated religion as slightly below moderate importance in their daily lives.
All participants completed the Moral Expansiveness Scale by assigning 30 specific entities into four concentric rings scored from 0 to 3. Placing an entity in the inner circle (3) meant the participant felt a strong moral obligation and personal responsibility to ensure its welfare, whereas the outer circle (2) reflected moderate concern with reduced personal obligation, the fringes (1) indicated minimal moral standing, and the area outside the boundary (0) meant the entity deserved no moral concern at all. The 30 entities were grouped into 10 broader categories of three items each.
Six categories covered humans: family and friends (family member, close friend, partner or spouse); ingroup members from one’s own community (fellow citizen, neighbor, co-worker); revered figures (elected leader, soldier, charity worker); stigmatized individuals (refugee, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender person, mentally challenged person); outgroup members outside one’s national, political, or religious group (foreign citizen, political opponent, person with different religious beliefs); and villains (murderer, terrorist, child molester).
The other four covered non-human nature: high-sentience animals widely seen as having complex minds and feelings (chimpanzee, dolphin, cow); the environment (national park, old-growth forest, coral reef); low-sentience animals viewed as having simpler mental capacities (chicken, bee, fish); and plants (redwood tree, apple tree, rose bush).
To evaluate how closely each cultural group and each individual matched the typical Western hierarchy, the authors focused on 13 pairwise comparisons between categories that had consistently differed in prior Western studies, such as prioritizing family and friends over ingroup members or plants over villains. Category pairs that had historically received nearly identical scores in Western samples, such as revered versus stigmatized humans or high-sentience animals versus the environment, were left out of the 13 core comparisons.
For 26 of the cultural groups with available data, the authors also compared the group rankings against a cultural distance index, which combines nearly 200 survey and institutional indicators to measure how much a society’s broader values, beliefs, and norms differ from those of the United States. The study was not preregistered, and the authors describe their approach as primarily descriptive, intended to map patterns that future work can test directly rather than to confirm specific predictions.
At the cultural group level, the results pointed to substantial cross-cultural similarity in how people organize their moral circles. Across the 41 cultural groups, a median of 11 out of the 13 expected rankings replicated, with an average of 11.32 rankings matching the typical pattern. Twelve cultural groups matched all 13 rankings: the Northern United States, Australia, English-speaking Canada, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, and Ukraine. Most of the remaining groups fell close behind, and even the most divergent kept the majority of the hierarchy intact, with Malaysia matching 8 of 13 and French-speaking Canada, Chile, Germany, and Poland each matching 9.
Family and friends occupied the highest position in every single cultural group, receiving an average rating of 2.89 out of 3.00 across all samples. At the bottom of the hierarchy, villains received the lowest moral concern in 38 of the 41 cultural groups, with an overall average score of 0.58 out of 3.00; the only exceptions were Hong Kong, Thailand, and Uganda, where criminals received scores similar to or slightly higher than plants and low-sentience animals. Three specific rankings held true in all 41 cultural groups without exception: family and friends were always ranked above ingroup members, and the natural environment was always ranked above both low-sentience animals and plants.
“Although we found some evidence for cultural differences, what really stood out to me was how similar the results were, even across countries that differ a lot from each other,” Jaeger said. “Participants from Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands showed a hierarchy that was very similar to the US hierarchy. These countries are all relatively similar to the US, but we also found similar patterns in Japan, Ukraine, South Africa, and Türkiye.”
Where cultures differed most was in how they weighed distant humans against non-human nature. Prioritizing human outgroup members over the natural environment was the least consistent pattern globally, appearing in only 21 of the 41 cultural groups, while prioritizing human outgroup members over high-sentience animals occurred in 26 of the 41 groups. A multilevel statistical model estimating the sources of variation at the group level indicated that 40.73 percent of the variation in whether a typical ranking held up was explained by which two categories were being compared, whereas only 13.36 percent was explained by which cultural group was being examined.
Comparing the 26 cultural groups with available cultural distance scores showed a moderate negative correlation (-0.46) between a society’s cultural distance from the United States and the number of moral rankings that matched the standard hierarchy. In other words, societies whose general values, beliefs, and social norms were closer to those of the United States tended to display a moral hierarchy more closely aligned with the pattern originally observed in American studies.
Examining individual participants rather than group averages uncovered far greater variation from person to person. Across all 6,561 students, the median individual matched 7 out of the 13 typical rankings, with an average of 6.85 rankings (or 52.75 percent across all comparisons). Only 38.25 percent of individuals placed human outgroup members above the environment, 44.72 percent placed human outgroup members above high-sentience animals, and 31.81 percent rated high-sentience animals higher than low-sentience animals. By contrast, 91.38 percent of individual participants placed family and friends above ingroup members, the most consistent ranking in the entire dataset.
“Researchers usually focus on finding differences, but I think it is also important to recognize that for some issues, people’s views are actually very similar,” Jaeger explained. “This can be an important thing to highlight in very polarized societies like the US, where many people (often mistakenly) think that others’ beliefs and values are completely different from their own. For example, privileging family above all else is usually framed as a conservative value. Our results show that, even though political differences exist, this is a view that is held by a wide majority of people in general no matter their political orientation.”
Identical group-level rankings can also hide disagreement among people within the same country. Both the Netherlands and Ukraine matched all 13 rankings at the group average level, yet 84.25 percent of Dutch students prioritized ingroup members over stigmatized individuals compared to 55.66 percent of Ukrainian students, whereas 44.34 percent of Ukrainian students prioritized high-sentience over low-sentience animals compared to 26.03 percent of Dutch students. In a statistical model analyzing all 85,293 individual comparisons, the pair of categories being compared accounted for 13.82 percent of the variation, differences between individual participants accounted for 1.30 percent, and the participant’s home country accounted for just 0.2 percent.
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Although the dataset spanned 41 cultural groups, all of the participants were university students, who tend to be younger, more educated, from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and more politically liberal than the general public in their home countries. Relying on student samples may have made the cultural groups appear more alike than they actually are, and future studies using nationally representative samples could uncover wider cultural differences.
“It is possible that nationally representative samples would lead to more cultural differences, but based on our results, we concluded that there are only modest cultural differences in people’s moral hierarchy,” Jaeger noted.
The high degree of variability among individual participants may also stem in part from how the categories were measured, as each of the 10 groups was represented by just three specific examples: chimpanzees, dolphins, and cows for high-sentience animals, and chickens, bees, and fish for low-sentience animals. The authors suggest that people may downplay the moral standing of cows to justify meat consumption and grant higher moral concern to bees because of their perceived usefulness, which could explain why fewer than a third of individuals rated the high-sentience group above the low-sentience group. Future research using a larger assortment of entities within each category could help separate genuine personal philosophies from measurement noise.
Finally, some of the specific groups on the questionnaire, such as refugees, sexual and gender minorities, and people with intellectual disabilities, were originally selected because they represent stigmatized populations in Western societies, and those social labels may not translate identically across every culture. Statistical checks of measurement invariance, which test whether people in different cultures interpret and use a survey scale in the exact same way, indicated that comparing raw average scores between nations remains challenging, though the researchers avoided this pitfall by comparing relative rankings within each culture rather than raw totals across borders.
Looking ahead, the researchers plan to examine why individuals differ so sharply when weighing human strangers against the natural world. “Although most people show maximum concern for family members, and very little concern for murderers and other deviants, concern for some other entities was more variable,” Jaeger added. “Many people were more concerned about human strangers than the rainforest and other ecosystems, but many also showed the opposite pattern. I’m curious which traits and beliefs can explain these differences in who people prioritize in their moral hierarchy.”
The study, “Exploring Cultural and Individual Differences in the Hierarchy of Moral Concern: Evidence From Student Samples Across 41 Cultural Groups,” was authored by Işıl Ayça Akkuş, Charlie R. Crimston, Kelly Kirkland, Brock Bastian, and Bastian Jaeger.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MoralPsychology #MoralCircle #CulturalDifferences #SocialPsychology #HumanValues #EnvironmentalEthics #NatureConservation #AnimalWelfare #CrossCulturalResearch #PsychologyResearch
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DATE: October 31, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Analysis of FDA reports finds Prozac’s sexual side effects vary widely, with some emerging years into treatment
URL: https://www.psypost.org/computer-models-reveal-new-clues-about-antidepressant-side-effects/
A recent study published in Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry suggests that sexual side effects associated with the antidepressant fluoxetine are highly varied, involving severe sensory disruptions alongside changes in libido. Using computer modeling, the researchers found that the drug may interfere with immune and cellular stress proteins, offering clues about the biological mechanisms behind these symptoms.
Fluoxetine is a widely prescribed medication used to treat depression and anxiety. It belongs to a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. These medications work by increasing the availability of serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain that helps regulate mood. While effective for mental health conditions, these drugs frequently produce unwanted sexual side effects.
Lead authors Jun Li and Xing Wang, along with corresponding author Honglin Hu from Nanchang University in China, initiated the investigation to better understand these adverse reactions. Previous research pointed to serotonin as the primary culprit, as heightened serotonin activity can suppress other brain chemicals like dopamine, which drives sexual arousal. The research team suspected that other biological networks, such as inflammation and cell survival pathways, might also be involved in these side effects. They combined real-world patient reports with advanced computer simulations to explore this hypothesis.
The scientists began by extracting data from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System. This public database collects voluntary reports of adverse drug reactions from patients and healthcare professionals. The team filtered the records from 2004 to 2025 to isolate cases where fluoxetine was listed as the primary suspected drug. They analyzed 997 reports related to sexual dysfunction to see if certain side effects were disproportionately associated with the medication.
The analysis revealed strong statistical signals for a wide range of sexual problems. Common issues like erectile dysfunction and decreased libido appeared frequently in the patient reports. However, the researchers observed the strongest reporting intensities for highly specific conditions. Symptoms such as a total inability to climax, decreased orgasmic sensation, and genital numbness showed unusually high reporting rates compared to traditional measures of sexual dysfunction.
Following the database analysis, the team calculated the time it took for these symptoms to appear after a patient started taking the medication. They only included reports that contained complete date information for both the start of treatment and the onset of the side effect. They used statistical distribution models to map out the timing patterns for different symptoms across the patient population.
The timing of the side effects varied greatly depending on the specific symptom. Some conditions, such as prolonged and painful erections or persistent genital arousal, emerged within the first few days of treatment. Issues related to sexual desire, such as a loss of libido, tended to surface after about four to five months. The most delayed side effects involved sensory and orgasmic disruptions, with reports of genital numbness and an inability to climax often appearing after more than two years of continuous medication use.
To understand the biological roots of these symptoms, the researchers turned to network toxicology. This computational approach maps out how drugs interact with the body by cross-referencing vast genetic and protein databases. The team first compiled a list of human proteins known to interact with fluoxetine. They then created a separate list of proteins and genes associated with human sexual dysfunction.
By comparing the two lists, the scientists identified 56 overlapping genetic targets. These shared targets operate within networks that control brain chemistry, including both serotonin and dopamine pathways. The overlapping targets were also heavily concentrated in biological pathways that regulate inflammation, immune responses, and cellular death.
The researchers built a digital map to visualize how these 56 targets interact with one another inside the body. This mapping process identified two core hub proteins that act like major intersections in a city traffic grid, handling a high volume of biological signals. The first is IL10, a protein that helps regulate the body’s inflammatory and immune responses. The second is TP53, a protein that responds to cellular stress and helps control when a damaged cell undergoes programmed death.
To see if the drug could physically influence these proteins, the team used a technique called molecular docking. This computer simulation predicts how a small drug molecule might fit into the three-dimensional structure of a larger protein. It operates much like a simulation of a key entering a lock.
The simulations showed that the fluoxetine molecule fits neatly into the structural pockets of both the TP53 and IL10 proteins. The binding affinity was notably strong for the IL10 protein. This physical compatibility suggests that the drug might directly attach to and alter the function of these proteins in the human body. The researchers suspect that fluoxetine might contribute to sexual side effects by triggering low-level inflammation or cellular stress in nerve and reproductive tissues.
Because the FDA database relies on voluntary submissions, it cannot capture the true frequency of these side effects in the general population. The reporting system also lacks complete information on drug dosages, the duration of treatment, and the patients’ other medications. These missing details prevent researchers from determining exactly how much of the drug is required to trigger a specific symptom.
The database does not track the severity of a patient’s underlying depression. Since depression itself is associated with bodily inflammation, it is difficult to isolate the medication as the sole driver of the immune system changes observed in the data. The underlying mental health condition may be contributing to the same biological pathways highlighted in the computer models.
The computer models used to predict protein interactions are entirely theoretical. While molecular docking shows that a physical bond is possible, it does not confirm how the drug behaves inside a living human body. Physical laboratory experiments and clinical trials are necessary to verify these biological mechanisms.
The study, “Deciphering the molecular mechanisms of fluoxetine-induced sexual dysfunction: Evidence from pharmacovigilance, network toxicology, and molecular docking,” was authored by Jun Li, Xing Wang, Yunfeng Zhang, Penglin Zhang, Zhenfa Tan, Ruizhen Huang, Zuhuan Xu, Zhiyu Zhou, and Honglin Hu.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/computer-models-reveal-new-clues-about-antidepressant-side-effects/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Prozac #Fluoxetine #Antidepressants #MentalHealth #SSRI #MedicationSideEffects #SexualHealth #MedicalResearch #Pharmacology #HealthResearch
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The motion has been made and duly seconded. Henceforth weeds in the garden are prohibited from being the same color as the dirt. All in favor signify by saying ‘aye’.
#Gardens #Gardening #GrowYourOwn #PNW -
From time to time, out of idle curiosity, I look at the MLS showing homes for sale in Anacortes WA. If it was up to me we would sell our place near Redmond WA and move.
The pic is from one of the real estate companies that shows all the homes listed in the MLS. Wow - I have never seen this many homes for sale in Anacortes. And it seems like an odd time of year to be selling.
I thought this real estate website I look at used to also show ‘Days on the market’ but I am not seeing that info.
#housingmarket #PNW #Anacortes -
The MOP Up: World of Warcraft comes to… Sega Dreamcast? - and more random bits of #MMO news we're mopping up here so it's not lost!
📰 https://massivelyop.com/2026/11/01/the-mop-up-world-of-warcraft-comes-to-sega-dreamcast -
I've never booked an AirBnB (my brother uses them, but we don't travel much) but these new rules seem weird.
AirBnB isn't a hotel. It's a short-term rental. So doing your own dishes seems reasonable (you've not got a restaurant cooking your food, so you don't get to just leave the dishes for the venue to clean up). Taking out a full bin bag on day four of a week-long stay isn't a stretch rather than just piling it up. And it's not hard to pile up the towels that you've used.
But emptying the bins regardless of how full it is and stripping the beds and mopping the floors is too much. That's cleanup crew turn-around stuff.
And yet now hosts can't even ask you to wash your own dishes?! When you can be there a week?!
Still, I guess it makes a change that it's the guests and not the landlords getting more rights 🤷
