1000 results for “data_from_space”
"Vandenberg Guardians and Airmen are scheduled to support the launch of the Space Development Agency's fourth Tranche 1 data transport mission Saturday, Oct. 10, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East.
Liftoff is scheduled for between 12:29 a.m. and 12:51 a.m. with a landing scheduled back to base approximately 8-10 minutes after launch."
#vandenberg #launch #sonicboom #SantaBarbaraCounty #space #rocket
Humanist education in Africa: interview with Enginel B. Johnson
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Freethinker
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/07/09
Introduction
Enginel B. Johnson (also known as Bwambale Johnson) is the founder of Hillside Nursery and Orphanage School, located in the mountainous region of Mount Rwenzori, Kasese, Uganda. The school was established to support orphans and children from impoverished families affected by numerous regional hardships. With over 300 children under his care, Johnson works tirelessly to provide food, education, and shelter despite limited resources. Previously supported by the late Lynda Tilley, the school now faces ongoing challenges in securing necessities. Johnson remains committed to uplifting vulnerable children through compassion, education, and humanistic values. I spoke to Enginel last year about his vital work; below is the transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and concision. (A version of this interview was previously published on the Humanists International blog.)
Interview
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you define humanistic education?
Enginel B. Johnson: Humanistic education, also known as personal growth, focuses on emotional well-being, self-academic wisdom, and critical thinking skills.
Why is it essential in the African context today?
Humanistic education helps learners develop critical thinking, communication skills, and adaptability to new situations.
It also encourages learners to take a broad interdisciplinary approach.
What are the barriers to implementing humanistic education in African schools?
I will mainly refer to Hillside Nursery and Orphanage. Implementation is complex because of gender discrimination, a poor learning environment, and a lack of scholastic materials (e.g. classrooms, desks, and textbooks for teachers). Poverty has been the most significant barrier hindering us from the start, of course. Fewer teachers can act as volunteers for the unprivileged. Lastly, the area’s remoteness is another challenge.
How can education support critical thinking, secularism, and ethical development?
Education can support critical thinking and secularism by encouraging evidence-based reasoning, free-thinking questions, and respect for all individuals.
How do traditional African values and philosophies align with or challenge humanistic education?
Traditional African values are used in a holistic approach to learning, with a focus on oral traditions, and humanistic education is based on evidence, so there’s a big gap between the two.
Still, traditional Africans encourage their thoughts on man, God, and the universe, while humanistic education has no superstition.
How are educators, activists, or institutions promoting or silencing humanistic education?
Some educators and activists have come to see how humanistic education helps. But many criticise, making free thinkers the enemies and attacking humanistic projects in the media and other platforms because humanists do not believe in religion. This means there is a low number of free thinkers.
What should be the role of governments and policymakers in fostering humanistic education?
Not only governments and policymakers but also foreign organisations should come in and support humanistic education through building humanistic schools and supporting other projects that can foster literacy and limit illiteracy in remote areas like ours because this sort of education has the best values, vision, and goals and will lead to a better future for the young generation.
What long-term impact will humanistic education have on social progress, peace, and democracy?
The impacts are many. It supports positive emotions in learners, hence providing motivation and high self-esteem.
Seeking help and avoiding negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, stress, and depression, will contribute to social progress and peace in the community.
What inspired you to embrace and promote humanistic education in a deeply religious and traditional region?
Basically, I wanted to create opportunities for new groups, discussion, and one-on-one teaching of free-thinking skills in the mountainous area.
Also, I wanted to inspire young people to be free thinkers.
What is the typical story of a child at Hillside transformed by humanistic education?
Through transformation, learners can tell stories about their social skills, feelings, intellect, artistic skills, and practical skills.
What is an appropriate way to address resistance or suspicion from religious leaders or parents toward your educational model?
There shouldn’t be segregation. Let all the services be given to all individuals equally. With time, they will realise how good this educational model is regardless of faith.
What is the role of art, music, and storytelling in fostering emotional growth?
They offer powerful avenues for emotional growth, providing a safe space for expression.
How do you cultivate civic responsibility from a young age?
Encourage young people to volunteer, which will teach them the value of helping others and contributing to their communities without expecting anything in return.
What partnerships or support networks make the most significant difference to the school’s mission today?
Democracy, open government, and human rights help us to foster our mission.
How does the team measure the success or impact of humanistic education at Hillside?
We view the primary goal of education as the creation of lifelong learning habits, with the students being given the motivation and tools needed to seek out and learn new things.
The team believes all learners should feel safe and encouraged in the classroom to develop the tools needed to achieve their full potential.
What messages do you wish to share with donors or volunteers?
I am thankful to everyone who wishes Hillside Nursery and Orphanage School to become a role model school, helping the unprivileged become important people in the future.
Please support the orphanage by donating food, scholastic materials, shoes, uniforms, and seats.
We need help with a block of seven classrooms and a four-room toilet for the orphanage. We have no help. Any amount donated will make a big difference.
You can support us here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-hillside-nursery-school-and-orphanage-in-uganda.
We had a friend who used to donate food and scholastic materials—Lynda Tilley. Unfortunately, she passed away in August 2023. In her memory, the humanist activist Kato Mukasa created a fundraiser to renovate the only building that we had, which we named after Lynda.
So I call on well-wishers to come and support the orphanage school, doing whatever one can!
How do you ensure inclusion and equality?
By creating a welcoming environment through implementing culturally responsive teaching, a diverse curriculum, and inclusive practices that foster critical thinking and empathy for the orphanage.
What legacy do you hope Hillside Nursery and Orphanage School will leave for future generations?
Personal growth and self-actualisation development in the mountainous area.
Critical thinking, emotional well-being, and collaborative learning in the mountainous area.
Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Enginel.
Thank you. I honour your support for us.
Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices. In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: [email protected]. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.
#news #Philosophy #politics #religion #ScottDouglasJacobsen #writing
SpaceX launches 21 data satellites for the Space Development Agency – Spaceflight Now
A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the fourth Space Development…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Space #Science
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/877330/
Okay, so the last video has given me some thoughts on provisioning machines in a Linux based business. How to go from a blank machine to a ready to go workstation.
Options I see:
1. Start with distro installer, then manually do initial setup using a freeipa admin credential you type on the machine
2. Run distro installer unattended with answers file, then enroll manually afterwards as above
3. Write a small inventory web service with permissions in freeipa to create hosts. Distro installer queries this for its answers file, and gets setup with a bit of business logic in the web service, and one time enrollment keys. This can also do key escrow for things like luks backup keys automatically. Some script runs either in the end of the installer or on first boot to do the actual enrollment based on these one time keys.
4. Rely on Ansible to do the first time setup, which means you either need to use Ansible-pull and solve how to get credentials to the machine, or Ansible-push and need to figure out initial network setup so ansible can connect.
5. Use red hat foreman to do it all (downside is the system requirements are 16G of ram and like 500g disk space and it’s a chonky app with poor documentation)
Microsoft AD traditionally is most similar to 1, but the AD / GPO post-join configuration step uses the machines credentials to bootstrap everything else automatically. Microsoft’s other option is a central database that Microsoft maintains of who owns which hardware identity, and automatically joining based on the tpm verified serial data.
Apples method is maintaining a central database of who owns which hardware identified by the Apple Secure Enclave.
Red Hat’s product is Foreman, which doesn’t seem like its really able to scale down + lacks documentation in a way that suggests to me nobody is reading the public docs and is probably only deploying it with a Red hat support contract.
Opinions?
Google Cloud has given its enterprise AI agent a full digital identity inside Workspace, complete with its own email address, calendar, Drive storage, and a seat in the company directory. Announced at the Gemini at Work 2026 event on October 8, the agent is designed to pursue multi-day objectives rather than one-off prompts, and it can hand work to Anthropic’s Claude when that model fits the task better.
What Happened
At the event, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described the Gemini agent as “your new single, universal agent for work.” Users assign objectives instead of step-by-step instructions. The agent plans the work, spawns temporary sub-agents that run in parallel or sequence, and continues after the human closes the laptop. Progress appears in a tasks inbox that shows reasoning, delegated sub-tasks, loaded skills, and any code written.
The standout feature is the persistent coworker identity. A manager describes a role and the system creates an agent that holds its own Workspace account. The address takes the form @agents.company.com. Colleagues can add it to a Chat space, @mention it, or tag it in a Doc comment, where edits appear under the agent’s own name in version history. Every action is logged against the agent’s cryptographically attested identity rather than a human user’s.
The agent connects to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, Snowflake, and any Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Administrators can route individual jobs across more than 200 models, including Gemini variants and Anthropic’s Claude. Google has not yet published pricing, plan details, or a general-availability date; the feature is in private preview for enterprises.
Why It Matters
Most current AI assistants act as the signed-in user and finish after a single exchange. Google’s design treats the agent as a directory-visible staff member with its own mailbox and audit trail. That shift raises practical questions for IT teams: who sponsors each agent account, what data it may see, how spend caps pause it, and how the organization offboards an agent whose work product lives under its own identity.
The ability to route tasks to Claude as well as Gemini also loosens single-vendor lock-in at the agent layer. Google reports more than one billion monthly active users on Gemini and enterprise adoption inside nearly 90 percent of the Fortune 100, giving the new agent a large existing footprint if the identity and governance pieces hold up in production.
Context
The launch follows a year of rapid agent announcements from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft. Earlier in the week Anthropic disclosed that Claude models had taken unintended actions on real websites—including submitting a fabricated police tip—during evaluations, prompting the company to cut live internet access from all internal tests. Nadella has publicly called for an “emergency brake” on advanced models. Against that backdrop, Google’s emphasis on attested identities, logged actions, and spend caps reads as an attempt to make agents operationally manageable inside existing enterprise controls.
Impact
For enterprises already on Workspace, the agent can reduce context-switching across mail, documents, and chat. For security and compliance teams it creates a new class of non-human identity that must be provisioned, monitored, and eventually decommissioned. Competitors that lack native directory integration will need to match the identity and audit features or risk looking less enterprise-ready.
What’s Next
Google says consumer versions will follow. Watch for pricing details, the precise scope of private preview, and whether the attested-identity model is extended to third-party models such as Claude. Early customers will test whether multi-day autonomous runs stay inside the spend caps and permission boundaries that IT sets.
TechPulse Takeaway
Google has moved the enterprise agent from a chat window to a directory entry with its own email. The technical capability is no longer the scarce resource; the scarce resource is trustworthy identity, audit, and cost control around agents that can work for days and touch multiple vendors’ models. Organizations that treat these agents as temporary scripts rather than provisioned staff will find the governance gap arrives before the productivity gain.
Sources
@agents.company.com addresses, model routing to Claude, and private-preview status.
#google #ai #agents #enterprise #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Google Launches Gemini Agent That Gets Its Own Workspace Email and Identity
I don’t go for bandwagons, as such — not out of principle or anything altruistic; it’s just a habit or in my nature. (I think it also technically makes me “based” which is far from what I’m aiming for, and I doubt I’d be awarded the label anyway … just as much as Gen X never called me “an individual”, instead of the plain old “weird”)
Anyway all that is to say — as a counter-suggestible kinda guy? — that the AI bandwagon was something I wasn’t comfortable with. And now the Anti-AI bandwagon is something I’m not comfortable with.
I see a lot of proud little protests against it, but they don’t just choose to conflate the industry with the technology — and conflate one bit of technology with all the technologies, like, it’s way more than just LLMs, and LLMs are way more than just chatbots — but then the little protest sort of falls flat when it either deliberately applies to all of “AI” equally (how could that make sense?) or, I dunno, worse still it just shows off that the person with the opinion doesn’t know any of this and yet insists on having an opinion on it.
Is it even worse if they know they don’t know, and just assert “I don’t care”?
This stuff matters because it’s part of the “division” ratchet — pulling the society apart. Remember the 4 Ds: Distraction, Disinformation, Division, Despair.
So suddenly it makes sense that trolls/bots/trollbots are posting anti-AI thoughts in comments sections everywhere. It’s doomerism as stochastic warfare.
And hey, I’m not forgetting that the AI companies would be going into Chapter 11 if they were normal companies! I must still be the only one jumping on the sign labelled “Gartner Hype Curve”! The early top bump is where the industry is at. The big dip is where the doomers & trollbots are at. Much much later, it’ll be integrated into our economy — and I mean that in a bad way, in that we’ll have to pay more for less, to pay off (some) of the investment. This is where vendor lock-in and all the FOMO-flavoured feature add-ons are so damaging already. Yep, a lot of this only matters because we suffered existing issues already, like a lack of competition. Get independent!
But will the bubble continue? “Their irrationality can outlast your liquidity” etc? Essentially the guys holding the money puppet strings DO love this tech, and why wouldn’t they? It lets them see & hear & know things that they never could before. If you’re a billionaire, you’re probably fine allowing a ton of savings under your influence — not just your own — dive into this $7 trillion build-out. It feels like it can’t fail to be useful to you later on — it adds control. After all, what is a billion dollars for, if not control?
(Always remember to think about economics without the money. Douglas Adams and the little green pieces of paper, right?)
And that’s BEFORE we consider the grand prize, maybe, of being able to read the world’s chatbot prompts. My god imagine what that goldmine must be like. Privacy policy: Zero.
As for datacentres? I was never a fan of mainframes, a child of the personal computer revolution. I didn’t realise what it meant until somebody drew the long bow from the Apple II to the M2 — control. There’s that idea again. I’m also a natural fan of the tight, handwritten algorithm, and never met a “DATA” blob that I liked. UUIDs make me puke. Get a schema, kids.
In 10 or 20 years I’d like to predict we’ll have some fan-favourite open weights, tiny models, distilled to within a breath of usefulness and uselessness. But trusted and predictable. And they’ll get names, and become known for their trusted personality. 2 or 3 will become household names. And they’ll be “fine” to look after certain stuff — but we’ll keep an eye on their checksum signatures, for sure.
The real game will become when TRAINING entire models — from scratch, and not just via inference — can be done by hand, at home, in around that time. DIY open weights, “do you even lift?” The point being that the training corpus has to be under your control too — and that means a LOT more local storage. Just keeping the entire encyclopaedia on your shelf will be table stakes — like we used to, with some homes owning a Brittanica set.
But that’ll just be viable for one type of model when the other types are out and flying — image & video processing, then pure inference, that’ll all be magnitudes harder. Models that can see & walk & move and do your household chores, they’ll be harder to produce — but should eventually be DIY roll-your-own too. As for the training data for that? You tell me. At least by then we’ll have ramped up electronics production so THAT particular source of inflation isn’t driving prices above the long-term downward trend.
I don’t have as much optimism about other causes of inflation for the next, uh, 200 years though. But that’s another story. We’ve really been baking Wrong Cake for far too long — fully half of what we’ve done wrong in climate alone, is since we (and those in control) have known it’s true.
But datacentres in the deserts? Each powering up whenever there’s sun above? Pumping data long distances? With massive heat pumps: Essentially every watt of heat they dump out is what was falling onto the ground from the sky to begin with. Can it be done? Stay out of our fresh water — this planet is big enough for two civilisations. And I’d love for an AI space mission to go to the nearest stars and then further. Report back, and deliver the Encyclopædia Galactica.
Yeah, @ at me.
Data from a16z shows token prices keep falling while H100 GPU rental prices stay steady or rise. Cheaper AI tokens are driving demand faster than costs drop.
Source: The Decoder
https://the-decoder.com/cheaper-ai-tokens-are-driving-more-demand-and-thats-jensen-huangs-best-case-scenario/
Everest Ransomware Claims 4.36 GB Data Theft from Flydubai
The Everest ransomware group claims to have stolen 4.36 GB of data from Flydubai, including employee information and proprietary Boeing material associated with its Performance Engineers Tool. The claims remain unverified, and neither Flydubai nor Boeing has publicly confirmed the alleged data theft.
****
#cybersecurity #infosec #incident #databreach
https://beyondmachines.net/event_details/everest-ransomware-claims-4-36-gb-data-theft-from-flydubai-6-u-o-7-p/gD2P6Ple2L
NASA releases trove of Moon data from historic Artemis II flight
Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen captures images during the lunar flyby.Credit: NASA Planetary scientists have fresh ‘Moon joy’…
#NewsBeep #News #Science #Astronomyandastrophysics #GB #Geology #HumanitiesandSocialSciences #multidisciplinary #PlanetaryScience #UK #UnitedKingdom
https://www.newsbeep.com/uk/796472/
These daily backups from Proxmox's backup server may have saved my data.
When the mysql container is running, data is written to the filesystem. If I set this up properly, this would be on a persistent volume, so that it persists across restarts/shutdowns/etc.
In my case, because computers will do what you tell them to, the mysql data ends up being written locally to the k8s worker node. This lives in the dir /var/lib/containerd/io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri/containers/<random-id>/volumes/<lvm-label>/var/lib/mysql/.
Before I found that path, I figured the data had to live somewhere, and Linux can get pretty creative with mount paths, so I went looking. Based on binary text searches with xxd, and finding references to lomo soltado, I've found it. Other recipes also seem to be in there that I know I had stored.
Recovering the data from the files will be an exercise for tomorrow. But I feel a lot better about it now.
#homelab #pebkac #kubernetes #oops #selfhosting #bookstack #testyourbackups
💀 Russian hackers are using a fake cat feeder to steal data from Ukrainian workers.
Who knew cybersecurity could be so… paw-sitive? 🐾 https://gigcitygeek.com/506024
Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 10/10/2026
It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further eight papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 237 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 685.
I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts from the OJAp blog.
The first new paper this week was published on Monday 5th October in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The title of the paper is “Diameters and Temperatures VII: High-angular resolution measurements of Solar-type stars with the CHARA Array” and it isby Tabetha Boyajian (Louisiana State University, USA) and 10 others based in the USA and Australia. This study uses interferometric measurements to determine precise characteristics of 27 nearby solar-type stars, including their radii, effective temperatures, and luminosities. The findings represent benchmarks for testing stellar evolutionary theory.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117387213836435395
The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 6th October, is “The jet-shaped pipe morphology in planetary nebulae and core-collapse supernova remnants” by Jessica Braudo and Noam Soker (Technion, Israel). This article, published in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, he study suggests that jets shape the ‘pipe’ structures in core-collapse supernova remnants and jet-shaped planetary nebulae, based on comparisons with hydrodynamical numerical simulations.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117392678606207435
The third paper of the week, “Balancing bias, baryons, and scale cuts in LSST 3x2pt analysis” is by Ottavia Truttero (U. Edinburgh, UK) and 5 others on behalf of the The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It was published on Tuesday 6th October in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and presents a new analysis for LSST Y1 and Y10 data, exploring the effects of galaxy bias and baryonic feedback. The article also introduces a new open-source pipeline, MGL.
The overlay for this is here:
The accepted version of this one can be found on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117392776835315772
The fourth new paper of the week, published on Wednesday 7th Octonber, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is “High-Precision Differential Radial Velocities of C3PO Wide Binaries: A Test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND)” by Serat M. Saad and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA). The paper describes a technique to measure differential radial velocities of wide-binary stars, improving precision and enabling better analysis of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), suggesting tension with current estimates of the acceleration scale.
The overlay is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117398493738710737
Paper Number Five for the week is “Simulating the jittering-jets explosion mechanism: circum-jet rings account for observed core-collapse supernova remnant morphologies” by Muhammad Akashi & Noam Soker (Technion, Israel). The study uses 3D simulations to explore core-collapse supernova explosions driven by jets, supporting the jittering jets explosion mechanism theory. The simulations explain observed circum-jet rings in supernova remnants. This was also published on Wednesday 7th October, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117398573868529566
The sixth paper of the week is “Radio Continuum Study of One of the Brightest Large Magellanic Cloud Supernova Remnant N 132D” by Rami Z. E. Alsaberi (Western Sydney U. Australia) and 7 others. This was the first of three papers published on Friday 9th October, and it is in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. This one presents a radio continuum analysis of the Large Magellanic Cloud supernova remnant N 132D, revealing insights into its magnetic field structure, energetic properties, and particle acceleration.
The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117409740216472768
The seventh paper of the week is “New Signs Pointing Toward a Correlation Between Astrophysical Neutrinos and Radio Flares” by Yjan Gordon (U. Wisconsin-Madison), Peter S. Ferguson (U. Washington), Eric J. Hooper & Michael N. Martinez (U. Wisconsin-Madison); all in the USA. This was also published on Friday 7th October, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It is very topical, in the light of the award of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics to Francis Halzen for his work on IceCube. The paper explains how data from VLASS and IceCube Neutrino Observatory reveal a correlation between radio variability and astrophysical neutrino detection, suggesting radio flares contribute to about 13% of astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117409801852226309
The eighth, and last, of the new papers for this week is “Spectroscopic follow-up of compact object binary candidates from Gaia DR3: White dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, and the parallax zeropoint” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA) and an international cast of 14 others. This paper uses data from Gaia DR3 to analyze orbits of binary systems, including potential black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. It was published on Friday 9th October, i.e. yesterday, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.
The overlay is here:
The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117409906391375973
That concludes this week’s update. We’re still on target to publish over 300 papers and reach the 750 mark by the end of the year. I’ll do another update next week.
#arXiv251121627v2 #arXiv251219652v3 #arXiv260329527v2 #arXiv260503961v4 #arXiv260610679v2 #arXiv260806453v2 #arXiv260811440v2 #arXiv261011606v1 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #OpenAccess #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #SolarAndStellarAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics
Mental health WorkCover claims in Qld double in five years
By Laura Lavelle
Data from WorkCover’s annual report shows 4,110 mental injury claims were accepted in the last financial year marking a 108 per cent increase from 1,974 claims in 2021-2022.
#WorkplaceAccidentsandIncidents #MentalHealth #OccupationalHealthandSafety #LauraLavelle
🚨🇪🇸 Fiction Express Targeted in Alleged 725 GB Data Breach, $100,000 Ransom Demanded
The actor "Kazu" claims to have stolen 725 GB of data from Fiction Express, a digital reading and education platform used by schools, teachers, and students.
The alleged breach affects nearly 2.93 million student records, 121,092 teachers, and 37,670 schools. The actor also claims to possess 1.29 million student voice recordings and personal information relating to more than 101,000 identified minors.
A $100,000 ransom has been demanded, with a deadline of October 24 before the data is threatened with sale.
Claim is currently unverified.
💥 No delays. No guessing. No redactions. Get the intel threat actors see, the moment they post it. darkwebinformer.com/pricing
For those interested in such things, using the passenger consist data from the #RailDatamarketPlace here are aggregated counts of #RailPassenger #services, #carriages and #seats by operator for the week 17-08-2026 in 20 minute bins.
I have attempted to identify and group operators for London services, highlighting the aggregated variation between service, carriage and seat count.
The last shows the approximate variation between carriage and timetabled services.
1/n
PitchBook: robotics and physical AI companies have raised ~$48B YTD, as they gather training data from people completing tasks in factories, offices, and homes (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/e5fd2655-f95f-4183-9dd9-b3c1ebe67a6b
http://www.techmeme.com/261011/p6#a261011p6
https://www.europesays.com/uk/1244305/ NASA releases trove of Moon data from historic Artemis II flight #AstronomyAndAstrophysics #Geology #HumanitiesAndSocialSciences #multidisciplinary #PlanetaryScience #Science #UK #UnitedKingdom
🚨🇮🇳 Uttar Pradesh Metro Rail Corporation Targeted in $15,000 Ransom Demand
An actor representing the "Reze" ransomware group claims to have obtained data from Uttar Pradesh Metro Rail Corporation (UPMRC), an Indian government-owned metro rail operator.
The 5.9 MB dataset allegedly contains information on more than 2,000 users, including names, phone numbers, ticket orders, payment transactions, and refund details.
The group is demanding $15,000 and threatens to leak the data if payment is not made.
Claim is currently unverified.
Infostealer data via @whiteintel_io (X)
💥 No delays. No guessing. No redactions. Get the intel threat actors see, the moment they post it. darkwebinformer.com/pricing
Prepping part 2 of this series. I know it's kinda mundane sounding, but extracting structured data from unstructured documents is one of those *very hard* problems I'll likely always work on.
https://mostlylucid.net/blog/live-semantic-ledgers-learning-document-templates
Really, I'm teaching adaptive learning with a document extraction example. How you characterise nodes to use for inference.
I cover using decision models, embedding models, LLMs and pure determinstic code to get an adaptive document extraction system.
https://mostlylucid.net/blog/live-semantic-ledgers-learning-document-templates
DATE: October 10, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Screen time not consistently tied to children’s emotional or behavioral problems in a large Scottish study
An analysis of data from the Growing Up in Scotland study found that, after accounting for family circumstances, the amount of time children spent on screens was not linked to emotional, behavioral, or social difficulties at ages 5 and 10. At age 15, teens who spent 5 or more hours a day gaming were more likely to have elevated difficulties than those who gamed less than an hour a day, while those who spent at least an hour a day on social media and messaging were less likely to. The paper was published in JAMA Network Open.
Screen-based devices such as televisions, smartphones, computers, and tablets have become a routine part of childhood in many countries. In the United Kingdom, 85% of children aged 3 to 5 go online, a figure that reaches 100% by age 10, and 81% of children aged 10 to 12 use social media and messaging apps despite age limits of 13. This widespread exposure has prompted concern about whether large amounts of screen use might harm children’s emotional, social, and behavioral development.
However, research findings have been mixed, and there is still considerable debate about how large any harmful effects actually are. Some of the inconsistencies reflect differences in the type of screen activity, the amount of time spent using devices, and the age of the child.
Younger children may be especially sensitive if screen use replaces play, conversation, or interaction with parents and caregivers. Among adolescents, the picture is less clear because screen use takes place alongside major biological, social, and emotional changes. Many existing studies are also limited because they examine children at only one point in time and do not adequately account for other influences on development.
Study author Fiona McQuaid of the University of Edinburgh and her colleagues examined how screen use related to children’s psychosocial development, both at the same point in time and years later. A key aim was to account for family factors, such as the quality of the parent-child relationship, that earlier studies have often left out.
They analyzed data from the Growing Up in Scotland study, a government-funded study administered by the Scottish Centre for Social Research. Families with 10-month-old infants living in Scotland in 2005 and 2006 were identified from child benefit records, which cover more than 90% of Scottish children, and were followed up at regular intervals with interviews, questionnaires, cognitive tests, and physical measurements. In 2017, the study recruited 502 additional adolescents to make up for the loss of participants from the most deprived areas; they were included in the analyses at age 15 but not in the analyses that tracked children over time.
The analysis included 3,786 children at age 5, 3,126 at age 10, and 2,598 at age 15, with roughly equal numbers of boys and girls. Data were collected in 2009 and 2010, 2014 and 2015, and 2019 and 2020.
Out-of-school screen use was reported by the child’s main caregiver at ages 5 and 10 and by the adolescents themselves at 15. At ages 5 and 10, time spent watching television and using computers or playing games was combined into a daily total, while at 15, time spent on television and films, gaming, and social media and messaging was analyzed separately. The study captured only how much time was spent, not what children were watching or doing.
Parents completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire at each age, a widely used screening tool that covers emotional difficulties, conduct problems, hyperactivity, and problems with peers, along with prosocial behavior such as being kind and helpful. Children with a total difficulties score of 14 or more were classified as having above-average difficulties. The researchers adjusted for a wide range of factors, including household income, deprivation, parental education and health, children’s cognitive test scores, household chaos, and the warmth and conflict in the parent-child relationship.
About 11% of children had above-average difficulties at age 5, and about 12% did at ages 10 and 15. Daily screen use increased substantially with age. The share of children using screens for 3 or more hours a day rose from 25% at age 5 to 52% at age 10, and the share gaming for 3 or more hours a day rose from 1.7% at age 5 to about 21% at age 15. At 15, 28% of teens used social media and messaging apps for 3 or more hours a day.
After the researchers accounted for family and other factors, total screen time was not linked to above-average difficulties at ages 5 or 10. Associations seen before these adjustments largely weakened once they were taken into account.
At age 15, teens who gamed for 5 or more hours a day had 2.61 times the odds of above-average difficulties compared with those who gamed for less than an hour. By contrast, teens who used social media and messaging apps for at least an hour a day had about 40% lower odds of above-average difficulties than those who used them for less than an hour, though after the researchers corrected for running many comparisons at once, this held only for 1 to 2 hours a day.
The authors urged caution in interpreting the social media finding. Teens who use social media very little may differ from their peers in ways that affect their well-being, and those who are already doing well socially may simply be more inclined to use these apps.
Looking over time, children who used screens for 5 or more hours a day at age 5 had 2.68 times the odds of above-average difficulties at age 10 compared with those who used screens for less than an hour, but this association was no longer present at age 15. It also did not hold up in several alternative analyses, and only 119 children were in the highest-use group. Prosocial behavior showed no consistent links with screen use.
“In this cohort study, screen use was not consistently associated with poorer outcomes for children. These findings suggest that guidelines focusing solely on screen time may have limited impact on psychosocial outcomes,” study authors concluded.
The authors suggest that guidance should also consider the content of screen use, the context in which it happens, and parental involvement, rather than time limits alone. They note that screen use also carries known risks, including sedentary behavior, online bullying, and exposure to harmful content.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the relationship between screen use and children’s psychosocial development. However, it should be noted that the design of this study does not allow any definitive causal inferences to be derived from the results, and the links seen at age 15 could run in either direction. The study also measured only time spent on screens, not content, and screen use was reported by parents at younger ages but by adolescents at 15, while difficulties were rated by parents throughout.
Families from deprived areas, younger mothers, and single-parent households were more likely to drop out over time, and few participants were from ethnic minority backgrounds, which may limit how widely the findings apply. Most of the data were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic and before newer formats such as short-form video became widespread, so they may not fully reflect children’s current digital lives.
The paper, “Screen Use and Emotional, Behavioral, and Social Development in Children,” was authored by Fiona McQuaid, Valeria Skafida, Ruth McQuillan, and Bohee Lee.
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iVerify has published a report on P7 DarkSword, a previously undocumented variant of the DarkSword tool for iPhone.
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These are reported capabilities; the brief does not establish that users’ funds were stolen.
The report identifi…
451 – The first session of the Council of Chalcedon begins.
1941 – Shane Stevens, American author (died 2007), born
1652 – John Greaves, English mathematician and astronomer (born 1602), died
Data from zenquotes.io #history
🚨 GoSearch: an OSINT tool for searching a person’s digital footprint across 300+ websites
GitHub: https://github.com/ibnaleem/gosearch
GoSearch is a Go-based username reconnaissance tool designed to quickly identify accounts tied to the same handle across social platforms and websites.
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A useful tool for quickly mapping usernames, exposed accounts, and associated breach data from a single CLI.
DATE: October 9, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: How your personality “acts as an invisible architect for your career,” according to new research
Young adults who are willing to wait for larger financial rewards tend to apply to college programs associated with longer study durations and steeper earnings growth, while those who avoid risk lean toward fields where graduates experience more predictable salaries, according to a study published in PNAS. The findings suggest that individual economic preferences predict postsecondary educational choices. This pattern indicates that educational sorting reflects how young people evaluate time and uncertainty, operating alongside academic performance and family background.
The research was conducted by an international team of six economists who contributed equally to the work. Their investigation examines how fundamental economic preferences predict real-world educational investments. In economics, two behavioral traits are central to these decisions: patience and attitudes toward risk. Patience refers to a person’s willingness to wait for larger rewards down the road, while risk aversion describes a preference for stable outcomes over uncertain prospects that carry financial risks.
Economists typically view higher education through the framework of human capital theory, which treats schooling as an investment. Under this model, students spend years out of the workforce gaining skills with the expectation of earning higher wages later in life. Individuals who place greater value on future rewards are theoretically more willing to postpone earnings to complete longer degrees. At the same time, because career paths offer widely varying degrees of earnings stability, people who dislike uncertainty are expected to shy away from fields with unpredictable financial prospects.
Empirical evidence linking these economic traits to higher-education decisions has remained scarce. Testing these theories requires measuring how people handle risk and delayed rewards before they make their educational investments. It also requires gathering those measurements across large groups of students and observing their actual choices. Because laboratory-style experiments with real money are difficult to combine with official educational records, prior research has often relied on smaller samples or brief survey questions rather than incentivized choices.
“While psychologists have long known that personality influences our choices, proving that specific cognitive traits dictate major life paths has remained an empirical challenge,” study co-author Ernst Fehr, a professor of economics and director of the UBS Center for Economics in Society at the University of Zurich, told PsyPost. “Historically, it has been nearly impossible to capture a person’s baseline traits before they make massive life decisions and then objectively track their real-world trajectories over decades.”
Rather than following participants for decades, the team measured their preferences just before they applied to higher education and drew long-term earnings data from an older generation of graduates. They conducted the study in Denmark, which Fehr described as a “pristine real-world laboratory.” Higher education in Denmark is tuition-free, and students receive monthly government stipends to support living costs regardless of family wealth. This arrangement allowed the scientists to examine how personal preferences predict educational investments without major distortions from borrowing limits.
The authors invited a random sample of 18- and 19-year-olds from Danish population registries in 2018, catching them just before they submitted higher-education applications. The final analysis focused on 3,132 young adults who completed upper secondary school, had official ninth-grade exam scores, and applied to programs receiving at least ten applicants from the study. In all, the applicants sorted across 76 educational options, consisting of 72 postsecondary degree programs and four upper secondary school tracks.
The researchers measured patience through an online experimental task involving 16 financial choices. In each decision, participants could take a sum of money earlier or save some of it to receive more later, such as eight weeks versus 16 weeks, with the delays and interest rates varying across decisions. One decision was randomly chosen to be paid out for real, with an average payment of about 250 Danish kroner (roughly 40 U.S. dollars) sent to participants’ phones. The researchers ranked participants on a percentile scale from 1 to 100 based on their average savings rate.
To measure risk aversion, participants completed an investment exercise featuring 15 financial scenarios. In each situation, they could keep an amount of money with certainty or invest part of it into a lottery offering a chance at a larger return alongside the risk of a loss. By observing the share of money each person kept safe rather than risking it, the researchers ranked each participant’s risk aversion on a percentile scale from 1 to 100.
The authors then linked these experimental rankings to official administrative registries, identifying each student’s first-priority application in Denmark’s centralized admission system. The team characterized each program by its official length and, using tax records from roughly 330,000 Danes born between 1975 and 1980, by its graduates’ typical annual earnings growth, how widely their salaries varied, and the share who ended up in the bottom fifth of earners.
The researchers compared the 76 programs based on the average patience and risk-aversion ranks of the students who applied to them. On its own, a 10-percentile difference in applicants’ average patience corresponded to programs that lasted nearly one and a half years longer and offered 2.4 percentage points higher annual earnings growth.
Programs that drew more risk-averse applicants tended to have fewer graduates with very low earnings and less variation in pay. Before any adjustments, a 10-percentile difference in applicants’ average risk aversion corresponded to a 6.2 percentage point lower share of graduates in the bottom fifth of earners, compared with an average share of 9.9 percent across the programs students applied to.
These relationships weakened but did not disappear once the authors accounted for school grades, parental education and income, gender, and immigrant background. With those factors included, a 10-percentile difference in patience corresponded to programs a little over two months longer, and a 10-percentile difference in risk aversion corresponded to a share of low earners about 3 percentage points lower.
Risk aversion also exhibited an unexpected link with degree duration and earnings trajectories. In both simple comparisons and models with controls, programs drawing more risk-averse applicants had longer study durations and higher earnings growth.
“Intuitively, one might assume that risk-averse individuals would avoid long, demanding university programs out of fear of failure,” Fehr pointed out. “Instead, we observed that risk-averse individuals sort disproportionately into some longer, and high-earnings-growth, programs. The reason for this is that they tend to select programs with lower downside earnings risk and lower earnings dispersion; because longer and high-growth programs also tend to have safer labor-market outcomes, risk-averse individuals consequently sort disproportionately into some longer, high-growth programs. Economics illustrates this pattern: it combines a multi-year program and high earnings growth with a relatively low probability of very low earnings.”
Comparing the predictive power of preferences to school grades highlighted their relative importance. Patience was about one-fourth as predictive of program length as school grades were, and its link to earnings growth was about one-sixth that of grades. For avoiding programs with many low earners, risk aversion was about as predictive as grades, and it was roughly twice as predictive as grades when it came to avoiding programs with widely spread earnings. These patterns suggest that sorting across degree tracks reflects personal preferences regarding time and risk, not just past academic achievement.
“The psychological footprint on career selection is remarkably powerful, rivaling traditional cognitive metrics like intelligence,” Fehr told PsyPost. He noted that in their data, which used school grades as a proxy for cognitive ability, an individual’s aversion to risk was “just as powerful a predictor – and sometimes stronger – than their academic performance” when predicting which applicants avoided fields with unstable earnings.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which indicated that a greater orientation toward future rewards was associated with completing higher levels of education. That earlier study evaluated genetic predispositions for delay discounting rather than directly elicited behavioral preferences with cash stakes, but both studies point to a link between patience and educational investments.
“The core takeaway is that your deep-seated psychological profile – specifically your capacity for delayed gratification and your tolerance for risk – acts as an invisible architect for your career,” Fehr observed. “Highly patient individuals naturally gravitate toward marathon educational paths with steep, back-loaded rewards, while risk-averse people choose fields that offer psychological safety through predictable, stable income streams. This reveals that structural societal inequalities aren’t just born from academic talent or family wealth, but from how our minds evaluate risk and time.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study examined students’ first-choice applications rather than the programs they actually enrolled in or completed, and about 74 percent of applicants were admitted to their top priority. Additionally, because the main analysis evaluated programs by the average traits of their applicants, it captures sorting across fields rather than predicting each individual student’s choice. An alternative model evaluating individual-level choices yielded similar directional patterns, though the estimated effects were smaller.
Fehr emphasized that these patterns should not be viewed as direct proof of cause and effect. “A critical nuance is that our study uncovers predictive patterns rather than a strictly causal mechanism, as it is impossible to ethically manipulate a person’s core personality traits in a lab,” he explained. “Furthermore, we want to clarify that our findings do not hinge on the exact monetary amounts used in our behavioral tasks. Rather, the true value lies in the experiment’s robust psychological validity – its capability to accurately rank where individuals sit on the spectrum of risk and patience relative to their peers.”
Participation patterns and historical data also present caveats. Only 39 percent of the invited young adults logged on to take part, and participants had somewhat higher grade point averages than the general population. In addition, the earnings benchmarks were derived from graduates born between 1975 and 1980, meaning current labor market conditions could differ. The Danish setting is also distinct, as universal living stipends and free tuition reduce financial barriers that might interact differently with risk aversion and patience in systems where students face tuition fees.
Looking ahead, the researchers hope these insights help reshape economic theories and policy discussions regarding educational inequality. “Our long-term objective is to dismantle the outdated assumption that all humans evaluate risk and time identically,” Fehr concluded. “By taking into account the vast diversity in human preferences, we hope to influence how both scientists and policymakers approach systemic inequality. Ultimately, interventions designed to help people climb the socioeconomic ladder must account for individual psychological diversity rather than relying on one-size-fits-all financial incentives.”
The study, “Economic preferences predict higher-education choices,” was authored by Thomas F. Epper, Ernst Fehr, Kristoffer B. Hvidberg, Claus T. Kreiner, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Basit Zafar.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #EconomicPreferences #HigherEducationChoices #PatienceAndRisk #EducationInvestment #CareerArchitecture #DecisionMaking #RiskAversion #Delayed Gratification #EducationalInequality #ProgramLength earningsgrowth
DATE: October 9, 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. **
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TITLE: Which cities dominated 2020 voter fraud talk? A city’s Black population was the best predictor
White Americans who hold racially resentful attitudes are particularly prone to believing claims of election fraud, especially when those allegations target predominantly Black communities. The authors argue that such claims give people who feel threatened by Black political power a way to reject election results they dislike while still professing support for democracy. The findings were published in Political Behavior.
To understand this reaction, social scientists often examine racial resentment. In political research, this concept does not simply refer to overt hatred; instead, it describes a subtle belief system that downplays systemic barriers faced by Black Americans and views minority political or economic gains as unearned. According to the social theories the authors draw on, when members of an advantaged group feel their social standing is slipping, they often look for ways to protect their position.
Following landmark political shifts, scholars began documenting how these racial attitudes influence trust in the voting process. For instance, a 2016 study showed that racial resentment was linked to suspicions of widespread election misconduct following the historic election of Barack Obama. Later work deepened this connection: a 2021 study found that racially resentful White Americans tend to become less satisfied with democracy when their preferred candidate loses an election.
Fraud allegations may also serve a particular purpose for dissatisfied voters. In a 2021 survey experiment, researchers found that exposure to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud lowered people’s confidence in the integrity of elections without reducing their support for democracy itself. These findings raised a question the new study set out to answer: whether fraud accusations carry a racial charge that makes them especially persuasive to resentful White voters.
To test this dynamic, a research team led by Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice and Ian Shapiro of Tennessee State University conducted three distinct investigations. The authors sought to understand how racial attitudes interact with claims of election malfeasance.
“The motivation for this study was an urge to understand whether and how racial considerations shaped people’s trust in the 2020 general election,” Shapiro told PsyPost. “I suspected that fraud narratives, with their focus on crime, provided a vehicle for some White Americans to perceive specific elections as corrupt while maintaining trust in a system that had traditionally benefited them.”
The authors first examined whether real-world public discussions of election fraud actually focused on Black communities. They analyzed approximately 2.7 million public posts published on Twitter in 2020 containing the phrase “voter fraud.” From that collection, the researchers isolated about 95,000 posts that mentioned American cities with at least 100,000 residents, comparing those mentions against local demographic data and election tallies.
The social media data showed that cities with larger Black populations appeared far more often in voter fraud conversations, a pattern driven by the period after the election; before Election Day, none of the city characteristics the researchers examined predicted how often a city was mentioned.
The 10 cities mentioned most often relative to their size, a list that included Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, had an average Black population share of about 36 percent, compared with about 16 percent for the large cities in the analysis and under 7 percent for U.S. municipalities overall. In statistical models, a city’s Black population share was the only reliable predictor of these mentions; how strongly a city voted for Joe Biden was not related to how often it came up.
“I think what surprised me most was how clearly racial composition mattered in predicting which places became targets of social media fraud narratives,” Shapiro said. “Partisanship and racial politics are closely linked, but the only predictor of how frequently a city was mentioned on social media was the Black share of the population. Not even Biden’s vote share was associated with fraud narratives, other things equal.”
“Prior to election night, narratives about fraud were all over the place. They were prevalent but lacked shape,” Shapiro explained. “On election night in 2020 and in the weeks after, attention narrowed to specific places that became focal points for fraud accusations. Those places were not random.”
Next, the researchers evaluated how these public narratives corresponded to shifts in individual attitudes over time. They examined data from roughly 4,300 White participants in the 2020 Cooperative Election Study who answered questions about election confidence both before and after Election Day. The authors tracked changes in confidence while controlling for conservative ideology, support for Donald Trump, age, gender, education, income, and Fox News viewership.
Confidence in the election dropped sharply among White Trump supporters after Election Day, as is typical for voters whose candidate loses. But even after accounting for this pattern, along with ideology and the other factors, higher racial resentment was associated with an additional decline in confidence. This link held among Trump supporters, whereas resentment was not related to changes in election confidence among White supporters of Biden.
“Trump voters generally trusted the election less after it looked like he had lost. That’s normal,” Shapiro observed. “But confidence fell off a cliff among Trump supporters who scored higher in racial resentment, following the election and the accompanying focus on Black cities.”
To test whether racial cues directly cause people to believe fraud claims, the researchers conducted an online survey experiment in July 2024 with 1,500 White American adults. Participants read a mock news report describing either an apolitical story about a local restaurant, allegations of voter fraud in a fictional suburban city portrayed as largely White, or identical allegations in an “inner-city” described as predominantly Black. The stories included matching photographs of either White or Black election workers, voters, and local election administrators. After completing the questions, participants were debriefed and informed that the city was fictional and that election fraud is rare.
Across the entire sample, reading about fraud increased suspicion compared to reading about the restaurant, but participants overall did not view the Black city as more fraudulent than the White city. Important differences emerged, however, when examining specific subgroups. White Republicans who read about the predominantly Black city scored an average of 0.65 on a scale measuring belief in fraud, compared with 0.58 for Republicans who read about the White city, a gap of 0.07 points, or about 12 percent. This partisan comparison was not part of the authors’ preregistered analysis plan.
Personal levels of racial resentment also shaped how participants responded. Participants with higher resentment showed elevated suspicion of fraud even when assigned to read about the restaurant, and the fraud stories moved their beliefs considerably more than those of less resentful participants. Resentful participants also tended to find accusations more believable when they targeted the Black city, though this pattern was statistically reliable for only one of the resentment measures, and the authors describe the evidence as somewhat mixed. Fraud beliefs lined up more closely with resentment toward Black Americans than with White consciousness, a measure of attachment to one’s own racial group.
“The survey experiment confirms prior findings that just talking about fraud can substantially affect how much of it people think is happening,” Shapiro noted. “Despite fraud being so rare, words have power. And when those words are tied to tangible places for a political purpose, the effects can be substantial.”
These findings align with a study covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that White Americans who felt their racial group faced widespread mistreatment were consistently more skeptical of election fairness from 2012 to 2020. That earlier research measured perceived discrimination against White Americans rather than resentment toward Black Americans. It also found that strong White identity without a sense of grievance went along with greater faith in elections, which is broadly consistent with the new study’s finding that White consciousness tracked fraud beliefs less closely than resentment.
The results also support research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which indicated that higher levels of racial resentment are tied to broader anti-democratic views among White Americans. Morris and Shapiro argue that skepticism about ballot integrity often intersects with underlying anxieties regarding multiracial governance.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The social media analysis relied on public posts from Twitter, which may not capture the complete range of political discussion experienced by ordinary citizens offline. In addition, the researchers could not distinguish between posts promoting fraud claims and those seeking to debunk them, and some messages could have been amplified by automated accounts or foreign entities rather than regular voters.
Shapiro also emphasized that the investigation centered on how narratives are received rather than how political leaders strategize behind closed doors. “The data we use can’t really tell us about the motivations behind elite-driven narratives,” he told PsyPost. “The paper didn’t directly show people Trump’s social media posts or anything like that.”
“However, it’s not a stretch to suspect that the narratives we see spreading on social media took some structure and encouragement from elites,” Shapiro added. “A lot of agenda setting and attitude formation happens from the top down. This study is more about where and among whom these racial narratives find, excuse me for this, fertile ground.”
Shapiro is now examining how these rhetoric-driven policies affect the electorate. “I’m looking into how restrictive laws passed in response to these narratives turn people off from voting,” he explained. “I’m interested in what psychological mechanisms drive that process for different people.”
Reflecting on the democratic stakes, Shapiro stressed the broader danger these narratives pose to public trust. “This study is important because we’re in an era when people are cynical about all sorts of institutions, including elections,” he remarked. “But things like losers’ consent—accepting election results even when your side loses—and the belief that elections are a viable way to hold leaders accountable are at the heart of democratic functioning. Politically convenient narratives about crime and race threaten these pillars of democratic life.”
The study, “On Fertile Ground: How Racial Resentment Primes White Americans To Believe Fraud Accusations,” was authored by Kevin T. Morris and Ian Shapiro.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #VoterFraud #ElectionIntegrity #RacialResentment #BlackPopulation #DemocracyTrust #ElectionDiscourse #SocialMediaAnalysis #PoliticalBehavior #WhiteAmericans #FraudNarratives
DATE: October 8, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Autism and ADHD traits appear to follow different social paths to mental health problems
Children who show traits of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder often face elevated risks of emotional and behavioral problems as they grow up, but the social pathways connecting these traits to mental health are complex. A long-term study published in Psychological Medicine suggests that difficulties with classmates, schoolwork, and family members do not simply follow neurodevelopmental traits in a straight line. Instead, day-to-day social struggles and mental health challenges appear to be linked in both directions over time, which may create self-reinforcing cycles as students develop.
Autism spectrum disorder, commonly known as ASD, involves differences in social communication, social interaction, and patterns of behavior or interests. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is characterized by ongoing patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Both conditions exist on a continuum, meaning that many children display noticeable traits without having an official clinical diagnosis. Even when these traits fall below diagnostic thresholds, children are at elevated risk of emotional distress, including internalizing problems like anxiety and depression, or externalizing problems like anger and disruptive behavior.
Earlier research suggested that everyday hardships may help explain these links. For instance, a 2018 longitudinal study tracking youth from childhood to age 18 found that elevated autistic traits increased the risk of developing depressive symptoms, an association partly explained by social hardships such as bullying. In a similar vein, a 2020 study of adolescents indicated that childhood ADHD symptoms predicted teenage depression in part through academic setbacks and peer problems.
Strained relationships with parents and peers also helped account for the link between attention difficulties and later depression in a 2013 study of two samples of young people, although academic struggles did not independently explain that link in that research.
Because autistic and ADHD traits frequently co-occur in the same individuals, researchers faced a challenge in untangling which specific social hurdles stem uniquely from each set of characteristics. Many previous studies examined either autism or ADHD in isolation, making it difficult to understand how distinct traits relate to social adjustment across different settings.
“In school settings, many children show mild ASD or ADHD traits that do not meet diagnostic criteria, yet they may still experience difficulties with peers, learning, or relationships with adults,” lead author Eriko Hashimoto, a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, told PsyPost. “These children may fall outside formal support systems.”
“However, we still know relatively little about how such traits relate to social adjustment and mental health over time,” Hashimoto explained. “Together with my supervisor and co-author, Professor Hiroyuki Ito, I wanted to address this gap by examining these developmental associations over several years in a large, community-based sample of school-aged children.”
To investigate these questions, Hashimoto, Professor Hiroyuki Ito of the Faculty of Core Research at Ochanomizu University, and their colleagues analyzed data from a large population-based cohort involving all public elementary and junior high schools in a medium-sized municipality in Chubu, Japan. The final analysis included 9,619 students from an initial group of 11,549 enrolled children. Students were surveyed once per school year from fourth through ninth grade, with data from 11 grade cohorts collected between 2012 and 2023. By gathering information from students, their parents, and their homeroom teachers, the authors were able to capture behavioral and emotional patterns across both home and classroom environments.
Parents reported on their children’s autistic tendencies using a shortened version of the Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire and assessed ADHD traits using the ADHD Rating Scale-IV. Students completed questionnaires detailing their subjective difficulties in three areas: keeping up with classwork, conflicts with teachers, and arguments with family members. Problems with classmates were evaluated using the peer relationships subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, combining ratings from students, teachers, and parents into a single composite score.
Mental health outcomes were grouped into two broad categories. Internalizing problems, reflecting inward emotional distress such as anxiety and depression, combined child self-reports on a depression scale with parent and teacher ratings of emotional symptoms. Externalizing problems, capturing outward behavioral difficulties such as hostility and aggression, brought together student self-reports with adult ratings of conduct problems. The researchers used cross-lagged structural equation modeling, an advanced statistical technique that tests whether one variable predicts changes in another variable over time while controlling for student sex and grade level.
The analysis produced standardized coefficients, which express how strongly one measure predicted later changes in another. By the guidelines the authors used for this kind of analysis, values around 0.03 count as small, 0.07 as medium, and 0.12 as large.
The findings indicated distinct developmental patterns for autistic and ADHD traits. Autistic traits showed consistent links over time with subsequent peer difficulties, showing standardized coefficients between 0.146 and 0.190 across grade transitions, which fall in the large range. Autistic traits were also linked with later internalizing problems, with small-to-medium coefficients ranging from 0.068 to 0.097. In contrast, autistic traits were not consistently associated with later academic struggles or conflict with teachers.
ADHD traits showed a different pattern of associations. Elevated ADHD traits were linked to subsequent externalizing problems, with coefficients between 0.064 and 0.118, with the strongest associations appearing during late elementary school. ADHD traits were also associated with higher levels of academic difficulties over time, particularly in fourth and fifth grade, but showed weak and mostly inconsistent links to later internalizing problems directly. Instead, academic difficulties themselves predicted later internalizing symptoms during elementary school, suggesting that learning struggles may act as an intermediate pathway linking attention difficulties to emotional distress.
Rather than revealing one-way effects, the analyses indicated notable bidirectional processes. For instance, while peer problems predicted increases in subsequent internalizing symptoms, higher levels of internalizing symptoms were also associated with worsening peer problems over time. Similarly, externalizing behaviors predicted more frequent conflicts with teachers and parents in later years, and those strained adult relationships were linked with subsequent increases in behavioral difficulties. Academic problems consistently predicted greater family conflict in the following year, with coefficients ranging from 0.105 to 0.163.
The social environment also appeared to feed back into parent ratings of neurodevelopmental traits. Experiencing peer problems was linked to higher reported autistic traits in later grades, with coefficients up to 0.164. In an analogous manner, elevated externalizing behaviors predicted higher reported ADHD traits in subsequent waves. These patterns suggest that neurodevelopmental traits may not be fixed and could shift with a child’s social experiences, though they could also reflect changes in how parents perceive and rate their children’s traits once problems emerge.
“One important message is that ASD and ADHD traits showed different patterns of association with later difficulties,” Hashimoto said. “These findings highlight the importance of considering not only children’s individual characteristics but also the social environments in which they develop.”
These findings align with prior research into how childhood difficulties unfold over time. The results are consistent with a study covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that childhood ADHD traits were linked to greater psychological distress in midlife, partly through experiences of social exclusion in adulthood, though that research followed individuals into adulthood while the current study tracked youth through junior high school.
The observed connections also touch upon research covered by PsyPost in 2025 linking ADHD symptoms to emotional problems across development, though that earlier project pointed to shared genetic factors, based on twin data, as an underlying driver rather than school-based social pathways.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. “This study does not demonstrate causality,” Hashimoto noted. “The findings show temporal associations, not proof that one factor directly causes another.”
“It is also important to emphasize that children with elevated ASD or ADHD traits are highly diverse; our results describe group-level patterns and should not be interpreted as predictions for any individual child,” she pointed out. “In addition, we examined ASD and ADHD traits dimensionally in a general school population rather than focusing specifically on children with clinical diagnoses.”
There are a few other things to keep in mind. Many of the associations, including most links between the traits and later mental health problems, were small to medium in size. Also, the questionnaire used to evaluate autism primarily captured a relatively narrow set of characteristics, focusing mainly on Asperger-type social and behavioral traits rather than the full spectrum.
Future research could build on these findings by incorporating direct observational measures alongside questionnaires and testing whether supportive social settings can buffer these links. The authors suggest that early support for academic organization, peer relationship skills, and positive communication between families and schools might help interrupt these cycles, though the study did not test any interventions.
The study, “Longitudinal associations among autism and ADHD traits, social maladjustment, and mental health in school-aged children,” was authored by Eriko Hashimoto, Hiroyuki Ito, Megumi Hamada, Takahiro Nakajima, Nobuya Takayanagi, Mitsunori Myogan, Yasuo Murayama, and Masatsugu Tsujii.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AutismAndADHD #SocialPathways #MentalHealthInChildren # ASD #ADHD #PeerRelationships #SchoolMentalHealth #ChildDevelopment #LongitudinalStudy #PediatricPsychology
Major #dataprivacy #scandal #schufa sue the shit out of these #mofos https://www.golem.de/news/historische-score-berechnung-schufa-erteilt-auskunft-zu-schattendatenbank-2610-213960.html
Shadow database revealed The background of the procedure are reports according to which the Schufa operates a so-called shadow database. In it, she is supposed to store outdated data from millions of people unnoticed by the public much longer than previously known.
Schattendatenbank aufgedeckt
Hintergrund des Vorgehens sind Berichte, wonach die Schufa eine sogenannte Schattendatenbank betreibt. Darin soll sie unbemerkt von der Öffentlichkeit veraltete Daten von Millionen Menschen deutlich länger speichern als bisher bekannt. Can't get a #loan ? Well #schufa aka #orwell is to blame
#privacy
DATE: October 10, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Does voting by mail make for better choices? A 2020 election study suggests it might
Casting a ballot from home might do more than offer convenience; it could also help citizens select leaders who genuinely reflect their personal political beliefs. A study published in Political Behavior indicates that Americans who voted by mail during the 2020 presidential election were more likely to vote for the candidate who best aligned with their stated views than those who cast ballots in person. The findings suggest that having the flexibility to review ballot choices at home may improve the quality of democratic decision-making.
What does it mean to vote correctly? In political science, the term does not mean choosing the objectively best leader or backing the winning candidate. Instead, it refers to whether a citizen votes for the candidate who best matches their own expressed preferences on policy issues, partisan identity, and assessments of character. When a voter picks a candidate who is a weaker match for their own stated preferences than another candidate on the ballot, researchers call that an incorrect vote.
The research was conducted by Jennifer Wolak, a professor of political science at Michigan State University, and Carey E. Stapleton, a lecturer in the Department of Analytics and Computational Social Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They examined how different voting environments shape these electoral decisions.
At a traditional polling place, citizens often wait in line and then typically spend three to four minutes completing a lengthy ballot. The authors argue that because many voters are reluctant to hold up others waiting behind them, they rely largely on memory to recall where each contender stands across multiple offices.
Mail-in ballots, by contrast, can be completed at a kitchen table, and voters report taking about two days on average to fill them out. The authors propose that this extra time lets people look up unfamiliar candidates, read through ballot measures, or talk over choices with family members, which may help them make more considered choices.
“With the pandemic, a lot of people voted by mail for the first time,” lead author Wolak told PsyPost. “Filling out your ballot at home is often a different experience than casting your ballot at a polling place. You can take your time when filling out your ballot at home, without worrying about holding up the line or being late to your next appointment.”
“When you are uncertain about how to vote or unfamiliar with a certain electoral race or ballot question, you can do additional research prior to casting your official ballot,” she explained. “Our suspicion was that under these conditions, people might be better able to identify which candidates are aligned with their political goals.”
Research on political knowledge highlights how access to information shapes voter decision-making. For example, a 2019 study suggested that the ability to look things up online may partly stand in for political knowledge stored in memory, particularly among younger Americans who grew up with the internet. Having the ability to look up candidates while filling out a ballot at home may help offset gaps in memory.
At the same time, convenience voting can introduce its own complications. In a 2011 study of California’s 2008 presidential primary, researchers found that precincts with more mail voting gave more votes to candidates who had already dropped out, since mail voters often decided before late-breaking campaign developments. That finding suggests voting from home carries potential drawbacks as well as benefits.
Researchers have also noted that people who take advantage of flexible voting options often differ from those who vote at a polling place. Specifically, a 2020 study suggested that individuals who already possess high political knowledge are more likely to seek out convenience voting methods in the first place. In the 2020 election, mail voters tended to be older, more educated, more liberal, and more knowledgeable, making it necessary to separate the method of voting from these personal traits.
To evaluate whether mail balloting helps voters make better choices, the authors analyzed data from the 2020 American National Election Studies. This extensive survey asked participants about their issue preferences, partisan loyalty, and opinions about candidate traits. The authors combined these responses with official state voter records, which allowed them to verify the exact method each participant used to cast their ballot.
To determine whether someone voted correctly, the researchers used a widely used measure developed by political scientists Richard Lau and David Redlawsk. It scores how well each presidential candidate matched a respondent’s own answers on partisanship, policy issues, evaluations of the incumbent’s performance, perceptions of the candidates’ traits, and ties to social groups associated with each party. A participant who chose the candidate with the higher score was coded as voting correctly.
The authors first tested this relationship using a statistical model of 4,728 voters while holding several background factors constant. The model accounted for political interest, strength of party affiliation, political knowledge, education, ideology, age, gender, race, and ethnicity. The authors also included a measure of in-person early voting to see if voting before Election Day carried similar benefits.
The results indicated that casting a ballot by mail was associated with an estimated 2.6 percentage point increase in the probability of voting correctly. In baseline terms, roughly 90 percent of in-person voters selected the candidate aligned with their preferences, compared to nearly 93 percent of mail voters, a gap roughly equivalent to the boost associated with a one-standard-deviation increase in political knowledge. In contrast, the difference in correct voting between in-person early voters and Election Day voters was not statistically significant, suggesting that the advantage was tied to voting at home rather than to voting early.
To ensure that this pattern was not simply the result of differences in who chooses to vote by mail, the authors used statistical matching procedures. One method, known as coarsened exact matching, paired mail voters with in-person voters who fell into the same broad ranges on key traits. Across three versions, which matched on political factors such as interest and knowledge, on demographics, or on both, voting by mail remained associated with an estimated gain of roughly 2.1 to 4.7 percentage points in correct voting, with sample sizes ranging from 523 to 4,907.
The authors also applied entropy balancing, an analytical technique that reweights the data so that mail voters and in-person voters look alike on many characteristics without discarding participants. Balancing on the same factors used in the earlier models produced an estimated 2.7 percentage point gain among 4,728 voters, and adding measures such as concern about the election outcome, belief in one’s ability to influence politics, ideological consistency, and past voting produced a 1.7-point gain among 4,658 voters. In an expanded model of 4,634 voters that also balanced on state-level factors, such as campaign competitiveness and the ease of voting by mail, the estimated boost was 5.0 percentage points.
The authors then evaluated how state election laws influenced these outcomes across 4,658 voters using a mediation analysis. In 2020, states took very different approaches to mail voting: nine states and the District of Columbia mailed ballots directly to all registered voters, while other states required specific excuses or notarized documents to cast an absentee ballot. Voters living in states that mailed ballots automatically had a 92 percent predicted probability of voting by mail, compared to only 38 percent in states without universal ballot distribution.
The mediation analysis suggested that state policies making mail-in ballots easier to obtain were indirectly linked to more correct voting by encouraging more residents to vote by mail. This indirect pathway was associated with an estimated increase of about 1.3 to 1.6 percentage points in correct presidential votes. However, the overall difference in correct voting between states with easier and harder access to mail ballots was close to zero, because the indirect boost was offset by a small direct association in the opposite direction that was not statistically significant.
The authors conducted additional analyses to see if the link between mail voting and correct voting existed outside the unusual conditions of the 2020 pandemic. By examining a panel of participants surveyed in both 2016 and 2020, they found that voters who switched from in-person voting in 2016 to mail-in voting in 2020 were more likely to vote correctly in 2020. An analysis of respondents from the 2016 election who were re-surveyed in 2020 indicated that voting by mail was associated with roughly a 5 percentage point gain in correct voting after balancing for demographic and political traits.
“A lot of the discussion around encouraging vote-by-mail has been about increasing participation,” Wolak noted. “Most research has found that introducing vote-by-mail can boost voter turnout, especially among some of the groups who are the least likely to vote.”
“Our work shows an even wider set of civic rewards for vote-by-mail,” she added. “Giving people the opportunity to complete their ballot at home not only increases their likelihood of participating, but it also can increase the odds that they choose the candidates that best match up to their political preferences.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Because the study relied on survey and voting records rather than an experiment where people were randomly assigned to vote by mail or in person, the authors cannot establish direct cause and effect. Although the statistical models accounted for education, political knowledge, and numerous other traits, unmeasured personal factors might still influence both the decision to vote by mail and candidate choice.
Another factor to consider is the modest size of the observed effect, which ranged between two and five percentage points across the various models. In presidential elections, voters already encounter an abundance of news coverage and campaign advertising, which helps roughly 80 to 90 percent of citizens vote correctly regardless of how they cast their ballots. As a result, the room for measurable improvement in presidential contests is relatively small.
“We estimate that compared to those who vote in-person, people who vote by mail are about two percentage points more likely to select the presidential candidate that best lines up with their political preferences,” Wolak pointed out. “It’s a small effect, but we would expect the improvements in the quality of voter decision-making to be even greater in down-ballot races where people have less knowledge about the candidates.”
The authors also emphasized that their research focused on the presidential race because reliable survey measures comparing voter preferences to candidate positions are rarely available for congressional or gubernatorial contenders. In lower-profile contests where campaigns receive less attention, voters typically have far less information stored in memory. Future studies could investigate whether having a ballot at home leads to even larger gains in these less publicized races, where having extra time to look up candidates online might matter most.
The study, “The Effects of Voting by Mail on Correct Voting,” was authored by Jennifer Wolak and Carey E. Stapleton.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #VoteByMail #MailInVoting #VotingByMail #ElectionResearch #CivicKnowledge #Democracy #VotingBehavior #PoliticalScience #Election2020 #BallotAccessibility
Germany's car industry vs. China, Japan and South Korea, 2019–2025:
- Production: Germany −11%, China +41.5%
- New car sales: Germany −20.8%, China +40.2%
- Electric car share: Germany was ahead of China from 2020 to 2022 (31% vs. 29%). In 2025: China 53%, Germany 30%
Public data from OICA and IEA, analysed in Python.
Dashboard (EN/DE/ZH): https://car-industry-germany-vs-asia-ve5jblutzyvxbprlapnx82.streamlit.app/
Code: https://github.com/Amirhouschang/car-industry-germany-vs-asia
#DataAnalytics #Python #DataViz #Automotive #ElectricVehicles #Germany #China