Robert Koch's dubious legacy in Africa

Scientist Robert Koch tried to cure to tuberculosis and sleeping sickness while working with African patients in what he called "concentration camps." His 19th-century techniques still fuel debates about his fame.

The scientist Robert Koch (with tropical helmet) on his East African expedition around 1906

Who was Robert Koch — a revered top researcher or a colonial physician without a conscience?

A winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine and one of the most important microbiologists of the 19th century, Germany's renowned federal institute for infectious diseases bears his name.

But during the coronavirus pandemic — throughout which the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reports daily COVID-19 infection figures and calls its namesake to mind — critical voices have piled up, even more than 110 years after Koch's death.

Some are even calling for the RKI to be renamed. 

What's Robert Koch accused of?

The celebrated physician of infectious disease not only did good in Germany's African colonies, but also conducted research at the expense of human lives. Critics say more focus is needed on the subjects of his work, while others say he should be held to the standards of his day.

Medical historian Christoph Gradmann at the University of Oslo thinks the debates about Robert Koch's legacy in Africa go too far, although they do need to take place.

"You have to place Robert Koch's actions in their time. I find the condemnation of his person — representative of colonial medicine — in 2022 banal," he told DW.

Former chancellor Angela Merkel pays the president of the Robert Koch Institute, 

Lothar Wieler (left) a visit in 2021.

Robert Koch's 'darkest chapter'

His colleague Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor of Global History at the University of Hamburg, takes a different position.

Zimmerer has emphasized in reports the "unscrupulous" side of Koch, who was commissioned by the German colonial administration to research sleeping sickness in Africa.

The illness is caused by microscopic parasites transmitted by the tsetse fly and spread in Africa around 1900.

Koch was responsible for numerous health experiments in what are now Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon to find a cure for sleeping sickness. 

Most of Koch's patients were housed in what he himself called "concentration camps," a model he borrowed from the British administration in South Africa, and treated with atoxyl, a substance containing arsenic and already known to be highly toxic in large doses.

Koch accepted the pain and agony of thousands of patients, even to the point of death, say his critics, including the Haitian-American historian of science Edna Bonhomme.

His intentions probably cannot be conclusively clarified, Bonhomme conceded in an October 2020 commentary for the Arabic news network Al-Jazeera. 

"What we do know is that Koch's actions directly contributed to the colonial oppression of African populations," wrote Bonhomme.

The research camps he founded, she said, solidified inhumane treatment and hierarchies in medical experiments.

Robert Koch at his microscope in his laboratory in Kimberley, South Africa, in 1896

What does the Robert Koch Institute say?

The agency, founded in 1891 as the Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases and headed by Koch until 1904, declined to be interviewed by DW.

However, its website has references to Koch's use of atoxyl.

It describes his last major research trip from 1906–1907 to East Africa as the "darkest chapter" in Koch's career.

By using atoxyl, Koch "initially achieves successful results in the treatment of the sleeping sickness," the RKI states.

But the parasite could only be suppressed in the blood of the patients for a short time.

"Koch doubles the dose — even though he is aware of the risks of the drug," according to the RKI's website.

"Many patients begin to suffer from pain and colic, some even go blind. Nevertheless, Koch remains convinced of the benefits of atoxyl in principle."

Pressure to succeed and fame

Koch held on to the medicine atoxyl for too long; he was under pressure to succeed, Gradmann commented.

But the historian doesn't believe Koch's practices at the time influenced today's skepticism about drug trials and vaccinations — not in Africa, and not in the Global North.

Tanzania is very open to Western medicine, he said, and that medicine cannot be reduced to one of its representatives.

Koch experimented with Atoxyl to find cure against the sleeping sickness transmitted by the tsetse fly

In 1880, Koch identified the pathogen of tuberculosis in 1882 — a discovery that established his worldwide fame and earned him the 1905 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery.

"If we apply these standards of today to historical persons without circumstance, then just about everyone comes off badly. But that would be wrong in the case of Robert Koch. Because he is also regarded in Africa and by Africans as the discoverer of the tuberculosis bacterium and in this sense is seen as a role model," Gradmann told DW.

No connection to vaccination skepticism

In Tanzania, Richard Shaba can confirm this, at least for a small part of the people: the experts.

"Koch's research on malaria and tuberculosis is well known in the circles of scientists, but it is not an issue among ordinary citizens," Shaba said in the DW interview. He represents the German office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Dodoma.

Health care in Tanzania: a COVID-19 vaccination is given to prevent virus infection

"It would be wrong to try to make a connection between the dark side of his experiments and the resistance of Tanzanians and Africans to COVID vaccination," Shaba said. There are other reasons for this that have nothing to do with Koch's work.

There's more skepticism there, he said, because people are getting sick after the vaccines are developed quickly, so they believe they are not safe. "It's a luxury today to look critically at Koch's behavior, but what researcher at the time did not do bad experiments in the name of science in Africa?" asked Shaba.

Koch, according to the ideology of the time, would likely have considered himself — like many others — some kind of superhero to Africans.

Edited by: Keith Walker 

Huawei reports record net profit as exec Meng makes public return


Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou made her first public appearance since returning to China from Canadian custody (AFP/STR) (STR)


Beiyi SEOW
Mon, March 28, 2022

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei on Monday reported record profit for 2021, defying the US sanctions aimed at it as executive Meng Wanzhou made her first public appearance since returning to China from Canadian custody.

The company has been caught in the crosshairs of a US-China trade and technology rivalry, with the administration of former President Donald Trump moving to cripple it over cybersecurity and espionage concerns.

The results, announced in Chinese tech hub Shenzhen, also marked the first return to the limelight of Meng since her high-profile return to China after nearly three years under house arrest in Canada.

Meng, daughter of CEO and founder Ren Zhengfei, spent the years in Canada fighting extradition to the US, as Washington accused her of defrauding HSBC bank by trying to hide alleged violations of US sanctions on Iran.

She returned home shortly after two Canadians were released from prison in China, ending a diplomatic row that poisoned ties between Beijing and Ottawa for years.

Huawei's revenue fell by around 29 percent last year to 636.8 billion yuan ($100 billion), as it grappled with US sanctions aimed at blocking access to key technology and supplies.

But the slump under US sanctions appears to be slowing, and the company said its net profits hit a new record -- surging 75.9 percent on-year to 113.7 billion yuan.

"Despite a revenue decline in 2021, our ability to make a profit and generate cash flows is increasing, and we are more capable of dealing with uncertainty," Meng said in Monday's statement.

The company attributes its profitability to "improved product portfolios and more efficient internal operations", with a rise in net profit margin even with gains from the sale of its budget phone brand Honor excluded.

The company is not publicly listed and its accounts are not subject to the same audits as companies traded on the stock market.

Huawei, a supplier of telecom networking gear and smartphone brand, has been struggling since Trump launched a campaign to contain the company in 2018.

Smartphone sales stalled after the US cut Huawei off from key parts and barred it from using Google's Android services.

Last year Huawei logged 243 billion yuan in consumer business sales -- almost 50 percent down from 2020.

Huawei has instead tried to shore up other parts of its business, refocusing on the Chinese market and diversifying to encompass enterprise and cloud computing, along with other business segments related to 5G networks.

Rotating chairman Guo Ping said in a speech at the event that Huawei's ability to “survive and thrive" depends on ongoing investment in development.

"Our fight to survive is not over yet," Guo said.

"No matter what comes our way, we will keep investing. That is the only way forward."

The company's research and development investment amounted to 142.7 billion yuan last year, around 22 percent of its total revenue.

bys/rox/apj/jfx

Hypersonic missiles – hype or hyperdangerous?
Kinzhal carried on a Tu22 Backfire bomber


By Gav Don March 27, 2022


Russia claimed that it had used hypersonic weapons to attack arms depots in western Ukraine on 18 March. Is this a qualitative up-step in Russia’s campaign, a sign of stress, or just a capability demonstration?

“Hypersonic” is generally accepted to mean a missile faster than 5,000 km/h (though there is nothing magical about that speed). Intercontinental ballistic missiles have always been hypersonic, exceeding 20,000 km/h, but they spend most of their journey from launcher to target in the near-vacuum of space, and only a few seconds passing through the atmosphere. The hard part is sustaining hypersonic speed inside the earth’s atmosphere, where atmospheric gases create friction, heating the missile to 1,000 centigrade.

At high altitude the atmosphere is thin and generates less friction and heat. But targets are at ground or sea level, so to remain hypersonic the missile must be constructed from materials which can withstand that heat. Heat is not the only problem. The air around a hypersonic missile becomes so energised that molecules lose their electrons and become ionised plasma, which makes terminal guidance difficult to achieve. Most of the investment in hypersonic missiles ends up in designing new alloys and in expensive and extensive testing.

Why bother? High speed offers three big wins. The first win is to reduce the time your opponent has in which to react to the threat. A low-level missile becomes visible to airborne radar at around 500 km. Flying at 900 kph a subsonic cruise missile provides about half an hour’s notice of its threat. In that time a ship can move 30 km, either off the missile’s incoming vector (leaving the missile’s pre-programmed search area) or away from the missile, potentially taking it out of range completely.

Targets are typically protected by layers of defensive equipment placed at progressively greater distances up-threat. The warning time of a subsonic missile allows the protective screen to manoeuvre to allow optimal engagement, to choose which defensive layers will engage which threats, to add air assets in the missile’s path which can attack the missile, and to deploy decoys and multiple active jamming solutions to force a soft kill – one in which the missile misses and splashes harmlessly.

With multiple layers of defence and multiple defensive options available, a well-equipped target force has a high chance of either forcing a miss or getting a hard kill on an incoming subsonic missile. That means the attacker must launch many missiles, preferably from many directions, carefully timed to arrive simultaneously and so to overwhelm the defensive layers. So subsonic missiles come with a high cost in units fired and firing platforms, and a demand a high threshold of accurate target data.

Hypersonic weapons fly at an average speed (from launch to impact) of around 3,500 kph. Detected at the same 500 km they cut the available reaction time from 30 minutes to about eight. That reduces target manoeuvre to +/- 8 km. Seen from the missile’s perspective the terminal seeker needs to scan an azimuth of only a couple of degrees either side of its track to gain a final target solution and a hit. Within that narrow arc there will be fewer false targets, fewer decoys and fewer SAM launches. The missile also conserves energy because it need only manoeuvre a degree or two off its base track, and that helps preserve both speed and range.

If the targeted force does not have airborne early warning cover the hypersonic’s win is much bigger. A warship with a radar antenna at 60 feet (18 metres) above sea level has a radar horizon to a sea-skimming missile (at 12 feet above sea level) of only 26 km (the high scanner of the UK’s Type 45 adds 10 km to that). A subsonic cruise missile takes 100-150 seconds to fly from its detection point at the horizon to the target. That is just enough time for the target to calculate the missile’s track, decide whether to engage it, to fire one or two surface to air missiles and for those to reach the incoming missile before it is close enough to do damage to the target ship. It also just allows time for decoys to be fired and to deploy, and for active jamming of the missile seeker to be programmed, aimed and used. An efficient well-worked-up ship should be able to counter most subsonic missile strikes.

A hypersonic cruise missile, even one whose terminal velocity has been reduced by drag and some evasive manoeuvring to perhaps 3,000 kph, covers the same distance in 30-40 seconds. If the target is quick enough to get a hard kill it must be obtained at sufficient distance that incoming missile debris falls into the sea instead of hitting the target ship at supersonic speed: three tonnes of missile fragments arriving at 3,000 kph can do almost as much damage as the explosive power of the warhead. Time is so short that there is barely time to deploy decoys and jammers.

While a well-prepared target warship has some chance of hitting a single incoming hypersonic missile, a salvo of two or three has a high chance of overwhelming the defence. If the target is not a modern air defence ship then it must rely on its own close-in weapon systems (chain guns or small short-range missiles) to get a hard kill, which will be at a range close enough for high velocity missile fragments to do damage.

When attacked by a subsonic missile a target can manoeuvre itself to present a smaller target aspect (turning towards or away from the missile at speed) or to change speed (and so throw off the missile’s predictive targeting algorithm) because there is just time to do that. With a hypersonic missile there is no time to use manoeuvre as a defence.

In sum, in a ship-killing role the use of hypersonic speed substantially reduces the number of missiles an attacker must fire to obtain a hit and, because of the kinetic energy of hypersonic speed, increases the damage caused by a hit.

At a strategic level the presence of hypersonic missiles forces one’s opponent to keep his naval forces concentrated and within constant airborne early warning coverage. That in turn means he must operate close to a friendly coastline, or within a Carrier Strike Group. Operations at a distance by ships sailing alone or in small task groups become borderline suicidal if a hypersonic threat is present.

Hypersonic missiles offer a third advantage, both at sea and on land. The target may well be covered by surface-to-air missiles located at some distance from the target itself. So at sea, an aircraft carrier is covered by air defence ships placed in a screen at several miles distance, and on land a target may be covered by a SAM battery located dozens of miles away at right angles to the incoming missile’s track.

If the defence unit is located off-track to the incoming missile its own weapon must close from the side of that track, which takes time. Surface-to-air missiles fly at twice the speed of a subsonic cruise missile, so can make up the ground from some way off. But they fly at half as fast as a hypersonic missile. Fired from several miles off the threat track, and literally at the last minute, they are more or less guaranteed to reach the hypersonic missile’s track after it has passed. The tactical result is that hypersonic missiles dilute air defence assets, by limiting the effective arc of fire of a given asset. In consequence some targets must be left undefended, or the number of targets must be reduced by concentrating one’s forces – both strategic wins for the owner of a hypersonic missile system.

There are major technical obstacles to getting a hard kill on a hypersonic missile. The defending missile is not designed to make a direct impact on the threat, as both are small and closing at extreme speed. The challenge is to make the 50-litre body of the defending missile get close enough to the 200-litre body of the threat missile so that a fragmentation warhead can get a hit.

The problem comes in two parts. First, one must design a guidance system that brings the two bodies together in time and space. Guidance (and radar tracking) systems use proportional geometry tailored to the speed of the threat – traditionally subsonic, but up to 2,000 kph for the well-established Moskit sea-skimming missile deployed by Russia since the 1980s – to steer the defending missile into the same few metres of space as the threat missile. A threat moving at two to four times the normal expected speed may render a tracking and guidance system’s parameters ineffective.

The second challenge is to detonate the SAM’s warhead close enough to the threat missile to get a hard kill. The kill is achieved by hitting the threat missile with one or more high energy metal fragments, either thrown in front of the incoming missile or from its side. Collision with a single metal fragment at that speed will break the threat missile up. To obtain that result the defending missile’s warhead fuse must be tailored to within a precise part of a millisecond. Detonate the warhead a millisecond too soon and the incoming missile will fly through a hole in the shrapnel field. Fire it a millisecond too late and the fragment field will bloom behind the incoming missile. Hypersonic missiles close at two to four times the relative closing speed of a subsonic cruise missile, which may allow them to outpace the fusing algorithm of the defending missile, even one detonated by a proximity radar system.

These two problems are solvable (THAAD has solved them) but a SAM system designed and built for a subsonic or low supersonic threat may need a substantial upgrade to beat a hypersonic threat missile. Some older systems will not be upgradeable at all.

Russia operates two tactical hypersonic missile systems and one strategic system.

Kinzhal (“Dagger”) is a re-purposed Iskander tactical ballistic missile (DoB 1980). The missile has kept its solid-fuelled rocket motor but is fired from an aircraft instead of from the ground. Starting high and fast, more of the missile’s fuel can be converted into range. Reports of range are ambiguous (varying from 500 to 2,000 km) and probably include the range of the launch aircraft. Russia is claiming that Kinzhal is both manoeuvrable and has terminal guidance (additional to its original inertial guidance system). Photographs of the missile in the public domain challenge both of those assertions, since the missile lacks wings and a visible seeker head.

Some steering will be provided by the small fins located in Kinzhal’s rocket exhaust, but these will only operate while the rocket motor is burning, at the start of the ballistic flight. Kinzhal may well not have the ability to carry out evasive manoeuvres in flight. Kinzhal’s most probable guidance system is inertial, to a pre-programmed target, aided by a satellite receiver but not by sophisticated manoeuvring systems. If that is true then it has no naval application unless fitted with a nuclear warhead. Kinzhal’s win over its ground-based sibling is that it can be fired from a much wider arc (in practice any air space that is safe for the launch aircraft) which forces an enemy to place more SAM systems around a given target, and so dilute air defence capability.

After leaving its launch aircraft the missile’s speed rapidly increases to high hypersonic. The missile’s trajectory is probably a low ballistic curve, in which the initial launch probably has a substantial “up” component. After motor burnout the missile will follow a ballistic flight path.

As its flight path descends through thickening atmosphere to ground or sea level the missile will slow down under friction. To maximise range the missile must spend as much time as possible as high as possible, where it is detectable at great ranges, and where it provides more time in which it can be engaged by defending missiles.

A high-altitude hypersonic missile is very like an incoming ballistic missile. The US has spent a substantial time and money equipping ships and shore-based units with THAAD – “Terminal High Altitude Area Defence” systems – which are capable of destroying high ballistic missiles at ranges of 100 km plus so long as they are flying more or less directly towards the THAAD launcher.

THAAD is not capable of hitting a missile on a crossing track, so each THAAD launcher is effectively locked to a target down-range and a threat up-range, both on a narrow arc. If the missile’s launch vehicle can fly around at will to change the threat bearing by 350 degrees THAAD risks becoming ineffective (unless the defender saturates the target’s defence with multiple THAAD systems or co-locates THAAD with the target. That increases the number of THAAD systems needed to protect a set of targets.

Russia’s second tactical hypersonic missile is Tsirkon (sometimes transliterated to Zirkon). Tsirkon has an air-breathing supersonic compressed air ramjet engine, usually abbreviated to Scramjet. A scramjet only starts to work well above supersonic speeds, so when Tsirkon is fired the missile must be boosted by a large solid-fuelled rocket motor. Designed to be fired at sea-level, Tsirkon has a shorter range than Kinzhal – 500 km has been demonstrated, and 1,000 km claimed.

Range is traded off against manoeuvring potential. Range is also a trade-off against average altitude. Tsirkon can climb to height for greater range and speed (at height it flies through thinner air) but at the expense of earlier detection. Exact range/height profiles are unknown but Tsirkon is designed to fly as a sea-skimming missile, reducing target reaction times to 40 seconds.

Tsirkon is reputed to have the ability to evade counter-missile fire. Two approaches are available. The first is to use conventional aerodynamic control surfaces to alter course. Tsirkon appears to have these but their use comes at a cost in speed, and the weight of actuators reduces the explosive payload.

A second approach is to use small manoeuvring thrusters which can bodily move the missile up, down or sideways in flight. If used at the precisely correct moment these can force incoming hard-kill warheads to miss by jumping Tsirkon out of the shrapnel path. A side-skip will also move Tsirkon out of the narrow beam of a targeted jammer. Lateral thrusters don’t slow a missile down and are lighter than aerodynamic actuators, which make it more likely that Tsirkon employs these than guidance surfaces. Videos of Tsirkon firings (and also of S400 firings) show such lateral thrusters in action, to orient missiles from vertical launch attitudes to horizontal flight attitudes.

A third type of hypersonic weapon, a hypersonic glide vehicle, has also been tested by both Russia and China. This is an unpowered gliding body which is carried into low earth orbit on a conventional ballistic missile. Once in orbit and at high hypersonic speed, either its on-board guidance system or a ground-based command trigger braking rockets, which bring it out of orbit to head for its target at high hypersonic speeds. Russia’s version is called Avangard, and has been tested several times. China tested its own version – the DF17 – last year to considerable Western consternation.

There is no public domain evidence that either weapon has terminal guidance, though claims exist that they can be guided towards a moving target, such as an aircraft carrier, using lateral and vertical thrusters.

Hypersonic glide vehicles could be used to attack critical ground-based infrastructure at continental ranges – imagine a US attack on a Russia/China oil pipeline in Mongolia. The US has invested several billion dollars in hypersonic weapon and glide vehicle development aimed at creating a weapon which can strike ground targets anywhere on the planet at very short notice, but so far nothing has been brought into service. US programmes include Conventional Prompt Global Strike, the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon programmes. The US has also collaborated on hypersonics with Australia.

To summarise, so far only Russia has a working hypersonic anti-ship capability, and Russia and China working land attack capabilities. Russia’s (claimed) use of a hypersonic missile in Ukraine is probably largely symbolic, and possibly nothing more than an opportunistic operational test.

There are serious question marks over whether the reported Kinzhal strike in west Ukraine was actually in West Ukraine, or even a Kinzhal. Planetlabs has geolocated the target we see in Russia’s video as a farm in East Ukraine about 100 km south-east of Kharkiv, and has dated its destruction to a week before the date of the apparent strike. After the strike we see no secondary detonations, and the resulting fire has a single hotspot, consistent with unburnt fuel combusting, but not with burning ammunition stocks. The video does show (at two seconds in) a munition of some sort descending vertically onto the target at high speed. The weapon’s size is consistent with a Kinzhal – 4 metres long – but equally consistent with its ground-launched cousin the Iskander tactical ballistic missile. The blast, on the other hand, is inconsistent with a 500-kg high explosive warhead detonation.

With no maritime dimension to the Ukraine war Russia’s Tsirkon ship-killing missile is of little tactical relevance, though we may see symbolic firings of these too against land targets. Successful use of a Tsirkon against a warship would be a completely different matter, and a game-changer to compare with the destruction of the Israeli ship Eilat by a missile in 1967 – the first missile kill in modern warfare.

UK
Anoosheh Ashoori Accuses Johnson of 'Opportunism' after Release from Iran Prison

Saturday, 26 March, 2022 - 06:15

Sherry Izadi, Elika Ashoori and Aryan Ashoori, the family of Anoosheh Ashoori stage an 'empty chair' protest opposite Downing Street, on the 4th anniversary of his imprisonment, in London, Britain, August 13, 2021. 

REUTERS/Henry Nicholls

London - Asharq Al-Awsat

Anoosheh Ashoori, a former detainee in Iran, has accused Boris Johnson of ‘opportunism’, claiming the prime minister only reached out to him after his release from detention.

The 67-year-old British-Iranian was held in Tehran’s Evin prison for five years after a visit to Iran in August 2017 to see his elderly mother.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a dual British-Iranian citizen who went to Tehran in 2016 to visit her parents when her daughter was a toddler, was released last week along with Ashoori, who is a retired civil engineer.

Iran, which doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, has charged the detainees with crimes such as espionage and sentenced them to long prison terms under harsh conditions.

Speaking exclusively on Sky News program Beth Rigby Interviews, Ashoori said he felt let down by Britain's leader but praised the "fantastic job" civil servants have done behind-the-scenes.

Johnson did not respond to the family's requests for assistance, nor did he reply to a direct plea from Ashoori.

The detained Briton managed to record an audio message while inside the prison asking for Johnson's help. It was published by Sky News in 2020.

The retired engineer said: "I risked my safety but I managed to convey that message to him.

"Unfortunately he did not expend even five minutes to give a telephone call to my family."

However, on Monday, Ashoori received an invitation to meet with the prime minister.

He told Sky News: "Now he's eager to see us. How would you interpret that?

"I think that there's a bit of opportunism involved in it."

Asked if he would meet with the prime minister, Ashoori said: "I'm not sure."

Why Biden hasn't scored a political win from canceling $17 billion in student loans

By Katie Lobosco, CNN
Sun March 27, 2022

President Joe Biden walks on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One in Washington, DC, on March 18, 2022.

Washington (CNN)Joe Biden has canceled more student loan debt than any other President -- a notable fact that's flown under the radar.

Taking a piecemeal approach, the Biden administration has expanded existing loan forgiveness programs for borrowers who work in the public sector, those who were defrauded by for-profit colleges and borrowers who are now permanently disabled.

Those moves have delivered significant relief to more than 700,000 borrowers, totaling more than $17 billion.

Yet some voters feel misled by the President, who had supported canceling $10,000 for each of the 43 million federal student loan borrowers while on the campaign trail.

"He's not delivering on his promise," said Jennifer Lewis, a 57-year-old nurse practitioner in Washington state who has about $80,000 in student loan debt.

"If he were to run again, I would think twice about voting for president at all," added Lewis, a self-described "super progressive."

Biden is also facing a drumbeat of pressure from some key Democratic lawmakers who are urging him to do more and cancel $50,000 per borrower.

That puts Biden in a tough political spot as federal student loan payments are set to resume May 1 after a two-year, pandemic-related pause. Biden could decide to extend the pause again, a move that could please borrowers in a midterm election year who are struggling with rising inflation.

But not every Democrat thinks it's a good idea to broadly cancel student debt, and some economists warn that extending the payment pause could make inflation worse.

"I think it's important to keep in mind that there is far from a consensus viewpoint among Democratic members of Congress and Democratic voters that large sums of debt should be canceled," said Michelle Dimino, an education senior policy adviser at Third Way, a think tank that promotes center-left ideas.

Pandemic, inflation set back some borrowers

Sandeep and Tom Berry were hoping Biden would cancel some of their student debt but have lost hope of that pledge coming to fruition.

The North Carolina couple, who both identify as moderates, have $160,000 in student loan debt borrowed to pay for Tom's MBA.

"We knew what we signed up for. Tom and I made a decision to take on these loans," said Sandeep, 39.

But the pandemic threw a wrench into their financial plans. Sandeep, a consultant, planned to return to work once both of their children were in school. But she put those plans on hold when schools shut down and both kids were home for remote learning. She now hopes to reenter the workforce next year.

"I'm not one to ask the government to give away money, but given Covid -- a once-in-a-lifetime situation -- I feel like forgiving student loans as a one-time thing would really help," she said.

When payments resume, the Berry family will be on the hook for $1,000 a month -- a payment the couple says will be hard to make since inflation has made their everyday expenses higher.

"To be honest, the loans have been paused for so long I don't know what we're going to do when they are put back into effect," said Tom, 43, noting that he thinks an unprecedented response is needed to meet the current situation, but realizes canceling debt won't be a lasting solution.

"If he (Biden) waved a magic wand and all my debt went away, my life would get exponentially better. But I know it doesn't solve the larger problem," he added.

How a fringe issue became mainstream

The progressive wing of the Democratic party was pushing for student debt cancellation long before the pandemic. Born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a grassroots organization known as the Debt Collective organized its first "student debt strike" in 2015.

But it was still a fringe issue until 2019 when Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, soon followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, put forth proposals to broadly cancel student debt.

About a year ago, a Monmouth University poll found that 61% of adults supported canceling $10,000 in college debt for anyone with an outstanding federal loan. Fewer people, 45%, supported canceling $50,000 in debt per borrower.

Biden has never been all-in on broadly canceling student debt. But he made it clear during the presidential campaign, after the Covid-19 pandemic began, that he was in support of some federal student debt cancellation. He outlined specific policy proposals in April 2020 in an olive branch to supporters of Sanders, who had just dropped out of the race.

Those proposals called for immediately canceling a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person as a response to the pandemic, as well as forgiving all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for those borrowers earning up to $125,000 a year.

RELATED: Youth turnout could save, or sink, Democrats in 2022

Since taking office, Biden has resisted pressure to cancel debt on his own with an executive order. It's not totally clear that he has the authority to do so. Last year, Biden directed lawyers at the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to evaluate whether he does, in fact, have the power to broadly cancel federal student loans -- but the administration has not disclosed those findings.

Instead, Biden has urged Congress to pass legislation that cancels $10,000 per borrower. He also suggested that cancellation should exclude high-income borrowers, arguing last year that the government shouldn't forgive debt for people who went to "Harvard and Yale and Penn."

But key Democratic lawmakers, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, continue to call on Biden to cancel $50,000 for every borrower. Hundreds of advocacy groups, including the nation's two biggest teachers' unions and the NAACP, have also urged the administration to broadly cancel student debt. And former Education Secretary John King, a Democrat who is now running for governor of Maryland, has called on Biden to cancel student debt through executive action.

"I get it, I talk to people who have student debt and it's real for them," current Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told CNN earlier this year.

"But the President takes this seriously," he said, noting that the administration is working to fix the system to help future students, too, as they weigh borrowing to pay for school. The department has started rewriting a federal rule, known as gainful employment, that aims to prevent students from taking on too much debt to attend predatory for-profit colleges. The rule was revoked by the previous administration.

Targeted debt relief for 700,000-plus people

More than 700,000 people have seen their student debt wiped away under Biden, some of whom had been waiting months, if not years, for the Department of Education to process their forgiveness claims under existing relief programs.

Last year, the Biden administration overhauled the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that cancels outstanding federal student loan debt for those who work in the government and nonprofit sectors after they've made 10 years of payments.

The administration temporarily expanded the eligibility criteria until October 31, 2022, so that the forgiveness applies to borrowers who have older loans that didn't originally qualify as well as those who were in the wrong repayment plan but met the other requirements. So far, the Department of Education has identified 100,000 borrowers with about $6.2 billion in loans who are eligible for student debt cancellation due to the waiver, though not all of them have seen their debt wiped away yet.

The department has been chipping away at a backlog of forgiveness claims filed under a policy known as borrower defense to repayment that allows former students who were defrauded by their colleges to seek federal debt relief. Under that policy, the Biden administration has canceled about $2 billion in debt held by more than 107,000 individuals who attended for-profit colleges like ITT Technical Institute and DeVry University.

The department also improved efforts to reach borrowers eligible for debt relief because of permanent disabilities.

But there were still more than 200,000 unresolved borrower defense claims as of September, the latest data available, according to the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group that represents borrowers in an ongoing lawsuit over unprocessed borrower defense claims.

The Biden administration's efforts have yet to deliver debt relief for Lionel Siongco. He filed a borrower defense claim last year, arguing he was misled by the Art Institute of California in Hollywood, a campus that was part of a for-profit chain that abruptly shuttered in 2019 after losing its accreditation. In his claim, which is pending, he's arguing the school inflated graduation rates and job placement numbers.

Siongco, now 30 and living in California, earned an associate degree in fashion design from the school about eight years before it closed. He later earned a bachelor's degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, a public college in Manhattan, but he said the institution did not accept any of his previous credits.

He hopes the Department of Education will cancel the loans he borrowed to attend the Art Institute and said he is "so disappointed" that Biden hasn't broadly canceled student debt.

Lionel Siongco, a student loan borrower, is disappointed that Biden hasn't canceled more student debt.

"If we can bail out banks and corporations in this country, why can't we invest in the future and the education of its citizens?" he asked.

Siongco, a progressive who has more than $20,000 in student debt remaining, said that he'll be voting for a Democrat for president. But he's concerned that broad student loan forgiveness won't remain a point of discussion for lawmakers.

Payment pause delivered more relief, without a political boost

In addition to Biden's actions to expand existing forgiveness programs, he has also extended the pandemic-related pause on federal student loan payments and interest three times. Congress initially provided an automatic pause on payments and interest for most federal student loans in March 2020, which was then extended by the Trump administration.

A recent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that the pause on interest and payments -- from March 2020 through the scheduled end date of May 1, 2022 -- will result in debt relief equivalent to an average of $5,500 per borrower. The analysis notes this relief is largely due to the halt on interest accumulation and has benefited doctors and lawyers -- who tend to borrow huge amounts of money for their graduate degrees -- the most.

The analysis may underestimate the relief because it doesn't take into account the added benefit that those pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness receive from the payment pause. They are still receiving credit toward the 10 years of required payments as if they had continued to make them during the pandemic, as long as they are still working full time for qualifying employers.

Federal borrowers who didn't make any payments during the pandemic will owe the same amount when payments resume as they did in March 2020. But they will have saved money thanks to the interest accumulation pause. Those savings are in addition to the $17 billion canceled by the Biden administration for defrauded borrowers, public sector workers and those permanently disabled.

"I don't think, unfortunately, that's going to give Democrats the political win they are looking for," said Marcela Mulholland, political director at Data for Progress, a think tank and polling firm that supports progressive causes.

"I think canceling student debt or extending the pause are examples of things Democrats should be doing ahead of the midterms. There are very obvious adverse political consequences to restarting payments in an election year," she added.
Administration officials have recently said they are considering another extension before payments are set to resume on May 1.

The pause costs the government roughly $4 billion a month, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Economic impacts

Advocates for student debt cancellation argue that it would help close the racial wealth gap because Black students are more likely to take on student debt, borrow larger amounts and take longer paying them off than their White peers.

But some economists criticize student debt cancellation proposals as regressive, using taxpayer dollars to disproportionately benefit higher-wealth households because they tend to have more student debt. While it would have a big financial benefit for many, partial student loan cancellation is expected to have a only a modest effect on immediately boosting the economy since it would do little to increase the amount of cash households have to spend.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that canceling all federal student loan debt would cost roughly $1.6 trillion, canceling $50,000 per borrower would cost between $675 billion to $1 trillion, and canceling $10,000 per borrower would cost between $210 billion and $280 billion.

Canceling existing student debt would also do little to help future college students, borrowers who have already paid off their loans and those who never went to college in the first place.

Biden also campaigned on making community colleges free, a move that would require an act of Congress, but that proposal was cut from his Build Back Better agenda.
Joseph Steinfels, a public defender in Illinois, sees student loan debt cancellation as something that would increase the economic disparity in the US.

"I can't get past the fact that this would not help my clients, the ones truly suffering, or the millions of others who never set foot in college," said Steinfels, a former Marine.
"It's taking taxpayer dollars and creating unjust enrichment," he said.

Steinfels, now 45, fully paid off the loans he borrowed for his undergraduate degree. He used a combination of military benefits and his own funds to pay for his three graduate degrees and a certificate.

"I personally had a unique path, and I'm just so grateful," he said.
Steinfels, who has four children, considers himself an independent and said student loan policy wouldn't be a "make-or-break" issue for him next time he goes to the polls.

‘Surrender or die’: Ghost village tries to push back Russians

 by AFP
March 28, 2022
By Danny Kemp

Russian snipers are still targeting the deserted crossroads into the village of Stoyanka, but Andrii Ostapets hopes to bring food to his neighbours — and to his cats, if they are still alive.

A soldier patrols at a checkpoint in Stoyanka, on March 27, 2022, 

amid Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fadel Senna / AFP

The 69-year-old private museum owner has returned one week after fleeing the village on Kyiv’s western edge, having heard that Ukrainian troops were driving back Moscow’s forces.

“We saw people killed, we saw burnt down houses, we lived through hell” when Russia occupied the village, says Ostapets, protected from the biting cold by a thick leather jacket.

“Yesterday they pushed them back from our farm. The Russians have no chance to stay alive — they can either surrender or die.”

A bitter wind whips through Stoyanka, which has been turned into a ghost village after nearly a month on the western frontline of Russia’s attempt to encircle the Ukrainian capital.

The sound of shelling still booms from the low forested hills that surround the village — where Ukrainian defence volunteer forces say Russian snipers are lurking. Gunfire crackles at a distance.

The fighting continues despite Moscow signalling on Friday that it had scaled down the aims of its month-old invasion of Ukraine, focusing now on the eastern Donbas area.

Ukraine says it is pushing back the stalled Russian advance on Kyiv in areas such as Stoyanka, just half a kilometre (about 500 yards) from the western city limits.

“I have a full car of groceries, the people and pets who stayed there, we’ll bring them food,” says Ostapets. “We are waiting for permission and we will go save those alive.”

‘Shot by snipers’

Most of the houses on the approach to Stoyanka appear to be empty, and some have been destroyed by shelling.

At a sandbagged checkpoint where people are waiting to deliver aid, one militia member said it was “suicidal” to try to cross into the main part of the village at the moment.

“Two civilians were shot by snipers today,” says a civil defence volunteer toting a Kalashnikov rifle, his face covered by an olive green balaclava.

The village was still being targeted by sniper fire, mortars and shelling, much of it coming from the surrounding woods, said the volunteer, asking not to be named.

Of the residents who have braved the fighting to stay, many are running short of food.

A surprise arrival at the scene is Ostapets’ daughter, Snizhana Shokina, who says she has come to join the aid effort because the war “hurts the soul”.

“I didn’t tell my parents I would come, because they would start worrying. I just decided to come,” says the 45-year-old mother-of-two, wearing a designer biker jacket.

“They want to bring them food and I want to help and support them.”

‘Historical enemy’

Her parents fled Stoyanka after a shell exploded in their garden, throwing her mother to the ground and leaving a large crater.

Their cats “probably were killed but we hope most of them stayed alive”.

The road ahead for the volunteers is dangerous.

A pile of twisted metal that used to be a petrol station sits on the other side of the debris-strewn crossroads on the main western highway out of Kyiv.

A van driven by military volunteers stops to check on a team of AFP journalists, warns them that Russian snipers are targeting the junction, then careers across at high-speed.

But Ostapets, a history buff who says Russia is a “historical enemy” going back to a bloody conquest of Kyiv in the 12th century, insists it is a violent rearguard action by Moscow’s 21st-century forces.

“The Russians ran out of ammunition and have been broken up into small groups. Small arms and snipers in this situation won’t help them,” adds Ostapets.

“They killed every living creature, cats, dogs. They ran out of provision, so they broke in everywhere and stole everything.”

With a broad smile he waves a fist in the air and shouts “Glory to Ukraine!”

Spotlight of shame on companies sticking with Russia

Major French retailer Auchan, whose logo is pictured on a shopping center in Moscow on March 24, 2022, has remained in Russia, prompting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to insist that "French companies must quit the Russian market" 

(AFP/NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA)


Juliette MICHEL
Sun, March 27, 2022, 

American professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is putting public pressure on Western companies that maintain operations in Russia despite its war against neighboring Ukraine.

The Yale University expert on management and leadership has them on a list publicly posted for consumers and investors around the world to see, the idea being that the shame will make the businesses change course and leave Russia.

Sonnenfeld believes that the tougher daily life is for Russian citizens, the more motivated they will be to turn against President Vladimir Putin.

In an interview he tells AFP he has spoken out because there is "no middle ground" possible with Moscow regarding its invasion.

Why did you start the list?

Sonnenfeld: "There were about a dozen companies that moved to cut ties with Russia after it invaded the Ukraine. They were not the companies that usually move first on social or human rights issues. Among them were oil companies, professional services firms and law offices, and tech giants.

"But, there were also a flood of pretenders -- companies that had clever public relations putting out smokescreens of misleading messaging. So, I put together a little team that has no particular ideology or involvement with these companies and can objectively assess them.

"It was originally just a list showing those which did something and those who did nothing, but we realized that was not enough. Now, there are five categories, from a complete withdrawal to people who are digging in."

Why did some companies leave?

"For the very first movers, some might argue that there was some element of self-interest because they may have been for instance intertwined with the oligarchs and wanted to jump ahead of any reputation risk.

"Some companies that have been quite controversial over the past four or five years, like oil companies over climate change or tech companies over privacy, wanted to use this opportunity to show that they're capable of doing the right thing.

"There's another piece to it: their employees were revolting. Gen Z is really holding to the principles that where they shop as customers, where they invest as shareholders, and where they choose to work is critical. Inside major consulting firms, there was anger about being servants to evil."

Is it a valid argument to stay for sake of employees or citizens in Russia?

"It's disgusting that any of these companies (that stay in Russia) try for some humanitarian or paternalistic employer arguments. It's just because of their own greed. They should be called out and shamed for it."

Companies staying "undermines the whole purpose of the economic sanctions and these voluntary business blockades. Which is not to bring comfort to the Russian population and allow them to continue to be complacent. It is to make them uncomfortable; it is to increase the sense of stress in Russian society, so that they question their leadership.

"There are some people who sympathetically say 'the Russian general population has filtered information.' Well, every Russian knows that too.... They should be questioning the truth of what they're being told, and if they don't, they are willingly ignorant.

"When ceasefires are openly violated by the Russians or when you have children's hospitals being bombed, there's no middle ground here.

"We hear every day from companies that are furious (about being on the list). They'll send us examples of threats that they're getting from international hacker groups like Anonymous. Well, that's not our problem. This is a choice they've made. And if there's backlash from the community, they should change their position."

jum-gc/mlm

Afghan women’s rights groups vow mass protests if Taliban keep girls’ schools shut



Issued on: 28/03/2022 - 

01:28 Afghan women and girls take part in a protest in front of the Ministry of Education in Kabul on March 26, 2022. © Ahmad Sahel Arman, AFP

Text by: FRANCE 24Follow

Women’s rights activists pledged Sunday to launch a wave of protests across Afghanistan if the Taliban fail to reopen girls’ secondary schools within a week.

Thousands of secondary school girls had flocked to classes on Wednesday after the hardline Islamists reopened their institutions for the first time since seizing power last August.

But officials ordered the schools shut again just hours into the day, triggering international outrage.

“We call on the leaders of the Islamic Emirate to open girls’ schools within one week,” activist Halima Nasari read from a statement issued by four women’s rights groups at a press conference in Kabul.

“If the girls’ schools remain closed even after one week, we will open them ourselves and stage demonstrations throughout the country until our demands are met.”

The Taliban should be building more schools for girls in rural areas rather than shutting existing facilities, said the statement, which comes after several women’s activists were detained in recent months.

“The people can no longer tolerate such oppression. We do not accept any excuse from the authorities,” it said.

On Saturday, about two dozen schoolgirls and women staged a protest in Kabul demanding the reopening of the schools.

“Women, teachers and girls should come out on the streets and protest,” said student Zarghuna Ibrahimi, 16, who attended the press conference.

“The international community should support us.”

The education ministry has so far not given a clear reason for its policy reversal, but senior Taliban leader Suhail Shaheel told AFP that some “practical issues” were still to be resolved before reopening the schools.
Separate days at parks

Since storming back to power the Taliban have rolled back two decades of gains made by Afghanistan’s women, who have been squeezed out of many government jobs, barred from travelling alone, and ordered to dress according to a strict interpretation of the Koran.

>> Life under the Taliban: Afghan women facing hardship six months on

The Taliban had promised a softer version of the harsh Islamist rule that characterised their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001.

But many restrictions have still crept back, often implemented locally at the whim of regional officials.

Some Afghan women initially resisted the curbs, holding small protests where they demanded the right to education and work.

But the Taliban soon rounded up the ringleaders, holding them incommunicado while denying that they had been detained.

Since their release, most have gone silent.

On Sunday, the Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice ordered that men and women should not visit parks in Kabul on the same days.

Women are now permitted to visit parks on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, while the remaining days were reserved for men, a ministry notification said.

“It is not the Islamic Emirate’s order but our God’s order that men and women who are strangers to each other should not gather at one place,” Mohammad Yahya Aref, an official at the ministry, told AFP.

“This way women will be able to enjoy their time and freedom. No man will be there to trouble them,” he said, adding that religious police were already implementing the order.

(AFP)

Is Geometry a Language That Only Humans Know?

Neuroscientists are exploring whether shapes like squares and rectangles — and our ability to recognize them — are part of what makes our species special.


By Siobhan Roberts
March 22, 2022

During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special.

Dr. Dehaene has spent decades probing the evolutionary roots of our mathematical instinct; this was the subject of his 1996 book, “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.” Lately, he has zeroed in on a related question: What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? Part of the answer, Dr. Dehaene believes, might be our seemingly innate intuitions about geometry.

Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican workshop addressed the subject “Symbols, Myths and Religious Sense in Humans Since the First” — that is, since the first humans emerged a couple of million years back. Dr. Dehaene began his slide show with a collage of photographs showing symbols engraved in rock — scythes, axes, animals, gods, suns, stars, spirals, zigzags, parallel lines, dots. Some of the photos he took during a trip to the Valley of Marvels in southern France. These engravings are thought to date back to the Bronze Age, from roughly 3,300 B.C. to 1,200 B.C.; others were 70,000 and 540,000 years old. He also showed a photo of a “biface” stone implement — spherical at one end, triangular at the other — and he noted that humans sculpted similar tools 1.8 million years ago.

For Dr. Dehaene, it is the inclination to imagine — a triangle, the laws of physics, the square root of negative 1 — that captures the essence of being human. “The argument I made in the Vatican is that the same ability is at the heart of our capacity to imagine religion,” he recalled recently.

He acknowledged, with a laugh, that it is no small leap from imagining a triangle to devising religion. (His own intellectual trajectory entailed a degree in mathematics and a master’s in computer science before becoming a neuroscientist). Nevertheless, he said, “This is what we have to explain: Suddenly there was an explosion of new ideas with the human species.”



Geometric shapes appear below the Megaloceros, a giant extinct deer, in the Lascaux, France, cave paintings, which are thought to be 17,000 years old.

Credit...Alamy



An engraved slab from the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating to 70,000 years ago.Credit...Album, via Alamy

Human or baboon?

Last spring, Dr. Dehaene and his Ph.D. student Mathias Sablé-Meyer published, with collaborators, a study that compared the ability of humans and baboons to perceive geometric shapes. The team wondered: What was the simplest task in the geometric domain — independent of natural language, culture, education — that might reveal a signature difference between human and nonhuman primates? The challenge was to measure not merely visual perception but a deeper cognitive process.

This line of investigation has a long history, yet is perennially fascinating, according to Moira Dillon, a cognitive scientist at New York University who has collaborated with Dr. Dehaene on other research. Plato believed that humans were uniquely attuned to geometry; the linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that language is a biologically rooted human capacity. Dr. Dehaene aims to do for geometry what Dr. Chomsky did for language. “Stan’s work is truly innovative,” Dr. Dillon said, noting that he uses state-of-the-art tools such as computational models, cross-species research, artificial intelligence and functional M.R.I. neuroimaging techniques.

In the experiment, subjects were shown six quadrilaterals and asked to detect the one that was unlike the others. For all the human participants — French adults and kindergartners as well as adults from rural Namibia with no formal education — this “intruder” task was significantly easier when either the baseline shapes or the outlier were regular, possessing properties such as parallel sides and right angles.

Try the “Intruder” Test:

Click the yellow cross to start, then choose the shape that is the odd one out.


The researchers called this the “geometric regularity effect” and they hypothesized — it’s a fragile hypothesis, they admit — that this might provide, as they noted in their paper, a “putative signature of human singularity.” (Experiments are ongoing and open to participants online.)

With the baboons, regularity made no difference, the team found. Twenty-six baboons — including Muse, Dream and Lips — participated in this aspect of the study, which was run by Joël Fagot, a cognitive psychologist at Aix-Marseille University.

The baboons live at a research facility in the South of France, beneath the Montagne Sainte-Victoire (a favorite of Cézanne’s), and they are fond of the testing booths and their 19-inch touch-screen devices. (Dr. Fagot noted that the baboons were free to enter the testing booth of their choice — there were 14 — and that they were “maintained in their social group during testing.”) They mastered the oddity test when training with nongeometric images — picking out an apple, say, among five slices of watermelon. But when presented with regular polygons, their performance collapsed.

Fruit, Flower, Geometry

Symbols used to test whether baboons can pick out a non-matching symbol within a group.

By The New York Times | Source: Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Stanislas Dehaene et al.

“The results are striking, and there seems indeed a difference between the perception of shapes by humans and baboons,” Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said in an email. “Whether this difference in perception amounts to human ‘singularity’ would have to await research on our closest primate relatives, the apes,” Dr. de Waal said. “It is also possible, as the authors argue (and reject), that humans live in an environment where right angles matter, whereas baboons do not.”

Probing further, the researchers tried to replicate the performance of humans and baboons with artificial intelligence, using neural-network models that are inspired by basic mathematical ideas of what a neuron does and how neurons are connected. These models — statistical systems powered by high-dimensional vectors, matrices multiplying layers upon layers of numbers — successfully matched the baboons’ performance but not the humans’; they failed to reproduce the regularity effect. However, when researchers made a souped-up model with symbolic elements — the model was given a list of properties of geometric regularity, such as right angles, parallel lines — it closely replicated the human performance.

These results, in turn, set a challenge for artificial intelligence. “I love the progress in A.I.,” Dr. Dehaene said. “It’s very impressive. But I believe that there is a deep aspect missing, which is symbol processing” — that is, the ability to manipulate symbols and abstract concepts, as the human brain does. This is the subject of his latest book, “How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine … for Now.”

Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal, agreed that current A.I lacks something related to symbols or abstract reasoning. Dr. Dehaene’s work, he said, presents “evidence that human brains are using abilities that we don’t yet find in state-of-the-art machine learning.”

That’s especially so, he said, when we combine symbols while composing and recomposing pieces of knowledge, which helps us to generalize. This gap could explain the limitations of A.I. — a self-driving car, for instance — and the system’s inflexibility when faced with environments or scenarios that differ from the training repertoire. And it’s an indication, Dr. Bengio said, of where A.I. research needs to go.

Dr. Bengio noted that from the 1950s to the 1980s symbolic-processing strategies dominated the “good old-fashioned A.I.” But these approaches were motivated less by the desire to replicate the abilities of human brains than by logic-based reasoning (for example, verifying a theorem’s proof). Then came statistical A.I. and the neural-network revolution, beginning in the 1990s and gaining traction in the 2010s. Dr. Bengio was a pioneer of this deep-learning method, which was directly inspired by the human brain’s network of neurons.

His latest research proposes expanding the capabilities of neural-networks by training them to generate, or imagine, symbols and other representations.

It’s not impossible to do abstract reasoning with neural networks, he said, “it’s just that we don’t know yet how to do it.” Dr. Bengio has a major project lined up with Dr. Dehaene (and other neuroscientists) to investigate how human conscious processing powers might inspire and bolster next-generation A.I. “We don’t know what’s going to work and what’s going to be, at the end of the day, our understanding of how brains do it,” Dr. Bengio said.




Credit...Video by Yoshi Sodeoka


To know a triangle

The French mathematician René Descartes reckoned that “we could never know the geometric triangle through the one we see traced on paper if our mind had not had the idea of it elsewhere.” Dr. Dehaene and Mr. Sablé-Meyer borrow this sentiment in the epigraph of a new study, currently under review, wherein they try to pin down that cognitive “elsewhere” — offering theories and empirical evidence of what “elsewhere” might be.

Building on research originating in the 1980s, they propose a “language of thought” to explain how geometric shapes might be encoded in the mind. And in a fittingly circuitous twist, they find inspiration in computers.

“We postulate that when you look at a geometric shape, you immediately have a mental program for it,” Dr. Dehaene said. “You understand it, inasmuch as you have a program to reproduce it.” In computational terms, this is called program induction. “It’s not trivial,” he said. “It’s a big problem in artificial intelligence — to induce a program to do a certain thing from its input and output. In this case, it’s just an output, which is the drawing of the shape.”

In tackling such questions, Josh Tenenbaum, a computational cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the new paper under review, likes to ask: How do we humans manage to extract so much from so little — so little data, time, energy? His approach is to solve the puzzle of these inductive leaps.

“Instead of being inspired by simple mathematical ideas of what a neuron does, it’s inspired by simple mathematical ideas of what thinking is,” he said; the distinction is one of hardware versus software, essentially. It’s an approach motivated by the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, among others, and the notion that thinking is a kind of programming.

With this new study, Dr. Dehaene and Mr. Sablé-Meyer began by proposing a programming language for drawing shapes. But the novelty, Mr. Sablé-Meyer said, wasn’t in simply proposing the language — “there must be thousands of them by now, starting with Logo in the ’60s and a whole lot of derivative turtle graphics” — but rather in devising a language that mimics our human competence for geometry.

Try the Match-to-Sample Test:

Click inside the yellow circle, watch closely for the sample shape, then find its match among the collection of shapes that appears.

The language is made up of geometric primitives, including basic building blocks of shapes, as well as rules that dictate how these can be combined to produce symmetries and patterns. The ultimate goal, however, in inventing such a language isn’t merely drawing, Mr. Sablé-Meyer said; it’s in developing “a good candidate theory for cognition” — a plausible theory for how thoughts, or computations, are processed in the mind.




Petroglyphs at Mount Bégo, Valley of Marvels, in southern France.

Credit...Stanislas Dehaene




A spiral stone engraving on Signal Hill in Saguaro NationalPark, Arizona, dated 550 to 1,550 years ago.

Credit...John Cancalosi/Alamy


Next the researchers used an A.I. algorithm called DreamCoder, developed a few years ago by Kevin Ellis when he was a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Tenenbaum; he is now a computer scientist at Cornell University and an author of the new study. DreamCoder modeled how the mind might use the programming language in optimally processing shapes: the algorithm finds, or learns, the shortest possible program for any given shape or pattern. The theory is that the mind operates in much the same way.

Geometric Language

Researchers developed a programming language to generate shapes of increasing complexity. The theory is the brain similarly encodes shapes as programs in a language.

At right, shapes found across many cultures include lines, circles, spirals, zigzags, squares and squares of circles.
◀ LESS COMPLEX
MORE COMPLEX ▶
The programming language drew increasingly complex shapes that combined lines, circles, arcs and spirals.
By The New York Times | Source: Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Stanislas Dehaene et al.

The researchers then added humans back into the equation, by testing the ability of subjects to process shapes of varying complexity that the programming language had generated. During one test, they measured how long it took people to memorize a shape such as a squiggly curve, compared with how long it took to find that shape among a collection of six similar squiggles (called the match-to-sample test). The researchers found that the more complex a shape and the longer the program, the more difficulty a subject had remembering it or discriminating it from others.

The baboons are trying this test now. But beyond these behavioral studies, the researchers hope to probe even deeper into symbolic thought — at Dr. Dehaene’s NeuroSpin neuroimaging lab, with functional M.R.I.s that measure neural activity while subjects entertain geometric confections. Dr. Dehaene already has some data showing that the brain regions involved — in the prefrontal and parietal lobes — overlap with those known to be associated with the human “number sense.”

The brain areas that light up for the language of geometry are what Dr. Dehaene and his former Ph.D. student, Marie Amalric, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, called the math-responsive network. “They are very different from the classical regions activated by spoken or written language, such as Broca’s area,” he said.

Language is often assumed to be the quality that demarcates human singularity, Dr. Dehaene noted, but perhaps there is something that is more basic, more fundamental.

“We are proposing that there are languages — multiple languages — and that, in fact, language may not have started as a communication device, but really as a representation device, the ability to represent facts about the outside world,” he said. “That’s what we are after.”


A version of this article appears in print on March 22, 2022, Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Decoding Shapes.