Cats purrfectly demonstrate what it takes to trust robots

UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

 

IMAGE: 

CAT WITH THE ROBOT ARM IN THE CAT ROYALE INSTALLATION 

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CREDIT: BLAST THEORY - STEPHEN DALY

Would you trust a robot to look after your cat? New research suggests it takes more than a carefully designed robot to care for your cat, the environment in which they operate is also vital, as well as human interaction.

Cat Royale is a unique collaboration between Computer Scientists from the University of Nottingham and artists at Blast Theory who worked together to create a multispecies world centred around a be-spoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. The installation was launched in 2023 at the World Science Festival in Brisbane, Australia and has been touring since, it has just won a Webby award for its creative experience.

The research paper, “Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans” has just been presented at the annual Computer-Human Conference (CHI’24) where it won best paper. It outlines how designing the technology and its interactions is not sufficient, but that it is equally important to consider the design of the `world' in which the technology operates. The research also highlights the necessity of human involvement in areas such as breakdown recovery, animal welfare, and their role as audience.

Cat Royale centred around a robot arm offering activities to make the cats happier, these included dragging a ‘mouse’ toy along the floor, raising a feather ‘bird’ into the air, and even offering them treats to eat. The team then trained an AI to learn what games the cats liked best so that it could personalise their experiences.

 “At first glance, the project is about designing a robot to enrich the lives of a family of cats by playing with them. “ commented Professor Steve Benford from the University of Nottingham who led the research, “Under the surface, however, it explores the question of what it takes to trust a robot to look after our loved ones and potentially ourselves.”

Working with Blast Theory to develop and then study Cat Royale, the research team gained important insights into the design of robots and its interactions with the cats. They had to design the robot to pick up toys, deploy them in ways that excited the cats, while it learned which games each cat liked. They also designed the entire world in which the cats and the robot lived, providing safe spaces for the cats to observe the robot and from which to sneak up on it, and decorating it so that the robot had the best chance of spotting the approaching cats. 

The implication is designing robots involves interior design as well as engineering and AI. If you want to introduce robots into your home to look after your loved ones, then you will likely need to redesign your home.

Research workshops for Cat Royale were held at the Univeraity of Nottingham’s unique Cobotmaker Space where stakeholders were bought together to think about the design of the robot /welfare of cats. Eike Schneiders, Transitional Assistant Professor in the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham worked on the design, he said: “As we learned through Cat Royale, creating a multispecies system—where cats, robots, and humans are all accounted for—takes more than just designing the robot. We had to ensure animal wellbeing at all times, while simultaneously ensuring that the interactive installation engaged the (human) audiences around the world. This involved consideration of many elements, including the design of the enclosure, the robot and its underlying systems, the various roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and, of course, the selection of the cats.” 

 

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DOI

10.1145/3613904.3642115 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

11-May-2024

Report looks at ‘stigma’ through a new lens to stamp it out of society

Stigma is a glue that holds poverty, inequality and economic insecurity in place enabling and exacerbating inequalities of wealth, health and opportunity, says a new report

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

Stigma is a glue that holds poverty, inequality and economic insecurity in place enabling and exacerbating inequalities of wealth, health and opportunity, says a new report.

Poverty Stigma is a ‘wicked social problem’, highly complex, difficult to define and challenging to solve, says the report.

Co-authored by Professor Imogen Tyler, from the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, and Sarah Campbell, the Head of Participation and Advocacy at UK leading poverty charity Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the report is the outcome of a year-long project involving a group of ten people from a diverse range of lived experiences and professional expertise.

The JRF Poverty and Stigma Design team comprises people with lived and learned knowledge of poverty and poverty stigma from a range of sectors including housing associations, local government, care experienced sector, arts and youth work, health and disability charities, and academia.

Loosening the grip of that stigma provides ‘a key lever’ to change the collective work being carried out to combat poverty in the UK.

Published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), the report highlights that poverty and poverty stigma are ‘inextricably entangled social problems’ that reinforce and feed each other, and which need to be tackled together.

With 3.8 million people, including 1 million children, currently recorded as living in situations the JRF defines as destitution, and tens of millions more struggling to make ends meet during a cost-of-living crisis, poverty is seriously impacting on the nation’s health and mental health.

Working with the JRF Poverty and Stigma Design team and lead author of the report, Professor Tyler, a leading expert on stigma, says: “Poverty in the UK is a political choice.

“The stigmatisation of people living in poverty works to shift the blame onto individuals and families experiencing poverty and this helps justify the shockingly high rates of poverty and destitution we are now seeing in our society. To combat poverty, we need to stop the stigma.”

The study recommends anti-poverty work needs to be anti-stigma work at its roots and in every branch of collective action towards ending poverty in the UK.

And designing stigma out of social systems of welfare and support is integral to the fight for economic justice and economic security.

The group concludes that stigma is:

• Not a 'natural outcome' of poverty – rather it is socially produced.
• Manufactured by the powerful, including politicians and media.
• Frames public perceptions about the causes of poverty, shifting blame away from the systems that created it onto individuals.
• Shapes how people living in poverty are represented and how people experience poverty.
• Designed into systems and programmes of welfare and support, and functions as both a deterrent to help-seeking and a tool for rationing resources.
• Seeps into everyday interactions and, for those on the receiving end, the psychological impact can be as devastating as the struggle involved in surviving a low-income.

The report makes recommendations for effective action on poverty which include ‘reframing’ poverty as an issue of economic injustice and in relation to wealth inequality and developing rights-based understandings and approaches to poverty mitigation.

It also suggests combatting rising in-work poverty by challenging the stigmatisation of low paid work as 'low skilled', and by campaigning for real living wages, pay equity and maximum wage ratios as well as rejecting the stigmatising classification of disabled people and those with unpaid caring responsibilities as ‘economically inactive’.

Going forward, the team hope to create and test an array of tools to support organisations to design stigma out of policies and services.

They also want to commission a range of creative projects working with journalists, artists, creative practitioners, community activists and people on the receiving end of stigma to create images and stories which challenge stigmatising poverty narratives to produce ‘anti-stigma’ image and story banks for journalists, news and charitable organisations.

Sarah Campbell from JRF said: “Stigma is repeatedly deemed an issue in need of urgent attention by people who experience poverty.  This new analysis takes the understanding to a new level and is a call for action to all those working to address the issue of poverty. To address poverty, we must undo the glue that holds it in place.”

Steve Arnott, a member of the JRF Stigma and Poverty Design Team who grew up in poverty and is now a youth outreach worker with disadvantaged young people in Hull with Beats Bus, said: “Starting off your life off living in poverty, leaving school in poverty, getting a job but still being in poverty, poverty is a very hard place to get out of.

“The stigma makes everything worse. Stigma holds poverty in place. It harms and silences people. We can get can stuck in our own fear of being judged by others for being poor.

“The media also pushes a lot of poverty stigma, it brainwashes people into blaming people for poverty.

“This JRF project is about raising awareness about poverty stigma, about educating people about the harm it does, and about coming up with tools we need to tackle it. This report is a first step in that work.”

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation works to speed up and support the transition to a future free from poverty, in which people and planet can flourish www.jrf.org.uk 

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ARTICLE TITLE

Poverty stigma: a glue that holds poverty in place

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - DOKUMEN.PUB

 

Downsizing local news contributes to crumbling infrastructure

Study links local journalism with voter support for fixing public works, which adds to climate resilience

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - LOS ANGELES

Key takeaways

• A new study from UCLA and Duke University shows local journalism that produces detailed coverage about aging infrastructure increases voter support for additional infrastructure investment.

• Basic, undetailed reporting, like that from severely understaffed newsrooms or AI-generated stories, resulted in lower support for infrastructure spending.

• Voters demonstrated a willingness to hold local politicians accountable when provided with context in local reporting. 

Reading strong local journalism is tied to greater support for funding dams, sewers and other basic infrastructure vital to climate resilience, according to new research from UCLA and Duke University.

The study, published this month in the journal Political Behavior, found that reading fictionalized samples of news coverage with specific local details about infrastructure maintenance requirements led to as much as 10% more electoral support for infrastructure spending compared to reading bare-bones reporting. Just a few extra paragraphs of context in the mock news stories not only increased support for spending, but also increased voters’ willingness to hold politicians accountable for infrastructure neglect by voting them out of office.

“Local news reporting builds public support for infrastructure investments,” said UCLA political scientist Megan Mullin, a co-author of the study whose research focuses on environmental politics.

“Heat, floods, drought and fire are putting new stress on aging and deteriorating infrastructure, which must be maintained to protect communities against these growing climate risks,” said Mullin, a UCLA public policy professor and faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. “Our study shows that investing in facilities that improve our resilience to climate hazards requires investing in the health of local news.”

Private ownership has cut or eliminated local news staff nationwide, reducing original reporting and local political stories while focusing on national news that can be centrally produced and shared in many newspapers within the same ownership structure, the study’s authors noted. They cited research that found 300 to 500 fewer political stories after average staffing cuts, and a Pew Research Center found that 56% of newspaper employment disappeared from 2008-2022. With fewer reporters staffing newsrooms, the depth of reporting on infrastructure declines.

“Local newsroom capacity is critical to democracy,” said co-author Andrew Trexler, a Duke University doctoral candidate studying political communication. “Our study shows that when newsrooms can commit resources to report more information about infrastructure conditions and failure risks, readers notice and are more willing to hold officials accountable for inaction, and more willing to support higher spending.”

The study surveyed more than 3,300 adults. Each read a news-style story about an upcoming election with an incumbent mayor, a mayoral challenger and a property tax increase averaging $40 annually to fund aging infrastructure. The sample stories, viewable on page 15 of the study’s appendix, described either a local dam or a sewer system.

Control groups read basic, limited-information versions of the articles representing what might be generated with little reporting staff or even AI. Other groups read more complex coverage with a few extra paragraphs: either an investigative version highlighting longstanding flaws and government neglect; a contextual version referring to a similar nearby dam or sewer that failed disastrously; or a combined investigative and contextual version. Study participants then indicated how they would likely vote.

All of the detailed articles increased infrastructure support compared to the control.

“Across the board, we saw more support for infrastructure spending when people read news coverage that provided context about infrastructure neglect and its consequences,” Mullin said. “Empty newsrooms and AI reporting don’t provide communities with the information they need to make investments for their own health and security.”

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JOURNAL

Political Behavior

 

Facebook Marketplace is home to steals and deals—and serious trust issues

UBC study uncovers insights into users’ love-hate relationship with online resale platform

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

 

IMAGE: 

DR. KONSTANTIN BEZNOSOV

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CREDIT: DR. KONSTANTIN BEZNOSOV

Love it or hate it, Facebook Marketplace is the largest online resale site today with more than one billion monthly users. A new study conducted by UBC researchers sheds light on the intricate web of trust, privacy and safety factors shaping users’ experiences on this popular platform.

Researchers interviewed 42 Facebook Marketplace buyers and sellers in the U.S. and Canada to uncover the factors associated with trading decisions.

“Concerns for physical and financial safety, as well as well-being, were top of mind among users, reflecting the inherent risks associated with trading with strangers—particularly because goods are exchanged in person,” said Dr. Konstantin Beznosov, senior researcher on the study and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UBC. “Many participants hesitated to rate sellers, citing physical safety concerns and the challenge of balancing feedback with anonymity.”

Participants were also uncomfortable with the inseparable link between the Marketplace and Facebook, raising privacy red flags as personal details became intertwined with trading activities.

Because of these reservations, users remained vigilant while trading on the site, closely monitoring transactional signals, such as negotiation conversations, location preferences and signs of trader authenticity: perceived impoliteness, flirtatious or patronizing language, or multiple grammatical errors suggesting a foreign scammer.

“Despite these persistent trust concerns, most participants continued to use the Marketplace because it’s simple to set up and offers wide audience reach, and it’s effective in facilitating sales,” said Dr. Beznosov.

In response to the study’s findings, the researchers proposed increasing user safety and privacy on the Marketplace, including enhancing user understanding of the implications of sharing personal information, and adding features that strike a balance between privacy and trust—for example, by implementing a profile verification process.

Facebook, Dr. Beznosov added, should also offer more transparent communication channels for user feedback.

“At the end of the day, every market—even online platforms—carries an element of ‘buyer beware.’ But it’s always possible to create a safer, more trustworthy trading environment on Facebook Marketplace. We should be helping users to make more informed choices about the tradeoffs between benefits and risks in any online marketplace, particularly those in which goods are exchanged in person.”

Results from the study will be presented today (May 13) at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI conference, the leading conference on human-computer interaction research.

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DOI

10.1145/3613904.3641966 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Trust, Privacy, and Safety Factors Associated with Decision Making in P2P Markets Based on Social Networks: A Case Study of Facebook Marketplace in USA and Canada

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-May-2024

BAD KARMA TO TORTURE YOUR FOOD

More than 200 factory farms set up in UK in five years ‘creating living hell for animals’

Charity calls on government to stop approving systems that are ‘living hell’ for millions more animals as ‘cruelty hits all-time high’

Jane Dalton

Pigs kept in cages so small they cannot turn round on UK factory farms

More than 200 factory farms have been set up in the UK in just five years, creating what campaigners called “a living hell” for an extra 139 million animals.

Numbers of intensive systems have ballooned by 13 per cent, with 209 more intensive pig and poultry units, according to a new report which looked at the latest available figures.

In 2017 there were 236 pig factory farms in the UK; by 2022 there were 268, a rise of 32. In the same period, poultry factory farms rose from 1,376 to 1,553 – an increase of 177.

Sow stalls prevent mother pigs from standing, turning or moving

 (World Animal Protection)

In all there were 1,821 intensive farms, designed to “maximise production and profit” and accounting for four in five farm animals. The government said all farms are closely regulated and inspected.

Residents in several places have fought campaigns against plans in recent years to open factory farms near them, fearing pollution of air, land and water from run-off, as well as foul smells.

World Animal Protection, which compiled the report, said the expansion of factory farming means cruelty has hit record levels.

Lindsay Duncan, the charity’s farming campaigns manager, called on the government to stop approving new factory farms.

Some experts have previously called on banks and the International Monetary Fund to stop investing in factory farming to cut the risk of future pandemics.


According to the report’s authors, pigs and chickens bred for meat are reared in the lowest possible welfare conditions legally allowed.

They claim high death rates are the norm, with more than a million broiler chickens dying each week.

Farrowing crates are being banned in other countries (World Animal Protection)

The report, called “Confined in Cruelty: The Stark Reality of UK Farming”, sets out how factory farming harms the environment by using large quantities of feed, water, energy and medications, as well as causing high levels of air, water and soil pollution.


It says animals bred to grow rapidly or produce high yields suffer lameness, weakened or broken bones, infections and organ failure and reproductive difficulties.

Intensive farms drive the climate crisis through deforestation, the document warns: “The UK imported £3.3 billion pounds of animal feed in 2022, and is a major contributor to deforestation of the Amazon, Cerrado, and other biodiversity rich regions, to produce grain and soy-based animal feeds.”

Illegall deforestation by land-grabbers and cattle farmers is a problem in Brazil (AP)

Factory farming also contributes to growing antibiotic resistance, it is also claimed.

World Animal Protection says the UK has fallen behind seven European countries on farmed animal welfare.


Sweden, Switzerland and Norway have banned routine use of farrowing crates where mother pigs cannot turn around but the charity says “these horrific contraptions are still commonplace on UK farms”. 

“Enriched cages” for hens – described as battery cages with a postcard-size space added – are typical on UK factory farms but will be banned in Germany next year, in Czechia by 2027 and in Slovakia by 2030, while France has banned any new cages.

Crowded conditions contribute to disease and antibiotic resistance, it is claimed (World Animal Protection)

Scotland announced a consultation on banning enriched cages last month but England and Wales have not.

The EU has banned preventative use of antibiotics, which activists say allows animals to survive in “squalid conditions” – but the UK has not.

A poll for World Animal Protection found more than two-thirds of people think allowing piglets to have their tails cut off without pain relief – often done in factory farms – is cruel. 

World Animal Protection estimates by last year there were at least 1.71 billion animals in UK factory farms.

A government spokesperson said: “All farms are closely regulated, with more than 4,800 government-funded farm inspections taking place last year. These help farmers improve their practices and reduce environmental impacts, especially on our waterways.


“We have set highly ambitious legally binding targets to reduce water pollution from agriculture and our farming schemes are supporting farmers to reduce pollution and agricultural run-off.

“All farm animals are also protected by comprehensive UK law on animal health and welfare.”

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/beasts-burden-antagonism-and-practical-history

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History | libcom.org

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History. An attempt to rethink the separation between animal liberationist and communist politics. (Published ...

#NOSECRETS

Australian ex-army lawyer sentenced to five years for Afghan war leaks

David McBride leaked information that alleged Australian troops killed unarmed men and children in Afghanistan

 AFP |

Whistleblower David McBride speaking at an event in aid of Julian Assange in February. Photo: David McBride/Facebook

An Australian judge sentenced a former army lawyer to more than five years in jail Tuesday for stealing secret defence files on the Afghanistan war and leaking them to the media.

David McBride, who pleaded guilty in November to three charges of stealing and sharing military information, was given five years and eight months' imprisonment, Australian media reports said.

McBride must serve a minimum of two years and three months before being eligible for parole, they said, after the ruling by Justice David Mossop in the Australian Capital Territory's Supreme Court in Canberra.

Public broadcaster ABC said it used the leaked material for the "Afghan Files", a 2017 series alleging that Australian soldiers were involved in the illegal killings of unarmed men and children in Afghanistan.

McBride's lawyer, Mark Davis, said outside the court he would be launching an appeal, a decision greeted by applause from a gathering of supporters.

The appeal would be based on the question of what "duty" means, he said.

McBride had pleaded guilty in November last year to three charges of stealing and leaking military information to journalists at the ABC.

He made the plea after his lawyers reportedly failed to convince the judge that his oath of military service gave him a duty to reveal information if it was in the public interest.
'Afghan files'

After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, more than 26,000 Australian uniformed personnel were sent to Afghanistan to fight alongside US and allied forces against the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist groups.

Australian combat troops left the country in 2013, but since then, a series of often-brutal accounts have emerged about the conduct of Australia's elite special forces units.

They range from reports of troops killing a six-year-old child in a house raid, to a dead foe's hand being severed, to a prisoner being shot dead to save space in a helicopter.

The ABC's "Afghan Files" revelations led police to investigate its reporter Daniel Oakes and his producer Sam Clark for obtaining classified information -- even raiding the broadcaster's Sydney headquarters, before dropping the case.

In November 2020, a years-long public inquiry reported that Australia's elite special forces "unlawfully killed" 39 civilians and prisoners in Afghanistan, including by summary execution as part of initiation rituals.

It recommended that 19 individuals be referred to Australian Federal Police, compensation be paid to the families of victims, and that the military carry out a slew of reforms.

Lawyer Sacked For Exposing Israel's AI-Assisted Genocide In Gaze 

Dawn News English

May 12, 2024 

Join Shahzeb Jillani on the 'Spotlight Show' as he sits down with human rights lawyer Ousman Noor from 'The Civilian Agenda (CSO), who was sacked for speaking out against Israel's use of AI-assisted genocide in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories.

ChatGPT-maker releases latest free model

AFP Published May 14, 2024 


SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI on Monday released a higher performing and more efficient version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins its popular generative tool ChatGPT, making it free to all users.

The update to OpenAI’s flagship product landed a day before Google is expected to make its own announcements about Gemini, the search engine giant’s own AI tool competing with ChatGPT head on.

“We’re very, very excited to bring GPT-4o to all of our free users out there,” Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said at the highly anticipated launch event in San Francisco.

The new model will be rolled out in OpenAI’s products over the next weeks, the company said.

Murati and engineers from OpenAI demonstrated the new powers of GPT-4o at the virtual event, asking questions and posing challenges to the beefed-up version of the ChatGPT chatbot.

“We know that these models get more and more complex, but we want the experience of interaction to actually become more natural, easy,” Murati said before the demo.

This included asking questions to a human-sounding ChatGPT in Italian and asking the bot to interpret facial expressions or make complex math equations.

The event is just the latest episode in the AI arms race that has seen OpenAI-backer Microsoft propelled past Apple as the world’s biggest company by market capitalisation.

OpenAI and Microsoft are in a heated rivalry with Google to be generative AI’s major player, but Facebook-owner Meta and upstart Anthropic are also making big moves to compete.

All the companies are scrambling to come up with ways to cover generative AI’s exorbitant costs, much of which goes to chip giant Nvidia and its powerful GPU semiconductors.

For now less performing versions of OpenIA or Google’s chatbots are available to customers for free, with questions still lingering over whether the public at large is ready to pay a subscription to maintain access to the technology.

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2024

Targeting girls education: Pakistan’s tribal areas suffer under Taliban influence

Schools are the best weapon against extremism, that’s why the militants fear them.

A mass awareness campaign for girls education with the help of local leaders in the tribal belt should be launched (Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images)

SYED FAZL-E-HAIDER
Published 14 May 2024 

The long, rugged border running along Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas that separates Afghanistan provides no barrier to the influence of the Taliban and its radical policies against women.

A private girls school was blown up on 8 May by unidentified militants in North Waziristan district, the former stronghold of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban. It reflects the impact of the Taliban’s policy of banning girls' education in neighbouring Afghanistan. It was the only private girls school in the area. The school administration had received multiple threatening letters from the militants.

This was not the first attack on a girls school. Attackers targeted two government schools for girls in North Waziristan last year.

Since the takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban has banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and banned women from university. Pakistani Taliban, who are ideologically closer to Afghan Taliban, are trying to enforce the a similar anti-education and theocratic agenda in Pakistan’s tribal areas by force.

Before the all-out military operation launched by Pakistan’s security forces in 2014, the TTP carried out hundreds of attacks on girls schools in the tribal areas and settled districts of the northwestern province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from its stronghold in Swat district. Education was a casualty of the conflict between the militants and the state. The youngest ever Nobel laureate, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the face at 14 by TTP gunmen in 2012. Malala was from Swat – her crime was that she wanted to pursue her education.

The military offensive may check the militants, but it cannot combat the growth of radical attitudes in the Pakistani tribal areas influenced by cross-border extremism.

More than 1,100 girls’ schools were destroyed in the tribal areas between 2007 to 2017, with teachers and young students also targeted. As a result of the military crackdown, TTP militants fled to Afghanistan and began to orchestrate cross border attacks from their new sanctuaries. The Taliban takeover of Kabul has emboldened the TTP, which is fighting to regain control of its strongholds in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The 8 May bombing provoked strong condemnation from UNICEF, with the local country representative Abdullah Fadil calling the attack a severe setback to national progress. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif last week ordered that the girls school be immediately rebuilt and vowed to provide women with equal opportunities for education. But securing education for girls in the tribal areas has proven nigh to impossible, compounded as the Talibanisation of the region continues.

Pakistan’s security forces are carrying out operations against the militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa almost on a daily basis and have even launched airstrikes targeting TTP hideouts. But inside Afghanistan, the Taliban has ignored Islamabad's repeated requests for a crackdown on the TTP. Besides, the military offensive may check the militants, but it cannot combat the growth of radical attitudes in the Pakistani tribal areas influenced by cross-border extremism.

The government needs to adopt a broader approach. For instance, a mass awareness campaign for girls education with the help of local leaders in the tribal belt should be launched. Religious scholars could play a key role by highlighting the importance of girls education and the empowerment of women from Islamic point of view.

Those within the Taliban movement who stand apart from the Taliban’s anti-education and anti-women policies need to be encouraged and deserve international appreciation. For example, Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former senior Taliban official in Kabul, onetime ambassador to Islamabad, an early member of the Taliban, and former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, has criticised the Taliban’s ban on female education. “Those who oppose modern education or invent arguments to undermine its importance, they are either completely ignorant or oppose Muslims under the garb of Islam,” he wrote on X on 5 March.

It is not the Taliban, but Talibanisation that is the real threat. Education is the most powerful weapon against such extremism. That’s why the extremists on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border are pursuing an anti-education agenda.

SUSTAINABLITY

Overflowing cups

Earlier, there was value attached to things and a sensibility too.

Muna Khan 

DAWN

Published May 12, 2024 

ON my travels in the last two years I noticed a new accessory: large water bottles. You know the ones with the straw protruding from its top? The most coveted one at the moment is the one which retails for around $45 — which is roughly Rs12,000, but sells for Rs18,000 in some Karachi markets. This water bottle is a reminder of how our overconsumption is exacerbating the climate crisis.

Despite all the evidence, it doesn’t feel like a climate crisis when you look at our tendency to buy more — of everything. Plenty has been written about how bulk buying of clothes has accelerated fast fashion culture. These fast-moving trends have a devastating impact on the climate, from labour abuse in the garment industry to microfibres polluting Earth and water. The fashion industry is estimated to be responsible for 10 per cent of global carbon emissions, according to a 2020 report by the European Parliament.

Although fashion houses will use terms like ‘sustainable practices’, only 1pc of used clothing is recycled into new clothes. The global textile production has doubled from 58 million tonnes in 2010 and is expected to grow to 145m tonnes by 2030, says the European Environment Agency. This is great news for world economies, except that it takes 200 years for some materials to decompose: synthetic fabrics like polyester, for example, break down into small plastic particles which last forever.

This should horrify us, but one look at women lining up to buy the new XYZ designer lawn collection across Pakistan proves we’ve not grasped the severity of the climate crisis. Or care about it. I can sympathise with this, having heard people say how despondent they feel about the state of the … well, state; how change doesn’t seem likely, so why care about the environment.

My students, however, care very much about the environment, more than politicians do; they are inheriting a planet deluged in waste. But as valiant a generation this Z is proving — defying university’s bullying tactics for example — they are, according to studies, also the most likely to be influenced.

Earlier, there was value attached to things and a sensibility too.

Against this backdrop, what’s the harm in buying a stainless steel cup which comes with a lifetime guarantee? Because it does not stop at one cup.

You only have to go to TikTok to see the cupboards lined up with up to 37 different coloured cups of a single brand. People line up outside stores to buy the new release, there are sites dedicated to selling them. This particular company, which catered to blue collar workers in the US, has gone from earning $73m in 2019 to $750m last year, according to Vox.

The company’s claim, that it can keep cold drinks cold for 11 hours and hot drinks hot for seven hours, received an unlikely boost when, last year, a woman’s cup survived a car fire. The woman posted a Tik Tok (of course) of her burned-to-a-shell car, but the cup remained in its cup holder, and she rattled it to show the ice was still in it. This was marketing gold for the company, which bought the lady a new car and cup.

It is this kind of marketing which adds to a product’s status and makes it more desirable. And causes a lot of problems for the environment. According to a story in the New York Times, producing one stainless steel water bottle was “far more environmentally damaging” than producing a plastic bottle.

I recognise I’m being more judgemental than usual, and while I am loathe to shame people for their choices, I’m bothered by what these cups are selling — health as a status symbol. As Vox pointed out, people leave comments saying they are hydrated bec­ause of such cups. This idea extends to other wellness products: “if you buy these clothes or these classes, you will unlock a better, healthier version of yourself,” writes Vox. Health and hydration, like skin care, supplements, yoga pants etc, are part of a self-care trend that only fuels fast capitalism.

Our elders were not immune to material acquisition, but there was value attached to things and a sensibility too. Clothes were upcycled, passed onto younger children, handed down as heirlooms even.

Today, it is easy to buy goods from the comfort of your phone, but it is not quenching our desire to want more. This desire is not helping our well-being, because retail therapy, as Time wrote last month, “is tanking your mental health”.

How do we return to a time of stretching the shelf life of things, reusing, recycling, taming the beast in us that wants more irrespective of whether we need it? Simply by buying less, we will see a reduction in emissions and pollution. This is the goal we need to practise and teach our children as their future is at stake.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.
X: LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2024