Ford unveils newest Mustang, extending gasoline-powered life

John BIERS
Wed, September 14, 2022 


Ford unveiled Wednesday its seventh-generation Mustang in a brash and boisterous launch event in downtown Detroit that pointed to the staying power of gasoline-powered vehicles.

The big reveal had been teased for months by company officials and organized as a celebration of the 58-year-old model. The event, organized for Ford employees and Mustang mavens, featured pulsating music, slickly produced videos on wide screens and a light projection of the brand's horse logo onto a city building that loomed in the background.

The 50-minute event culminated with the arrival of three sleek new sedans in different trims and, later, a fourth option, a racing vehicle called "Dark Horse" that was introduced dramatically by Ed Krenz, Ford's chief functional engineer for performance.

"Its name is indicative of its design and its aspirations," Krenz told a cheering crowd. "Its demeanor: absolutely sinister. Dark Horse is for the enthusiast who wants purebred force of nature."

Ford, which has dived into EV investment as much as any company in recent years, had refrained ahead of Wednesday from saying whether the new Mustang would be electric or gasoline-powered.

But the company made no apologies for its choice to go with the internal combustion engine (ICE).

"Investing in another generation of Mustang is a big statement at a time when many of our competitors are exiting the business of internal combustion vehicles," said Jim Farley, CEO of Ford Motor Company in a press release, adding that the company is "turbocharging" ICE growth even as it invests $50 billion in EV growth through 2026.


Mustang brand manager Jim Owens said some customers prefer the "visceral" feeling of an ICE vehicle, adding that the company has already released an EV version of the Mustang, the Mach-E sport utility vehicle.

"We know that there are customers out there in the sports car segment who still want the internal combustion engine," he told AFP in an interview before launch.

"There are a lot of late millennials and early Gen Zers who are into the sports car segment, and we think we have some wonderful things in here that are going to draw them in," he said.
- Rival muscle cars exit -

The latest Mustang -- once the inspiration for a Serge Gainsbourg song and seen in some 3,000 movies -- features a "fighter jet-inspired" interior and performance features that make it "the most exhilarating and fun-to-drive yet," Ford said.

The newest Mustang nods to earlier versions in its lighting and grille design, while also employing the latest in digital technology. This includes a key fob that lets drivers who love the sound of an engine revving satisfy their fix with the press of a button.

By extending the Mustang's run, Ford runs counter to some other brands such as Dodge, which in August said it was phasing out its gasoline-powered muscle car models, the Challenger and the Charger.

Ford's vehicle launch event also harked back to the spectacle of past car shows, even though the industry has been moving away from that marketing model in favor of online launches.

The Detroit Auto Show of yore was known for stunts such as the 1992 arrival of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which announced itself by crashing through glass.

For Wednesday's Mustang launch, Ford organized a "Stampede" of earlier Mustangs that caravaned from around the country to Hart Plaza in downtown Detroit, creating an impressive row of Mustangs that went on for blocks.

Participants were encouraged to participate in a best-dressed contest of "attire inspired by their favorite period in Mustang history, from the 1960s through today," with the first-place prize a two-year car lease for a new Mustang.

The event also appeared to be intended as a morale boost for "Motor City," where the auto show has been revived for the first time since 2019 after pandemic cancellations. Presenters repeatedly acknowledged the contribution of local Ford employees, especially at the nearby Flat Rock Assembly Plant, where the Mustang is built.

TORTURE ROOMS
Syrian ex-prisoners haunted by horrors of 'salt rooms'

Author: AFP|Update: 15.09.2022 

Qais Murad, 36-year-old former inmate at Syria's Sednaya prison now living in Turkey, re-enacts an episode from his prison treatment / © AFP

When a Syrian prison guard tossed him into a dimly-lit room, the inmate Abdo was surprised to find himself standing ankle-deep in what appeared to be salt.

On that day in the winter of 2017, the terrified young man had already been locked up for two years in war-torn Syria's largest and most notorious prison, Sednaya.

Having been largely deprived of salt all that time in his meagre prison rations, he brought a handful of the coarse white crystals to his mouth with relish.


Moments later came the second, grisly, surprise: as a barefoot Abdo was treading gingerly across the room, he stumbled on a corpse, emaciated and half-buried in the salt.

Abdo soon found another two bodies, partially dehydrated by the mineral.

He had been thrown into what Syrian inmates call "salt rooms" -- primitive mortuaries designed to preserve bodies in the absence of refrigerated morgues.

Syrian ex-prisoners haunted by horrors of 'salt rooms' / © AFP

The corpses were being treated in a way already known to the embalmers of ancient Egypt, to keep up with the industrial-scale prison killings under President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The salt rooms are described in detail for the first time in an upcoming report by the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, or ADMSP.

In additional research and interviews with former inmates, AFP found that at least two such salt rooms were created inside Sednaya.

Abdo, a man from Homs now aged 30 and living in eastern Lebanon, asked that his real name not be published for fear of reprisals against him and his family.

Diab Serriya, of the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, views a computer screen showing an image of the prison / © AFP

Speaking in his small rental flat in an unfinished building, he recounted the day he was thrown into the salt room, which served as his holding cell ahead of a military court hearing.

"My first thought was: may God have no mercy on them!" he said. "They have all this salt but don't put any in our food!

"Then I stepped on something cold. It was someone's leg."

- 'My heart died' -

Up to 100,000 people have died in Syrian regime prisons since 2011, a fifth of the war's entire death toll, according to Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Moatassem Abdel Sater, a 42-year-old former inmate at Sednaya prison, with his wife Bara'ah and their children Othman, on the left, and Abdel Sattar / © AFP

Abdo, fortunate to have survived, described the salt room on the first floor of the red building as a rectangle of roughly six by eight metres (20 by 26 feet), with a rudimentary toilet in a corner.

"I thought this would be my fate: I would be executed and killed," he said, recalling how he curled up in a corner, crying and reciting verses from the Koran.

The guard eventually returned to escort him to the court, and Abdo lived to tell the tale.

On his way out of the room, he had noticed a pile of body bags near the door.

Like tens of thousands of others, he had been jailed on blanket terrorism charges. He was released in 2020 but says the experience scarred him for life.

"This was the hardest thing I ever experienced," he said. "My heart died in Sednaya. If someone announced the death of my brother right now, I wouldn't feel anything."

Around 30,000 people are thought to have been held at Sednaya alone since the start of the conflict. Only 6,000 were released.

Most of the others are officially considered missing because death certificates rarely reach the families unless relatives pay an exorbitant bribe, in what has become a major racket.

Moatassem Abdel Sater, a 42-year-old former inmate at Sednaya prison, accompanied by his child Othman, gives an interview at his home in Turkey / © AFP

AFP interviewed another former inmate, Moatassem Abdel Sater, who recounted a similar experience in 2014, in a different first-floor cell of around four by five metres, with no toilet.

Speaking at his new home in the Turkish town of Reyhanli, the 42-year-old recounted finding himself standing on thick layer of the kind of salt used to de-ice roads in winter.

"I looked to my right and there were four or five bodies," he said.

"They looked a bit like me," Moatassem said, describing how their skeletal limbs and scabies-covered skin matched his own emaciated body. "They looked like they had been mummified."

He said he still wonders why he was taken to the makeshift mortuary, on the day of his release, May 27, 2014, but guessed that "it might have been just to scare us".

- Black hole -

The ADMSP, after extensive research on the infamous prison, dates the opening of the first salt room to 2013, one of the deadliest years in the conflict.


Moatassem Abdel Sater draws a rudimentary sketch of the prison plan / © AFP

"We found that there were at least two salt rooms used for the bodies of those who died under torture, from sickness or hunger," the group's co-founder Diab Serriya said during an interview in the Turkish city of Gaziantep.

It was not clear whether both rooms existed at the same time, nor whether they are still being used today.

Serriya explained that when a detainee died, his body would typically be left inside the cell with the inmates for two to five days before being taken to a salt room.

The corpses remained there until there were enough of them for a truckload.

The next stop was a military hospital where death certificates -- often declaring a "heart attack" as the cause of death -- were issued, before mass burials.

The salt rooms were meant to "preserve the bodies, contain the stench... and protect the guards and prison staff from bacteria and infections," Serriya explained.

US-based professor of anatomy Joy Balta, who has published extensively on human body preservation techniques, explained how salt could be used as a simple and cheap alternative to cold rooms.

"Salt has the ability to dehydrate any living tissue ... and can therefore be used to significantly slow down the decomposition process," he told AFP.

The salt rooms were "used for the bodies of those who died under torture, from sickness or hunger," the group's co-founder Diab Serriya said / © AFP

A body can remain in salt without decomposing longer than in a purpose-built refrigerated chamber, "although it will alter the surface anatomy", said Balta, who founded the Anatomy Learning Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.

The ancient Egyptians are known to have used the mummification process, which includes the immersion of the body in a salt solution called natron.

The tonnes of rock salt used in Sednaya are thought to have come from Sabkhat al-Jabul, Syria's largest salt flats, in Aleppo province.

The report by ADMSP is the most thorough study yet of the structure of Sednaya, which has manufactured death on a terrifying scale for years.

It provides detailed schematics of the facility and of how duties were split between various army units and wardens.

"The regime wants Sednaya to be a black hole, no-one is allowed to know anything about it," Serriya said. "Our report denies them that."

- 'Salt was a treasure' -

Qais Murad, 36-year-old former inmate of Syria's Sednaya prison, gives an interview at his house in Gaziantep, in southeastern Turkey / © AFP

The fighting in Syria's brutal war has ebbed over the past three years, but Assad and the prison that has become a monument to his bloody rule are still there.

New layers to the horror of the war are still being uncovered as survivors abroad share their stories, and investigations into regime crimes by foreign courts fuel a drive for accountability.

"If a political transition ever occurs in Syria," said Serriya, "we want Sednaya to be turned into a museum, like Auschwitz."

Prisoners recall that, aside from torture and disease, their biggest torment was hunger.

Moatassem said his weight more than halved, from 98 kilograms when he was jailed in 2011 to 42 kilograms when he got out.

The ex-inmates also see as a sickening irony the fact that the salt they craved so badly formed an integral part of the horrific death machine that was decimating them.

The wheat, rice and potatoes they were sometimes fed were always cooked without salt, or sodium chloride, a lack of which can have serious health impacts on the human body.

Low sodium levels in the blood can cause nausea, dizziness and muscle cramps and, if sustained, coma and death.

Detainees used to soak olive pits in their water to salt it, and would even spend hours sifting through laundry detergent to pick out tiny crystals which they treated like a delicacy.

Former inmate Qais Murad recounted how, on a summer day in 2013, he was called out of his cell to see his parents, but on his way to the visitation area was shoved into a room.

Inside, he stepped on something like grit on the floor. Kneeling with his bowed head against the wall, he caught a glimpse of guards dumping around 10 bodies behind him.

Qais Murad, 36-year-old former inmate at Sednaya prison, re-enacts an episode from his prison treatment / © AFP

When a cellmate returned from a visit later that day, his socks and pockets stuffed with salt, Murad understood what the substance was.

"From that day onwards, we always made sure to wear socks, and trousers with pockets, for visits in case we found salt," Murad told AFP, also in Gaziantep.

He remembered how the excited cellmates ate boiled potatoes with their first pinch of salt in years that day, oblivious to its provenance.

"All we cared about was the salt," Murad said. "Salt was a treasure."

Lost treasures Egyptians want back

Wed, September 14, 2022 


For decades, Egyptians have dreamed of bringing back some of the glories of their ancient civilisation scattered across museums and private collections across the world.

Now as Cairo gears up to open "the largest archaeological museum in the world" at the foot of the pyramids of Giza in November, Egypt's former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass told AFP that he will soon demand the return of three of its greatest lost treasures:

- Rosetta Stone -

The basalt slab dating from 196 BC was the key that helped French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion crack the code of Egypt's ancient hieroglyphs.

The stone was discovered by Napoleon Bonaparte's invading French army in 1799 while troops were repairing a fort near the Nile Delta port of Rashid (or Rosetta), close to the Mediterranean.

It bore extracts of a decree written in Ancient Greek, an ancient Egyptian vernacular script called Demotic and hieroglyphics.

Comparing the three scripts finally helped resolve a mystery which had bedevilled historians for centuries.

Champollion announced his discovery on September 27, 1822.

The stele has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, inscribed with the legend "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801" on one side and "presented by King George III" to the museum on the other.

Egypt has been demanding its return for decades, with Egyptologist Heba Abdel Gawad saying the inscriptions alone were "an act of violence that no one talks about, and which the British Museum denies is destruction of an artefact."

The museum told AFP that the stone was "handed over to the British as a diplomatic gift."

- Nefertiti bust -

The bust of the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, whose name meant "the beautiful one has come", was sculpted around 1340 BC but was carted off to Germany in controversial circumstances by a Prussian archaeologist after it was found at Amarna in 1912.

The depiction of one of the most famous women of the ancient world was later given to the Neues Museum in Berlin.

Cairo demanded its restitution as early as the 1930s, but Germany has long held that it was handed over in a colonial-era partage agreement, under which countries that funded archaeological digs could keep half of the finds.

But for Hawass it "was illegally taken".

Egyptologist Monica Hanna told AFP that Germany once agreed to give the bust back only for Adolf Hitler to block it after the Nazi leader fell under its spell.

No official requests for the treasures' return have been received "from the Egyptian government", according to the three European museums.

Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities did not respond to AFP's request for comment.

- Dendera Zodiac -

The celestial map was blasted out of the Hathor Temple in Qena in southern Egypt on the orders of French official Sebastien Louis Saulnier in 1820.

It has been suspended on a ceiling in the Louvre museum in Paris since 1922, while a plaster cast stands in its place in the temple.

The chart, regarded as "the only complete map that we have of an ancient sky", is thought to date from around 50 BC.

Tutankhamun: Egyptians bid to reclaim their history

Bahira AMIN
Wed, September 14, 2022



It's one of the 20th century's most iconic photos: British archaeologist Howard Carter inspecting the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun in 1922 as an Egyptian member of his team crouches nearby shrouded in shadow.

It is also an apt metaphor for two centuries of Egyptology, flush with tales of brilliant foreign explorers uncovering the secrets of the Pharaohs, with Egyptians relegated to the background.

"Egyptians have been written out of the historical narrative," leading archaeologist Monica Hanna told AFP.

Now with the 100th anniversary of Carter's earth-shattering discovery -- and the 200th of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone which unlocked the ancient hieroglyphs -- they are demanding that their contributions be recognised.

Egyptians "did all the work" but "were forgotten", said chief excavator Abdel Hamid Daramalli, who was born "on top" of the tombs at Qurna near Luxor that he is now in charge of digging.

Even Egyptology's colonial-era birth -- set neatly at Frenchman Jean-François Champollion cracking the Rosetta Stone's code in 1822 -- "whitewashes history", according to specialist researcher Heba Abdel Gawad, "as if there were no attempts to understand Ancient Egypt until the Europeans came."

The "unnamed Egyptian" in the famous picture of Carter is "perhaps Hussein Abu Awad or Hussein Ahmed Said," according to art historian Christina Riggs, a Middle East specialist at Britain's Durham University.

The two men were the pillars, alongside Ahmed Gerigar and Gad Hassan, of Carter's digging team for nine seasons. But unlike foreign team members, experts cannot put names to the faces in the photos.

- 'Unnoticed and unnamed' -

"Egyptians remain unnoticed, unnamed, and virtually unseen in their history," Riggs insisted, arguing that Egyptology's "structural inequities" reverberate to this day.


But one Egyptian name did gain fame as the tomb's supposed accidental discoverer: Hussein Abdel Rasoul.

Despite not appearing in Carter's diaries and journals, the tale of the water boy is presented as "historical fact", said Riggs.

On November 4, 1922, a 12-year-old -– commonly believed to be Hussein -– found the top step down to the tomb, supposedly because he either tripped, his donkey stumbled or because his water jug washed away the sand.

The next day, Carter's team exposed the whole staircase and on November 26 he peered into a room filled with golden treasures through a small breach in the tomb door.

According to an oft-repeated story, a half century earlier two of Hussein's ancestors, brothers Ahmed and Mohamed Abdel Rasoul, found the Deir el-Bahari cache of more than 50 mummies, including Ramesses the Great, when their goat fell down a crevasse.

But Hussein's great-nephew Sayed Abdel Rasoul laughed at the idea that a goat or boy with a water jug were behind the breakthroughs.

Riggs echoed his scepticism, arguing that on the rare occasions that Egyptology credits Egyptians with great discoveries they are disproportionately either children, tomb robbers or "quadrupeds".

The problem is that others "kept a record, we didn't", Abdel Rasoul told AFP.

- 'They were wronged' -

Local farmers who knew the contours of the land could "tell from the layers of sediment whether there was something there," said Egyptologist Abdel Gawad, adding that "archaeology is mostly about geography".


Profound knowledge and skill at excavating had been passed down for generations in Qurna -- where the Abdel Rasouls remain -- and at Qift, a small town north of Luxor where English archaeologist William Flinders Petrie first trained locals in the 1880s.

Mostafa Abdo Sadek, a chief excavator of the Saqqara tombs near Giza, whose discoveries have been celebrated in the Netflix documentary series "Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb", is a descendant of those diggers at Qift.

His family moved 600 kilometres (370 miles) north at the turn of the 20th century to excavate the vast necropolis south of the Giza pyramids.

But his grandfathers and great-uncles "were wronged", he declared, holding up their photos.

Their contributions to a century of discoveries at Saqqara have gone largely undocumented.

- 'Children of Tutankhamun' -

Barred for decades from even studying Egyptology while the French controlled the country's antiquities service, Egyptians "were always serving foreigners", archaeologist and former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass told AFP.


Another Egyptologist, Fatma Keshk, said we have to remember "the historical and social context of the time, with Egypt under British occupation."

The struggle over the country's cultural heritage became increasingly political in the early 20th century as Egyptians demanded their freedom.

"We are the children of Tutankhamun," the diva Mounira al-Mahdiyya sang in 1922, the year the boy pharaoh's intact tomb was found.

The same year Britain was forced to grant Egypt independence, and the hated partage system that gave foreign missions half the finds in exchange for funding excavations was ended.

But just as Egyptians' "sense of ownership" of their heritage grew, ancient Egypt was appropriated as "world civilisation" with little to do with the modern country, argued Abdel Gawad.

"Unfortunately that world seems to be the West. It's their civilisation, not ours."

While the contents of Tutankhamun's tomb stayed in Cairo, Egypt lost Carter's archives, which were considered his private property.

The records, key to academic research, were donated by his niece to the Griffith Institute for Egyptology at Britain's Oxford University.

"They were still colonising us. They left the objects, but they took our ability to produce research," Hanna added.

This year, the institute and Oxford's Bodleian Library are staging an exhibition, "Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive", which they say sheds light on the "often overlooked Egyptian members of the archaeological team."

- Excavators' village razed –

In Qurna, 73-year-old Ahmed Abdel Rady still remembers finding a mummy's head in a cavern of his family's mud-brick house that was built into a tomb.

His mother stored her onions and garlic in a red granite sarcophagus, but she burst into tears at the sight of the head, berating him that "this was a queen" who deserved respect.

For centuries, the people of Qurna lived among and excavated the ancient necropolis of Thebes, one of the pharaohs' former capitals that dates back to 3100 BC.

Today, Abdel Rady's village is no more than rubble between the tombs and temples, the twin Colossi of Memnon -- built nearly 3,400 years ago -- standing vigil over the living and the dead.

Four Qurnawis were shot dead in 1998 trying to stop the authorities bulldozing their homes in a relocation scheme.

Some 10,000 people were eventually moved when almost an entire hillside of mud-brick homes was demolished despite protests from UNESCO.

In the now deserted moonscape, Ragab Tolba, 55, one of the last remaining residents, told AFP how his relatives and neighbours were moved to "inadequate" homes "in the desert".

The Qurnawis' dogged resistance was fired by their deep connection to the place and their ancestors, said the Qurna-born excavator Daramalli.

But the controversial celebrity archaeologist Hawass, then head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said "it had to be done" to preserve the tombs.

Egyptologist Hanna, however, said the authorities were bent on turning Luxor into a sanitised "open-air museum... a Disneyfication of heritage", and used old tropes about the Qurnawis being tomb raiders against them.

Sayed Abdel Rasoul's nephew, Ahmed, hit back at what he called a double standard.

"The French and the English were all stealing," he told AFP.

"Who told the people of Qurna they could make money off of artefacts in the first place?"

- 'Spoils of war' –

Over the centuries, countless antiquities made their way out of Egypt.

Some, like the Luxor Obelisk in Paris and the Temple of Debod in Madrid, were gifts from the Egyptian government.

Others were lost to European museums through the colonial-era partage system.

But hundreds of thousands more were smuggled out of the country into "private collections all over the world," according to Abdel Gawad.

Former antiquities minister Hawass is now spearheading a crusade to repatriate three of the great "stolen" treasures -- the Rosetta Stone, the bust of queen Nefertiti and the Dendera Zodiac.

He told AFP he plans to file a petition in October demanding their return.

The Rosetta Stone has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, "handed over to the British as a diplomatic gift", the museum told AFP.

But for Abdel Gawad, "it's a spoil of war".

Nefertiti's 3,340-year-old bust went to Berlin's Neues Museum a century later through the partage system, but Hawass insisted it "was illegally taken, as I have proved time and again."

The Frenchman Sebastien Louis Saulnier meanwhile had the Dendera Zodiac blasted out of the Hathor Temple in Qena in 1820.

The celestial map has hung from a ceiling in the Louvre in Paris since 1922, with a plaster cast left in its place in the southern Egyptian temple.

"That's a crime the French committed in Egypt," Hanna said, behaviour no longer "compatible with 21st century ethics."

bha/sbh/jkb/fg/qan

SUFISM

Bangladeshi mystic fights demons with psychiatry


Shafiqul ALAM
Wed, September 14, 2022 


Evil spirits bedevil the families that seek blessings from an elderly Bangladeshi mystic -- but he knows his prayers alone are not enough to soothe their troubled minds.

Syed Emdadul Hoque conducts exorcisms but at the same time is helping to bust taboos around mental health treatment in the South Asian nation, where disorders of the mind are often rationalised as cases of otherworldly possession.

Hundreds of people visit the respected cleric each week to conquer their demons, and after receiving Hoque's blessing a team of experts will gently assess if they need medical care.

Mohammad Rakib, 22, was brought to the shrine after complaining of "possession by a genie" that brought alarming changes to his behaviour.

"When I regain consciousness, I feel okay," he tells Hoque. But his uncle explains that the student has suffered alarming dissociative spells, attacking and scolding his relatives while speaking in an unrecognisable language.

"Don't worry, you will be fine," Hoque says reassuringly, reciting prayers that he says will rid Rakib of the spirit and to help him concentrate on his studies.

Rakib is then led into a room by the cleric's son Irfanul, where volunteers note down his symptoms and medical history.

"We think he is suffering from mental problems," Irfanul tells AFP.

"Once we've taken his details, we will send him to a psychiatrist to prescribe medicines."

- Sufi mystics -

Hoque, 85, and his son are members of the Sufi tradition, a branch of Islam that emphasises mysticism and the spiritual dimensions of the faith.

They are descended from one of the country's most respected Sufi leaders, from whom Hoque has inherited the esteemed title of "Pir", denoting him as a spiritual mentor.


Their hometown of Maizbhandar is one of the country's most popular pilgrimage sites, with huge crowds each year visiting shrines dedicated to the Hoque family's late ancestors to seek their blessings.

Their faith occupies an ambiguous place in Bangladesh, where they are regularly denounced as heretics and deviants by hardliners from the Sunni Muslim majority.

But Sufi mystics have a deeply rooted role in rural society as healers, and Irfanul says his father gives his visitors the opportunity to unburden themselves.

"Those who open up their stresses and problems to us, it becomes easier for us to help," he says. "My father does his part by blessing him and then the medical healing starts."

Hoque is helped by Taslima Chowdhury, a psychiatrist who worked at the shrine for nearly two years, travelling from her own home an hour's drive away in the bustling port city of Chittagong.

"Had he not sent the patients to me, they might never visit a trained psychiatrist in their life," she tells AFP.

"Thanks to him, a lot of mental patients get early treatment and many get cured quickly."

- Veil of silence -

Despite Bangladesh's rapid economic growth over the past decade, treatment options for panic attacks, anxiety and other symptoms of mental disorder remain limited.

A brutal 1971 independence war and the floods, cyclones and other disasters that regularly buffet the climate-vulnerable country have left widespread and lingering trauma, according to a British Journal of Psychology study published last year.

Bangladesh has fewer than 300 psychiatrists servicing a population of 170 million people, the same publication says, while a stigma around mental illness prevents those afflicted from seeking help.

A 2018 survey conducted by local health authorities found nearly one in five adults met the criteria for a mental disorder, more than 90 percent of whom did not receive professional treatment.

But experts say Hoque's referral programme could offer a revolutionary means of lifting the veil of silence around mental health and encourage more people to seek medical intervention.

"It is remarkable given that in Bangladesh, mental problems are considered taboo," says Kamal Uddin Chowdhury, a professor of Clinical Psychology at the elite Dhaka University.

The country's top mental hospital is now engaged in a project to train other religious leaders in rural towns to follow Hoque's approach, he tells AFP.

"They are the first responders," he adds.

"If they spread out the message that mental diseases are curable and that being 'possessed by a genie' is a kind of mental disease, it can make a big difference in treatment."

sa/gle/skc/dhc

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The myth of ‘work-life balance’ is a generational illusion

Chris DeSantis - Yesterday

The term work-life balance didn’t come into popular use until 1986. While still in use, it no longer fits today’s circumstances. But before we redefine it, we first need to examine the evolution of work and working.


 ANGELA WEISS - AFP - Getty Images

The rise and fall of the company man

Following World War II, soldiers came home to a “revitalized” United States. For the next 30 years, the United States enjoyed economic expansion. This period was named the Great Compression: economic expansion coupled with social welfare initiatives, and strong, healthy unions flattened wage differentials, pulling everyone towards the middle.

When a young person entered the workplace, they became a “Company Man,” whose career culminated in a pension after many years of service. It was an unwritten covenant between employer and employee.

You were unlikely to broach the notion of work-life balance. It would have been seen as an indication you were not serious about your job and not committed to the organization.

Gen X and the beginning of the transactional workplace

Things started to change in the mid 70s. It was the beginning of the end of the covenant. As children, Gen Xers witnessed the downsizing and euphemistic “right-sizing” that their parents endured.

Many took the lesson to heart and, as adults, knew that they couldn’t rely on a single company to take care of them. Rather than selling their skills to legacy companies, they used their expertise to establish their own companies, which gave birth to the dot-com boom.

The dot-com workplaces were typically less formal, more egalitarian, and experimental in nature. Clever young people worked out new ways to leverage technology to reimagine how work–and the workplace–should look. Demands for more work-life balance that workers had not been able to make under the covenant were first implemented by Gen X entrepreneurs.

Millennials move the needle

Gen Xers recognized the difficulty in balancing work with a personal life, while still expecting to succeed professionally. Work still had to come first. The best they could hope to do was build a workplace that had enough flexibility to allow for shifting priorities and needs in one’s personal life.

The Millennial mindset is different. It can be described as work-life integration. This, too, should not be mistaken for balance. Millennials are not doing a better job of balancing their personal lives with work than Gen Xers have. Rather, they have worked to integrate work into their personal lives, breaking down the walls between professional and personal.

Many Millennials are crafting careers in the gig economy and pursuing part time or flexible work arrangements. This is sometimes out of necessity, but for others, it is an elective lifestyle choice. Moreover, they are taking on multiple roles to explore different paths in pursuit of finding their purpose.

Millennial knowledge workers have even more portable skill sets than their Gen X predecessors. They have more leverage in the transactional labor market than any previous generation. They are, in a sense, transactional “natives,” whereas those who came before were transactional “immigrants” who had to adapt to the new labor market.

Gen Z and the coming work-life options

While the Gen Z identity is still developing, there seems to be continuity of many of the trends observed with Millennials. Like the Millennials, they never knew the unbroken covenant and have never expected employers to take care of them for life. However, they also understand that societal safety nets are in a precarious state. Not only can Gen Zers not expect a pension, but they also can’t be certain that Medicare and Social Security will be there when they retire.

This reserved and practical outlook colors how Gen Zers fit work into their lives. They are moving beyond work-life integration and pursuing what I would call work-life options. They appear to strongly value employment stability, and like the Millennial cohort, they are very interested in establishing a career with firms that offer professional growth and development.

They use their free time to pursue interests that might someday become careers. Gen Z, unlike Millennials, aren’t pursuing multiple jobs in order to engage their passions or find their purpose. They are pursuing stable careers while cultivating side projects that could one day become revenue streams. These are often described as “side hustles.” Their aspirations veer toward the practical.

A myth retired

So, will the notion of work-life balance continue to evolve? Probably. Unless workers receive what they really wanted all along: autonomy and control over their lives so they can make meaningful decisions about the work they do, how it is done, and how to achieve the mastery to do it well.

If companies fulfill these requests and understand and respect employees’ motivations, work-life balance will no longer be a battle between work and the rest of life. It never really was. Workers just want to best accommodate, integrate, balance—whatever word you want to use—work into their lives.

The work-life dichotomy was always misleading. We need to move beyond the notion that work is simply the thing we do for a paycheck, and “life” merely the momentary reprieves between showing up at the office. Work, when it engages us, is life-affirming

Chris DeSantis is an independent organizational behavior practitioner, speaker, podcaster, and the author of Why I Find You Irritating: Navigating Generational Friction at Work.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Erotophilia and sexual sensation–seeking are good predictors of engagement with sex robots, according to new research

Simon Dubé’s study examines the personality traits of people who are more willing to experiment with erobotics

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: SIMON DUBÉ: “IT’S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND WHO THE FIRST USERS OF SEX ROBOTS ARE AND WHERE THE INITIAL DEMAND IS COMING FROM.” view more 

CREDIT: CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

Advances in technology, in particular artificial intelligence (AI), are impacting our everyday lives in ever more ways — including our sex lives. Sex robots — life-size, lifelike machines powered by AI and used for sexual purposes — are one such emerging technological system. While they remain very niche, those who make, use and study them believe the market offers room for growth.

But to see if and how demand for sex robots grows, stakeholders must first understand who is interested in using them and why. In a new study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Simon Dubé examines the personality traits of people who say they are (and are not) willing to engage with these technologies. Dubé is a former Concordia Public Scholar who completed his PhD this summer.

“It’s extremely important to understand who the first users are and where the initial demand is coming from,” he says. “The companies that make them need to know in order to adjust and develop these technologies.”

Building profiles

The results are based on data from almost 500 adults who completed an online survey examining their attitudes toward sex robots. First, the researchers assessed the respondents’ personalities using a validated measure of the Big Five, a standard model that includes the overarching traits openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and extraversion.

“Personality assessments help us predict people’s likely thoughts, emotions and behaviours across all kinds of situations, including those regarding their sexuality — and in this case, their willingness to engage with new erotic technologies such as sex robots,” says Dubé, who will be pursuing his studies as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana this fall.

Realizing that these categories may be overly broad, Dubé and his colleagues added a model that addressed respondents’ attitudes toward sex and technology. The model also included an important value measuring positive attitudes toward newness and a desire to try new erotic experiences.

They were then able to assess traits relating to erotophilia/phobia — positive or negative attitudes toward sexuality — technophilia/phobia and sexual sensation–seeking.

According to the results, the Big Five were only weakly correlated to willingness to engage with sex robots. Dubé says that was to be expected, given the breadth of each category. But when it came to traits that were more closely related to the specific subject of sex robots, results were much stronger.

“We found that erotophilia and sexual sensation–seeking, as well as an enthusiasm for new, diverse or more intense erotic experiences, were the primary drivers behind people’s willingness to engage with these new technologies,” Dubé notes. “Technophilia and non-sexual sensation–seeking were also correlated, but only weakly.”

Dubé adds that systematically, across multiple studies he consulted and this one, men were more interested in sex robots than women. However, he adds that respondents who identified as gender nonconforming or nonbinary exhibited similar patterns of interest as cis-identifying males. Respondents did not reveal their sexual orientation in this study.

A product oriented toward men, for now

The sex robot market currently caters heavily toward heterosexual men. Female robots — known as gynoids — feature much more prominently in media, advertising and websites, and high-end units can cost up to $15,000 US. Dubé points out that heterosexual women constitute the majority of sex toy consumers and believes there is an opportunity for manufacturers to cater to a female customer base in the future as the technology improves and becomes more affordable.

“Right now, women probably do not feel that the product meets their own preferences or needs, or it is just too expensive for something that does not have to be particularly complex or interesting.”

Read the cited paper: “Sex robots and personality: It is more about sex than robots.”

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JOURNAL

Computers in Human Behavior

DOI

10.1016/j.chb.2022.107403 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Sex robots and personality: It is more about sex than robots

Can a robot's ability to speak affect how much human users trust it?

by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Epi the humanoid robot used by Krantz and his colleagues, is a humanoid 

robotics platform used for human-robot interaction experiments and cognitive

 modelling. It was developed at Lund University Cognitive Science. 

Credit: Krantz, Balkenius & Johansson.

As robots become increasingly advanced, they are likely to find their way into many real-world settings, including homes, offices, malls, airports, health care facilities, and assisted living spaces. To promote their widespread use and implementation, however, roboticists should ensure that robots are well-perceived and trusted by humans.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding what affects a human user's trust in robots. Their paper, set to appear in the proceedings for the SCRITA workshop at IEEE Ro-man 2022, specifically tried to determine whether a humanoid robot's ability to speak can impact a human user's trust in it.

"The idea for the paper came about after we found some unexpected results in a previous experiment," Amandus Krantz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "We were investigating how faulty gaze behavior may impact trust in a humanoid social robot. The results showed a significant difference in trust before and after interaction with the robot across all conditions, but no decrease in trust from the faulty behavior. The only component that was unchanged between the conditions was a short speech from the robot."

Previous literature in robotics suggests that humans' trust in humanoid robots can depend on how intelligent they perceive them to be. Based on the findings they gathered in their previous study, Krantz and his colleagues thus started to reflect on the possibility that a robot's ability to speak, which could be perceived as intelligence, influences how much a human user trusts the robot.

"We theorized that perhaps the speech component was increasing the perceived intelligence of the robot, enough that the resulting trust change masked the trust change from the faulty behavior," Krantz said.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers re-ran the same experiment they carried out in their previous work, but in which the robot did not speak. They found that when the robot did not speak, users tended to trust it less and notice its faulty behavior. This suggests that the robot's ability to speak could in fact increase the participants' trust in it.

"Each of our study participants was shown a video of a humanoid robot displaying either faulty or non-faulty behavior and either speaking or being mute," Krantz explained. "When speaking, the robot would give some facts about one of a series of objects that were presented to it. After seeing this video, the participants were given a range of questionnaires designed to estimate their trust in the robot, along with their perceptions about the robots' intelligence, likability, and animacy (how alive the robot seems)."

The researchers conducted their experiments online, engaging 227 participants. When they analyzed the participants' responses, they found that overall, the non-faulty robots were the most trusted. Interestingly, however, when a faulty robot could talk, participants reported trusting it almost as much as non-faulty robots.

"As far as we know, this is the first study that has investigated how the ability to speak impacts trust," Krantz said. "There are some similar studies, but they tend to investigate the effect of the contents of the speech (usually apologizing for an error), rather than possessing the ability to speak. As for practical implications, the results indicate that implementing some form of human-like speech component may be beneficial for manufacturers of consumer robots (such as robotic vacuum cleaners) who are looking to reduce disuse of their robots following an error in operation."

The recent work by this team of researchers offers valuable and interesting insight about how a robot's ability to speak can affect how humans perceive it and relate to it. In the future, their findings could encourage robotics companies and developers to place a greater emphasis on a robot's speech, as a means to increase potential users' trust in it.

"The experiments outlined in the paper were carried out online, which is known to potentially cause slightly different results from physical human-robot interaction experiments, so we are planning a follow-up study where participants interact with the robot in a real-world setting," Krantz said. "We are also planning a range of studies that investigates how trust is affected by other aspects of a humanoid robot, such as gaze or pupil dilation/constriction."Study explores how a robot's inner speech affects a human user's trust

More information: Amandus Krantz, Christian Balkenius, Birger Johansson, Using speech to reduce loss of trust in humanoid social robots. arXiv:2208.13688v1 [cs.RO], arxiv.org/abs/2208.13688

© 2022 Science X Network

How silent environmentalists could help protect biodiversity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

 

IMAGE: NEW RESEARCH HAS IDENTIFIED AN IMPORTANT GROUP OF AUSTRALIANS WITH A SURPRISINGLY STRONG CONNECTION TO NATURE. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

New research has identified an important group of Australians with a surprisingly strong connection to nature.

A University of Queensland-led study surveyed 2,000 people across Australia, finding that a quarter of participants had a human-centric relationship with nature, but also a strong desire to protect the environment.

PhD candidate Nicola Sockhill said the results show pro-environmental behaviour is not just limited to outspoken environmentalists or the strongly ecologically-minded within the community.

“We found that large groups of people from either side of the political spectrum want to protect the environment and in fact they already do so at high levels,” Ms Sockhill said.

“We all know about the stereotypical left-leaning ecologically-centric person, who protests vocally about climate change, eats a vegan diet and values nature for its intrinsic worth.

“But we also found a very different group of people, often from rural areas and typically a more right-leaning voter base.

“These people valued nature mostly for the benefits it gives to us, such as growing crops.

“The findings revealed that both groups show equally strong levels of support for pro-biodiversity policies. 

“This result challenges the stereotype that right-leaning voters and those with human-centric values care less about taking steps to protect the environment and its biodiversity.

“Understanding this could mark a shift in the way conservation messaging is delivered moving forward.”

Ms Sockhill said existing conservation messaging strategies typically target the ecocentric subgroup of the population, assuming they are more likely to respond to pro-environmental campaigns.

“Where messaging does target the human-centric group, it may be created with the assumption that they aren’t connected to nature, or that they don’t already perform pro-environmental behaviours.

“We have clearly shown that both of these assumptions are wrong and could lead to the disenfranchisement of an important constituency.

“The number of people who could be encouraged to increase their level of pro-environmental behaviour is much bigger than previously realised.”

UQ’s Professor Richard Fuller said this opens the door for future conservation messaging to embrace a wider and more politically diverse audience.

“This work has profound implications for how political parties approach environmental issues, and it also means conservationists need to be much more open-minded about who supports the cause,” Professor Fuller said.

“Partisan battle lines are outdated, and there are committed environmentalists right across the political divide.

“Biodiversity is rapidly disappearing, so the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

This research is published in People and Nature. 

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JOURNAL

People and Nature

DOI

10.1002/pan3.10400 

Talk with your hands? You might think with them too!

Demonstration of embodied cognition mechanisms in the brain could have implications for artificial intelligence

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OSAKA METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: WHEN ASKED ABOUT WHICH WORD REPRESENTED THE LARGER OBJECT, PARTICIPANTS ANSWERED FASTER WHEN THEIR HANDS WERE FREE (LEFT) THAN WHEN HANDS WERE RESTRAINED (RIGHT). RESTRAINING HANDS ALSO LOWERED BRAIN ACTIVITY WHEN PROCESSING WORDS FOR HAND MANIPULABLE OBJECTS IN LEFT BRAIN AREAS ASSOCIATED WITH TOOLS. view more 

CREDIT: MAKIOKA, OSAKA METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

How do we understand words? Scientists don’t fully understand what happens when a word pops into your brain. A research group led by Professor Shogo Makioka at the Graduate School of Sustainable System Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University, wanted to test the idea of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition proposes that people understand the words for objects through how they interact with them, so the researchers devised a test to observe semantic processing of words when the ways that the participants could interact with objects were limited.

Words are expressed in relation to other words; a “cup,” for example, can be a “container, made of glass, used for drinking.” However, you can only use a cup if you understand that to drink from a cup of water, you hold it in your hand and bring it to your mouth, or that if you drop the cup, it will smash on the floor. Without understanding this, it would be difficult to create a robot that can handle a real cup. In artificial intelligence research, these issues are known as symbol grounding problems, which map symbols onto the real world.

How do humans achieve symbol grounding? Cognitive psychology and cognitive science propose the concept of embodied cognition, where objects are given meaning through interactions with the body and the environment.

To test embodied cognition, the researchers conducted experiments to see how the participants’ brains responded to words that describe objects that can be manipulated by hand, when the participants’ hands could move freely compared to when they were restrained.

"It was very difficult to establish a method for measuring and analyzing brain activity. The first author, Ms. Sae Onishi, worked persistently to come up with a task, in a way that we were able to measure brain activity with sufficient accuracy," Professor Makioka explained.

In the experiment, two words such as “cup” and “broom” were presented to participants on a screen. They were asked to compare the relative sizes of the objects those words represented and to verbally answer which object was larger—in this case, “broom.” Comparisons were made between the words, describing two types of objects, hand-manipulable objects, such as “cup” or “broom” and nonmanipulable objects, such as “building” or “lamppost,” to observe how each type was processed.

During the tests, the participants placed their hands on a desk, where they were either free or restrained by a transparent acrylic plate. When the two words were presented on the screen, to answer which one represented a larger object, the participants needed to think of both objects and compare their sizes, forcing them to process each word’s meaning.

Brain activity was measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which has the advantage of taking measurements without imposing further physical constraints. The measurements focused on the interparietal sulcus and the inferior parietal lobule (supramarginal gyrus and angular gyrus) of the left brain, which are responsible for semantic processing related to tools. The speed of the verbal response was measured to determine how quickly the participant answered after the words appeared on the screen.

The results showed that the activity of the left brain in response to hand-manipulable objects was significantly reduced by hand restraints. Verbal responses were also affected by hand constraints. These results indicate that constraining hand movement affects the processing of object-meaning, which supports the idea of embodied cognition. These results suggest that the idea of embodied cognition could also be effective for artificial intelligence to learn the meaning of objects. The paper was published in Scientific Reports.

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About OMU

Osaka Metropolitan University is a new public university established by a merger between Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University in April 2022. For more science news, see https://www.upc-osaka.ac.jp/new-univ/en-research/, and follow @OsakaMetUniv_en, or search #OMUScience.

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-022-17702-1 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Hand constraint reduces brain activity and affects the speed of verbal responses on semantic tasks