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Launched last year, the third generation Kia Carens is a compact- to mid-size multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) with a more stylish European-influenced design. In addition to sharper lines and aesthetics, the new Carens’ form is more similar to an overgrown hatchback than a saloon-based MPV or re-modded van. Better to drive than before, the new Carens is also better packaged and space efficient, with versatile seating and optional seven-seat format. Offered in three engine options including 1.5  and 2.0 petrol engines, the Carens’ best engine option was however the European market 1.7-litre CRDi turbo-diesel engine, with six-speed manual, rather than automatic transmission.

The case for diesel

Well-kitted, even basic trim Carens feature MDPS electric steering with adjustable levels of resistance, remote central locking, adjustable steering wheel, front seatback pockets, AC, CD player with MP3, USB and Bluetooth compatibility, rain-sensing wipers, rear view camera, front and curtain airbags and electronic driver aids including stability and traction control, hill-start and brake-force assist systems. Middle row seats get three-point side seatbelts but a two-point belt for the middle passenger. Range-topping EX spec includes side mirrors indicator lights, Xenon headlamps, LED running and rear lights, rear-side window blinds, 10-way adjustable driver’s seat, child monitoring cabin mirror, leather upholstery and front parking sensors.

Quicker, more efficient and often cleaner than petrol versions of same models, modern turbo-diesel cars like the Carens 1.7 CRDi also deliver more generous mid-range torque, which is particularly suitable for multi-passenger MPVs and is more useful for daily driving, commuting and hilly terrain like Jordan’s. Offering similar efficiency as hybrids without the extra weight, complication and cost, turbo-diesels outsell petrol cars in Europe, and one wishes that “clean” low-sulfur diesel becomes available to Jordanian motorists, so that diesel passenger cars might become legal. If they were to be legalised, one feels they should benefit from similar import duty incentives as hybrids.

Well-packaged

A more purposeful and dynamic looking car than the one it replaces, the new Carens is more tightly penned and packaged, starting with its new chrome outline and honeycomb “tiger grille” corporate face, more bulging and complex bonnet landscaping. Smart big alloy wheels, low side skirts and black lower rear bumper cladding add a hint of sporting flavor that is reflected by the tailgate spoiler at the end of its flowing roofline arc. Lending presence, the Carens’ high flanks are visually broken to avoid a slab-sided look by a sharp crease below the waistline, and subtle lower flank moldings.

Restrained and tastefully styled and appointed, the new Carens has a European sensibility, including sparing use of chrome details and the absence of faux wood, and instead uses piano black dashboard panels mixed with strategically placed soft textures and some less prominently placed hard plastics. Sensible and business-like inside, the Carens’ thick contoured steering wheel falls nicely to hand, while build quality seems good and function, button and instrument layouts and ergonomics are user-friendly. Dark interior colours look best, while an optional panoramic sunroof gives an airier ambiance without restricting first and second row headspace owing to the Carens’ high roof.

Practical and economic

Practical, versatile and compact, the Carens seats seven with optional 50:50 split folding third row seating. Lower, shorter and narrower than before, the Carens’ 50mm longer wheelbase however provides excellent front and second row head and leg space. Third row space is convenient for shorter passengers or children. Second row 60:40 split folding seats slide and tilt to manage space between rearmost rows. Minimum window-line cargo capacity is 103-litres behind the third row, expanding to 492-litres and 1667-litres behind second and first rows, in addition to an under-boot storage compartment. The front passenger seat also folds flat to increase capacity.

Powered by a modern 1.7-litre common-rail turbo-diesel for-cylinder engine, the Carens 1.7CRDi develops 134BHP at 4,000rpm and a massive 243lb/ft torque throughout 1,750-2,500rpm, and returns frugal 5.4l/100km derv-drinking and low 144g/km carbon dioxide emissions on the combined cycle. With little diesel clatter audible at idle, the Carens CRDi feels refined and smooth in delivery once turbos are spooled. A six-speed manual gearbox slips easily into gear and its clutch pedal is light and biting-point intuitive, and can better control the turbo-diesel engine to avoid low-rev turbo lag and better exploit its rich and muscular but slightly narrow mid-range torque band.

Compact and comfortable

With shorter final drive gearing for first and second gear helping the turbo-diesel spool up quicker, the Carens CRDi achieve a 10.4-second 0-100km/h time and once into its high torque mid-range sweet spot, pulls indefatigably up inclines and when overtaking on highways, and can reach 191km/h. Low-revving, the CRDi builds up to maximum power quickly, by when one shift up and back into its rich mid-range. Stable and refined on highways, where it is most economic, the Carens CRDi is a good long-distance cruiser, while its compact and well-packaged dimensions make it easy to maneuver and park in tight urban settings.

Driven on narrow and winding Monte Carlo roads, the Carens was agile, maneuverable and slipped through snaking lanes and often congested roads well. While front visibility is good, thick rakish front pillars slightly affect front-side views close to the kerb, but small front quarter windows help. A comfortable and supple ride, the Carens well-absorbs bumps and cracks. Steering is light, quick and accurate but reassuring at speed. Turn-in is tidy, even with the heavier turbo-diesel engine, and while some body lean is evident through corners, the Carens feels composed, and lighter and more nimble than expected considering its 1,522kg weight.

BARCELONA  – Fresh from a $19-billion (14-billion-euro) takeover by Facebook, mobile messaging service WhatsApp said Monday it will launch free voice calls by mid-year.

The introduction of free calls, revealed on the opening day of the four-day World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, would match rival application Viber's similar offering.

"We are going to introduce voice on WhatsApp in the second quarter of this year," WhatsApp founder Jan Koum said.

Facebook, whose 29-year-old billionaire creator Mark Zuckerberg was the star speaker on the opening day of the industry fair, announced a stock and cash purchase of WhatsApp on Wednesday.

"Five years ago we had no users, no product," said Koum.

"Today we have 465 million active users," he said, adding that the company still had no marketing, relying mostly on word of mouth to prosper.

WhatsApp had not planned any changes in the light of the Facebook takeover, Koum said.

"Mark really understands that for WhatsApp to stay successful it really needs to stay independent," he said.

Viber, one of WhatsApp's key rivals, offers free voice and messaging.

Japanese online shopping group Rakuten announced this month it would buy Viber's Cyprus-based developer, Viber Media, for $900 million.

Gertrude

Hassan Najmi

Translated by Roger Allen

Massachusetts: Interlink, 2014, 282 pp.

This intriguing novel is based on real knowledge of the life and times of Gertrude Stein, the famous American writer, intellectual and art collector, who spent most of her life in Paris. It is also rooted in the whimsical notion of "what if?" What if Stein had found a Moroccan lover during the short vacation she took with her life-long companion, Alice Toklas, in Tangier? What if she had invited him to visit her in Paris? What if he had actually gone? By using the "what if?" device, Moroccan author Hassan Najmi opens a new, if admittedly fanciful, perspective on Stein. Most of her biographers are Westerners, but in this novel, first published in Arabic in 2011, she is viewed through Arab eyes. 

"Gertrude" has many themes and layers. On one level, it is about the East-West (or, more accurately, North-South) encounter, for it is hard to believe that Najmi randomly named Stein's fictitious lover Muhammad, such a common Arab name and one so full of religious/cultural overtones. The author must have meant the relationship between them to symbolise "the enormous gap between East and West where almost everything keeps them apart, except, of course, for wars, explosions, and arms seizures!" (p. 33) Yet, the novel also illustrates that there are many points of attraction in the personal sphere. 

Despite his centrality in the novel, Muhammad is not the narrator. After returning to Morocco, he "lived in a perpetual Parisian mist, even when Paris itself was thousands of kilometres away and Tangier swaggered on its modest way under the clear blue sky". (p. 32) Wallowing in memories, he is unable to write the story himself, and entrusts the task to a friend to whom he has confided his Paris experience in detail. This creates another layer to the story — the writing process. It also increases the distance between lived reality and text, and injects one of many ambiguities present in the book. One cannot be sure that Muhammad's friend is conveying his experience accurately. It is not even certain that he will write the book. While doing research about Stein, he meets an American diplomat and embarks on a rather torrid affair with her. He seems to be following in Muhammad's footsteps, but not quite. Sometimes, one wonders which relationship he is narrating as the text shifts from past to present and to different points-of-view. 

The uncertainty of writing the tale is added to the basic ambiguity of the relationship between Muhammad and Stein. One doesn't know if she really meant it when she invited him to visit her. Once arrived, his role in her Paris apartment is highly ambiguous, a cross between butler, companion and lover. The reasons why she eventually makes him feel he should leave are equally unclear. 

What is very clear and also delightful is how Muhammad throws himself into his new life in Paris, developing an appreciation for the art on Stein's walls and befriending the writers, intellectuals and artists, American and European, who gather in her salon — Picasso, Matisse, Apollinaire, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others. "Muhammad was relishing his new life with the person he loved, without being entirely sure of anything… One can be in love without needing to ask questions." (p. 204) His spontaneity and sincerity are endearing, and stand in marked contrast to the artifice of these artists and poets. While they live by recreating life in various art forms, Muhammad simply lives. Picasso's portrait of Gertrude, which adorns the book's cover and is subject to various interpretations, comes to symbolise this contrast as well as the ambiguity of her personality and relationship to Muhammad.

"Gertrude" adds to the lore about American writers and artists in self-imposed exile, most recently Woody Allen's film spoof, "Midnight in Paris", and Paula McLain's more serious "The Paris Wife", as well as previous writing by and about Paul Bowles who settled in Tangier. But while their experience was fruitful, the results of Muhammad's reverse journey remain ambiguous. Bowles was known to encourage local writers, most famously Muhammad Choukri, author of "For Bread Alone", whereas Stein is portrayed as reeducating Muhammad, but not encouraging either his independence or creativity, calling to mind some American writers who loved Tangiers but not the inhabitants. 

Najmi's novel poses many questions, from whether the relation between North and South can be equitable, to why people leave their own country and what they find out about themselves and others in the process. While much new literature focuses on hybridity and cross-cultural exchange, Najmi chooses to remind that North-South relations are still unequal in many cases. 

Sally Bland 

BARCELONA — Microsoft will update its Windows system this spring to address some of the gripes people have had when they use devices without touch capabilities.

Windows 8 and last fall’s 8.1 update were designed for a touch environment. But some of the gesture commands don’t translate well when using traditional mouse and keyboard controls.

Among other things, Microsoft Corp. will add search, power and settings buttons to the Start page, so that users don’t have to figure out how to pull those functions like a sock drawer from the right. There also will be easier, touch-free ways to close apps.

Microsoft is also updating its Windows Phone system this spring to work better in corporate environments and to bring features desired in fast-growing emerging markets.

The announcement came Sunday ahead of the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, Spain.

Many of the changes are geared at reducing manufacturing costs.

In essence, Microsoft is relaxing hardware requirements. For instance, there will be no longer a requirement that phones have a physical camera button and three control buttons on the front. That can be done through software instead, the approach used in many Android phones. Meanwhile, tablets and personal computers won’t need as much memory and storage as before.

Microsoft is also allowing phones to support two SIM cards, something in demand in China, India and other emerging markets where prices and plans vary so much that people switch services constantly for the best deals. For developed markets, Microsoft plans improvements for corporations, including VPN support on phones so people can access work networks securely.

More details on the phone changes are expected at Microsoft’s Build conference for software developers in April. Microsoft didn’t immediately disclose the name of either Windows update or confirm that they will be free for existing users, as they have been in the past.

Microsoft also announced the availability of a Facebook Messenger phone app in the next few weeks.

Microsoft used Mobile World Congress two years ago to release a test version of its Windows 8 operating system, months before its October 2012 debut.

The system was a response to the growing popularity of smartphones and tablet computers, which have been siphoning sales from personal computers running Windows. Windows 8 emphasises touch controls, just like mobile devices, and borrows much of its look and feel from Microsoft’s Windows Phone system for smartphones.

Many consumers, however, hate having that approach on PCs. Research firm IDC blamed Windows 8 for accelerating a decline in PCs — by 14 per cent in the first three months of 2013, the first full quarter with Windows 8.

Just one year after the Windows 8 launch, Microsoft issued a free update to address some of the gripes. The system now lets people run more than two apps side by side, for instance, and its Internet Explorer browser lets people open more than 10 tabs without automatically closing older ones. Windows 8.1 also introduced new features, including a universal search to access files stored on the computer along with Web content on the Internet.

Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s vice president of operating systems, said many of the gripes have come from people who use non-touch devices. Although 40 per cent of Windows 8 devices sold in the U.S. are now touch-enabled, he said the new update will make it easier for the remaining, non-touch users.

NEW YORK – Overweight and obese women who gain too few kilogrammes, or even lose weight, during pregnancy may be putting their unborn child at risk, a new study suggests.

“While many people recommend that weight loss in pregnancy, particularly for very obese women is ok... (there) may be adverse effects,” said Dr Patrick Catalano, director of the Centre for Reproductive Health at MetroHealth in Cleveland, Ohio.

“We don’t have much data, in particular on body composition changes in overweight (or) obese women who lose weight,” said Catalano, who led the new study. “Maybe we need to be a little bit more careful before we are just glib about saying it’s ok.”

Research has offered evidence of many risks posed by obesity to mother and foetus during pregnancy, up to and beyond the point of delivery.

Obese mothers are at raised risk of early spontaneous abortion and foetal birth defects. Later on, there is a higher chance of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. At delivery, obese mothers are more likely to need a Caesarean-section and to have postpartum wound infections.

The newborns of obese mothers are at risk of being overly large for their gestational age and that has been tied to childhood obesity.

The US Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued guidelines in 2009 recommending that obese women gain between five and nine kilogrammes (11 to 20 pounds) during pregnancy, which is somewhat less than the gain recommended for women who start pregnancy at a normal weight.

However, some researchers have suggested that for obese women, little to no weight gain, and even weight loss, is preferable during pregnancy to minimise the risks associated with obesity.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommends that individualised care be given to overweight or obese women who wish to gain less weight than recommended by the IOM.

Yet, little is known about the foetal health risks associated with weight loss or limited weight gain by overweight or obese women during pregnancy.

To investigate, Catalano, who was involved in developing the 2009 IOM guidelines, and his co-authors examined the effects of any weight loss or a weight gain of less than IOM’s minimum 5kg (11lbs).

They looked at 1,241 full-term singleton pregnancies among overweight and obese women.

Most (85 per cent) of the women gained more than the IOM’s minimum 5kg during pregnancy, averaging a gain of 14.4kg (32 lbs).

In contrast, 15 per cent of the study participants had weight gains below IOM’s minimum, averaging a gain of just 1.1kg (2.4 pounds) while pregnant.

Infants born to women who gained little or no weight during pregnancy tended to be small for their gestational age, and had less lean body mass and less fat mass than infants born to women who gained more than 5kg, Catalano and his team report in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

These infants also had a lower percentage of body fat, a smaller head circumference, lower birth weight and were smaller in length than infants born to women who gained more than 5kg during pregnancy.

The results held when the authors took into account the mothers’ pre-pregnancy weight, smoking status, glucose tolerance (a measure of pre-diabetes or diabetes) and other factors that may have influenced the infants’ development.

Infants born to 46 women who lost weight during pregnancy were also small for their gestational age and had decreased lean and fat mass, lower birth weight and a lower percentage of body fat.

In contrast, infants born to women who gained more than the IOM minimum were more likely to be large for their gestational age. Among infants born to women who gained more than 5kg, 13 per cent were large for their gestational age. In comparison, 7.5 per cent of infants born to women who gained 5kg or less were large.

“Everyone agrees having a very big baby is not good,” Catalano said. However, “the loss of lean mass may have long-term consequences” as well, he said.

What’s the bottom line for obese and overweight women? “Lose weight between pregnancies,” Catalano recommends. “We just don’t know if it’s safe to do during pregnancy.”

BARCELONA — Samsung unveiled two new computerised wristwatches on Sunday, this time including health sensors and related fitness features to give people a reason to buy one.

Samsung’s first Galaxy Gear smartwatch came out last fall amid much fanfare, but it landed with a thud in the marketplace. Samsung and its smartwatch rivals had failed to persuade many consumers that they need to be able to constantly check messages from their wrists. Wearable devices that succeeded tended to be fitness products such as the Fitbit.

The new Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo will have a heart rate sensor, a pedometer and various tools to measure exercise, sleep and stress levels. The low-resolution, two-megapixel camera on the Gear 2 is being moved to the main body; it was on the strap on the original Gear. It’s not immediately clear if the Gear 2 Neo has a camera.

It’s also unclear whether the new watches will continually display the time. In the original Gear, that was shut off to save battery, which lasted just a day. The new watches promise two or three days under normal use, putting them more in line with what rivals offer.

Samsung didn’t immediately reveal prices for the new watches, but said they would be available in April.

Samsung Electronics Co. announced the new watches Sunday ahead of the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung has a major event Monday evening, during which it is expected to announce a successor to its popular Galaxy S4 smartphone.

The company decided to make the latest smartwatches with a little-known operating system called Tizen OS, instead of the Android system from Google used in the original Gear, as the South Korean electronics company tries to break the dominance Google has on mobile devices.

The move gives some credence to a fledging system that Samsung and other backers want to see on all sorts of devices, including televisions, refrigerators and cars. Samsung already has a Tizen camera out, but a Tizen phone has yet to emerge, despite expectations of one last year. For now, Samsung is putting Tizen on a smartwatch instead.

Although Google gives away Android for any manufacturer to use in its gadgets, it’s loaded with a range of Google services, including stores for apps, music and video. Samsung is trying to promote its own stores as well and ends up confusing users by including two of everything.

To prevent Google from having a similar dominance in wearable devices and other gadgets beyond phones and tablets, Samsung is pushing Tizen OS as an alternative.

But before Tizen can take off, Samsung needs the new Gear to be a success.

The original Gear worked with selected Samsung phones to display e-mail and text alerts. It also had a camera on the strap for low-resolution photos and a speakerphone on the watch to make calls, Dick Tracy-style. The Gear’s 1.6-inch (4cm) screen keeps the watch small enough — at least for men — to work as a fashion accessory. Straps came in six colours.

The device had many shortcomings, however.

Its $300 price tag was 50 per cent higher than what Sony Corp. charges for its SmartWatch 2. And the Gear worked only with selected Samsung phones, while watches from Sony and Qualcomm Inc. work with a greater pool of Android devices from a variety of manufacturers.

In addition, app selection on the Gear was limited, while the apps that were available fell short on functionality. Although the Gear was supposed to offer quick access to information so you don’t have to constantly pull out your phone, many of the alerts simply tell you to return to the phone to read a new message.

BARCELONA – When the next super-fast mobile network launches in 2020 you will be able to download a high-definition movie in one second flat.

But the future fifth generation, or 5G, network is not really being designed for you.

In fact, it will be built for your car, fridge, smartwatch, toothbrush, lightbulb and a host of other everyday objects to communicate with each other online, a phenomenon known as the Internet of things.

Handling the new traffic is a key challenge for network operators gathering at the four-day Mobile World Congress opening Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

Worldwide data traffic generated by people’s mobile devices will multiply 11-fold by 2018, according to US telecommunications equipment manufacturer Cisco.

But the traffic generated between connected objects, so-called machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, will already be greater than all the world’s mobile telephones combined by 2015, it said in a study.

Mobile networks will need to boost capacity by 1,000 times by 2020 to cope with the huge growth in M2M traffic if lag time is to be avoided, said Ulrich Dropmann, senior executive at Finnish mobile services group Nokia Solutions Network.

Many objects will only send a trickle of data but the combined data flow will be “considerable” said Dropmann.

The 5G networks will launch in 2020, with a broader rollout from 2025, said Frederic Pujol, head of mobile broadband at consultancy group IDATE.

The prospect of 5G networks may seem distant in countries where 4G has yet to be deployed, but in countries at the cutting edge of technology such as South Korea, operators are already installing an advanced version of 4G to handle the demand.

Stakes could be enormous 

“If we don’t prepare now for the next generation, we will soon reach the limits that 4G can offer,” said Thibaut Kleiner, adviser to the Europe Union’s digital agenda commissioner, Nelly Kroes.

“It comes down to a question of leadership in technological innovation,” he told a conference.

The stakes could be enormous in a world increasingly reliant on mobile networks, a world in which Europe risks becoming a laggard — its last big success in the field dates back to the creation of the GSM, or 2G, network at the end of the 1990s.

To get back in the game, the European Commission launched late last year a 5G public-private partnership to develop the new network.

Known as 5G PPP, it brings together equipment makers and network operators.

Brussels has allocated 700 million euros ($960 million) up to 2020 for the project, a sum that is to be matched by the private sector.

South Korea’s science ministry announced last month the launch of a 5G development project with a budget of 1.6 billion won ($1.5 billion/1.1 billion euros).

“Countries in Europe, China and the US are making aggressive efforts to develop 5G technology... and we believe there will be fierce competition in this market in a few years,” the South Korean ministry said at the launch.

But beyond the commercial battle to come, network builders and handset manufacturers want to agree on a technological standard to allow economies of scale and global roaming, said Viktor Arvidsson, head of strategy for France at Swedish multinational Ericsson.

Such an agreement is the goal of METIS 2020 project, which brings together operators such as Orange or Telefonica and equipment makers like Alcatel Lucent and Huawei, the Chinese company that announced last year it would spend $600 million on 5G research and development by 2018.

LONDON — Procter & Gamble Co (P&G’s)is bringing the dentist into the bathroom with the world’s first smartphone-connected toothbrush, a device that gives personalised advice to help people improve their brushing.

The toothbrush, to be sold under P&G’s Oral-B brand and which will be widely available from June, has a Bluetooth 4.0 link to a smartphone app that can be programmed with the help of a dentist, for example to pay more attention to any areas of the mouth being neglected, P&G said.

“The app provides real-time guidance,” Michael Cohen-Dumani, global associate director for Oral-B, told Reuters. 

“Dentists always tell us: ‘People do a great job in the week before they come to visit us and in the week after they visit us. But nothing can hide the fact that when we look inside the mouth we can see all the areas they miss’.”

The toothbrush will be unveiled at the phone industry’s annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week, joining an expanding range of devices connected to smartphones that measure everything from sleep patterns and calorie intake to distance walked and exercise taken.

Professionals had helped develop the app as a tool to manage their patients’ behaviour between visits, Cohen-Dumani said. The app displays brushing progress in real time, telling the user when to move to a different part of the mouth and warning if they are brushing too hard, he said. 

“It will guide you in terms of how to brush, and you will be able to fully personalise the brushing routine for you,” Cohen-Dumani said. 

In tests, the app had extended average brushing times from less than a minute for a manual toothbrush to two minutes and 16 seconds, he said.

The device will be at top end the Oral-B electric toothbrush range, with a recommended retail price of 199 pounds ($330) in Britain and 219 euros in Europe.

French startup Kolibree has also developed a connected electric toothbrush that it plans to launch in the third quarter, according to its website. 

WASHINGTON – The melting of ice in the Antarctic is considered a top threat to global sea level rise, and scientists said Thursday the trend could continue for decades or even centuries to come.

Researchers focused on the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, which has been thinning at an increasingly rapid pace for about the past 20 years, as the waters beneath get warmer along with the rest of the ocean.

Based on new geological surveys and advanced dating techniques on rocks that have been exposed by the retreating ice, experts said in the journal Science that a similar phenomenon occurred thousands of years ago.

Some 8,000 years ago, the glacier thinned as fast as it has in recent decades, suggesting it may follow a similar pattern in the future, they reported.

“This thinning was sustained for decades to centuries at an average rate of more than 100 centimetres per year, comparable to contemporary thinning rates,” said the article in Science.

“Our findings reveal that Pine Island Glacier has experienced rapid thinning at least once in the past, and that, once set in motion, rapid ice sheet changes in this region can persist for centuries.”

The research team came from Britain, Germany and the United States.

Last month, scientists reported in the journal Nature Climate Change that the glacier was melting irreversibly and could add as much as a centimetre (0.4 inches) to ocean levels in 20 years.

A massive river of ice, the glacier by itself is responsible for 20 per cent of total ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet today.

On average, it shed 20 billion tonnes of ice annually from 1992-2011, a loss that is likely to increase up to and above 100 billion tonnes each year, said the Nature study.

NEW YORK — People take to Twitter to talk about everything from politics to breakfast to Justin Bieber in what feels like a chaotic stream of messages. So it may come as a surprise that the conversations on the short messaging service fit into just six distinct patterns.

The Pew Research Centre, working with the Social Media Research Foundation and using a special software tool, analysed and mapped millions of public tweets, retweets, hashtags and replies that form the backbone of Twitter chatter. The resulting diagrams show how people, brands, news outlets and celebrities interact on Twitter, depending on the topic of conversation.

When it comes to politics, for example, Twitter’s citizens tend to form two distinct groups that rarely interact with one another, divided along liberal and conservative lines, according to the report, which was published on Thursday. Liberals tend to post links to mainstream news sources, while conservatives link to sites with a conservative blend, according to the study, whose authors likened their methods to taking aerial photos of crowds gathered in public places.

The researchers are quick to note that not everyone uses Twitter — only 14 per cent of the US population — and not all who do use it to talk about politics, for example. Still, looking at how conversations flow on social media can provide new insights into how people communicate in a way that was not possible until very recently.

“You could never do that in the old days when you were running around with a pen and clipboard,” said Marc A. Smith, one of the study’s authors and director of the Social Media Research Foundation.

What emerged in maps of political conversations that the liberal and conservative groups are not even arguing with one another. Rather, they are “ignoring one another while pointing to different web resources and using different hashtags”, according to the study.

The telephone polls that take the pulse of the country about everything from politics to race, religion and technology will continue to form the research centre’s backbone. But Lee Rainie, one of the study’s authors and director of the Pew Research Internet Project said there are other kinds of data that deserve exploration. Looking at social media — something that large swaths of people participate in — can give insights to important information about people’s lives.

Here are the other five types of conversations:

— People who talk about well-known brands on Twitter tend to be disconnected from one another, focusing only on the topic at hand and not really interacting with each other. The study calls these “brand clusters.” One graph, that looked at mentions of Apple, found that users didn’t follow, reply to or mention any other person who also tweeted about the company.

— People who tweet from a social media conference, or about another highly specialised topic tend to form tight crowds of people who are connected to one another as followers. There are only a few users who are not connected to at least a few others in the group.

— “Community clusters” happen when several, evenly sized Twitter groups are connected to each other. In a sense, these can be compared “to people clustering in different stalls at a bazaar”. The conversations in this group share a common broader topic, whether that’s Michelle Obama or a tech conference, but each cluster takes a different focus.

— “Broadcast networks” are often media outlets or prominent social media figures with a lot of followers who repeat the messages such outlets send out.

— A Twitter “support network,” is the last major conversation type. These conversations usually involve a large company, such as a bank or airline, that listens and replies to consumer complaints. When mapped, the interactions in these groups tend to look like a bicycle wheel hub with many spokes.