Features

Renault’s answer to the big near-luxury front-wheel-drive saloon with greater appeal in ‘world’ markets, the Talisman is a stylish and smooth contender that walks a fine line between the attainable and the premium.

A far cry from French car makers’ sometimes more unique, innovative and even quirky big saloons of yesteryears, the Talisman is instead a more conservatively mainstream and “safe pair of hands” effort developed in collaboration with Renault’s South Korean subsidiary, and also marketed as the Renault Samsung SM6. 

Subtle style

A big, comfortable and quick combustion engine saloon, the Talisman was first launched in 2015 and mildly refreshed in 2020 for certain markets. The Talisman may have ceased production for certain markets as of this year, but nevertheless seems to remain listed and presumably available in others ­—  including Jordan — as a last chance opportunity for a more individualistic and modern petrol powered premium saloon, before it is might be succeeded by some high riding crossover or electrified vehicle, if at all.

A long, low and sleek design with flowing lines, rakishly arcing roofline and high waistline, the Talisman is very much a product of its era and rather conservatively sporty design this is one of smooth understatement and flowingly discrete style rather than bland obscurity. With long snouty bonnet, bold grille and slim heavily browed headlights, the Talisman cuts a assertive stance that is reflected with subtly prominent sills, short and pert rear deck and a dramatic, and well grounded rear fascia treatment.

Smooth sprinter

Offered with a variety of compact, comparatively powerful and fuel efficient petrol and diesel engines for various markets, the top spec Middle East Talisman TCE190 version is powered by a turbocharged 1.6-litre direct injection four-cylinder engine producing 188BHP at 5,750rpm and 192lb/ft torque at 2,500rpm. Driving the front wheels through a slick, smooth and quick shifting 7-speed automated dual-clutch gearbox, the Talisman TCE190 carries its 1,444kg mass through the 0-100km/h sprint in just 7.7-seconds and onto a 225km/h top speed.

Quick spooling and responsive from standstill and at lower engine speeds for a small turbocharged engine mated to a big car, the Talisman’s engine is smooth and willing right to its peak power and rev limit. It is at its best in its muscular mid-range torque sweet spot. Flexible throughout its mid-range plateau, the Talisman’s on-the-move versatility allows for 6.6-second 80-120km/h acceleration and confident motorway overtaking. The Talisman TCE190 meanwhile returns frugally low claimed 5.88l/100km combined cycle fuel efficiency.

Confident comfort

A smooth and sophisticated drive on motorways, the Talisman TCE190 is a natural, refined and stable long distance cruiser, with low CD0.27 aerodynamics helping to keep it quiet and efficient. Underneath it rides on front MacPherson struts as expected in its segment, and more surprisingly, a torsion beam set-up at the rear, more common to smaller and less luxurious cars. Nevertheless, the Talisman avails itself well in terms of driving dynamics — for its segment — as well as ride comfort.

With quick and responsive 2.8-turn steering and confident front grip, the Talisman is tidy and eager turning in for such a long and large saloon, but naturally, cannot compare with the agility and nimbleness, never mind the intuitive feel of some of its smaller and sportier Renault sister models, such as the outgoing Megane. But regardless, the Talisman well controls cornering body lean corners, and provides reassuring rear grip. Braking is meanwhile similarly confident, with decent pedal feel and fade resilience.

Classy cabin

A comfortable ride that is for the most part forgiving even with low profile 225/45R18 tyres, the Talisman dispatches most textural imperfections and bumps in its stride. It can, however, feel slightly firm over more jagged and sudden potholes and bumps. Settled in its ride quality, the Talisman recovers well from sharp crests and dips, especially compared to similarly sized Korean competitors. Refined inside, its driving position is meanwhile comfortable, well adjustable and supportive for its class, and with good front sightlines.

With a classy cabin ambiance and design, the Talisman incorporates mostly good material and textures with a sophisticated and visually spacious horizontally oriented design. Uncluttered and intuitively user-friendly, controls and instrumentation include a vertically aligned infotainment screen and big tachometer behind its sporty contoured steering wheel. Spacious in front, its rear seats are comfortable and fairly sized, with decent, if not outright generous rear headroom for taller occupants. Well-equipped with infotainment, convenience and safety features, the Talisman’s big boot meanwhile accommodates 515-litres luggage volume.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Engine: 1.6-litre, transverse, turbocharged 4-cylinders
• Bore x stroke: 79.5 x 80.5mm
• Compression: 10:1
• Valve-train: 16-valve, DOHC, direct injection
• Gearbox: 7-speed automated dual clutch, front-wheel-drive
• Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 188 (190) [140] @5,750rpm
• Specific power: 116BHP/litre
• Power-to-weight: 130BHP/tonne
• Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 192 (260) @2,500rpm
• Specific torque: 160Nm/litre
• Torque-to-weight: 180Nm/tonne
• 0-100 km/h: 7.7-seconds
• 80-120km/h: 6.6-seconds
• Top speed: 225km/h
• Fuel capacity: 51-litres
• CO2 emissions, combined: 139g/km
• Track, F/R: 1,614/1,609mm
• Aerodynamic drag co-efficient: CD0.27
• Luggage volume: 515-litres
• Payload: 600kg
• Steering: Power-assisted rack & pinion
• Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts/torsion beam, anti-roll bars
• Brakes, F/R: ventilated discs, 320 x 28mm/290 x 11mm
• Tyres: 245/45R18

By Dina Halaseh
Educational Psychologist

As parents, we sit and meet our children’s teachers and hear all sorts of feedback, some may be positive while most may be negative.

What to look for in a teacher’s feedback

We usually find that the main concern is related to a certain skill or a combination of some. In general, all of our skills work together, so a weakness in one area can manifest itself in many different ways. 

Here are some of the common sentences we might hear from a teacher at school:

•Your child needs extra time to finish a task. Usually when extra time is mentioned, this means that there is an issue with slow processing speed. Processing speed is how fast we can deal with information especially under stress. Some students may need more time in finishing tasks and might even struggle to finish exams on time

•Your child doesn’t write enough sentences compared to other classmates and full sentences are not used. Writing, reading and all literacy skills relate to auditory processing. This is our ability to analyse, blend, segment and manipulate sounds to master a language. Students struggling with auditory processing usually tend to struggle with reading, writing, spelling, comprehension, and in many cases, even speech!

•Your child is very smart if only there were more focus and effort put in. Your child is distracted while doing a task and always needs to be prompted. This is an obvious one, when discussing focus and being distracted and is clearly related to attention skills. There are many types of attention. Attention includes Divided Attention (the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time) and Selective Attention (the ability to focus on one thing and ignoring all distractions) and Sustained Attention (the ability to focus for a long period of time)

•It seems like your child didn’t study enough. Your child couldn’t recall the material. Recalling information goes back to our memory skills! Long-term memory and working memory both play a huge role in remembering information. In many cases, students tend to forget, even though they worked hard and really studied the subject thoroughly

•Your child is all over the place, personal items are not well organised and time management is an issue as well. Organisation and time management skills may be an indication of a weakness in Logic and Reasoning. The latter is needed to deal with abstract information and data analysis. It helps us build connections between different ideas, organise, plan and conclude different ideas from given information and data (the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time), Selective Attention (the ability to focus on one thing and ignoring all distractions) and Sustained Attention (the ability to focus for a long period of time)

•Your child struggles to understand visual graphs and information from visual graphics. Visual processing is the skill needed to understand graphics, visualise material, read maps, understand directions and much more. It can even affect their math skills when dealing with geometry and other related topics

•Your child is reading below grade level. Make sure you read a book on a daily basis. This also goes back to the child’s auditory processing skills, which can be enhanced! The brain can actually rewire itself in a way that a struggling reader can become a skilled one!

•Your child is struggling with mathematical concepts, especially multi-step questions and equations. A math weakness can relate to logic and reasoning, processing speed, or both at the same time! Children struggling in these areas might find math challenging and need extra time and effort to understand it

These are only some of the weaknesses you might be hearing about from your child’s teacher. All of these skills can be improved and turned into strengths when challenged and worked on! Make sure you find out the reason behind the weakness so you can target the areas needed for a better school year!

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

PARIS — Scientists have identified the maximum mix of heat and humidity a human body can survive.

Even a healthy young person will die after enduring six hours of 35ºC  warmth when coupled with 100 per cent humidity, but new research shows that threshold could be significantly lower.

At this point sweat — the body’s main tool for bringing down its core temperature — no longer evaporates off the skin, eventually leading to heatstroke, organ failure and death.

This critical limit, which occurs at 35 degrees of what is known “wet bulb temperature”, has only been breached around a dozen times, mostly in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, Colin Raymond of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.

None of those instances lasted more than two hours, meaning there have never been any “mass mortality events” linked to this limit of human survival, said Raymond, who led a major study on the subject.

But extreme heat does not need to be anywhere near that level to kill people, and everyone has a different threshold depending on their age, health and other social and economic factors, experts say.

For example, more than 61,000 people are estimated to have died due to the heat last summer in Europe, where there is rarely enough humidity to create dangerous wet bulb temperatures.

But as global temperatures rise — last month was confirmed as the hottest in recorded history — scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will also become more common.

The frequency of such events has at least doubled over the last 40 years, Raymond said, calling the increase a serious hazard of human-caused climate change.

Raymond’s research projected that wet bulb temperatures will “regularly exceed” 35ºC at several points around the world in the coming decades if the world warms 2.5ºC degrees above preindustrial levels.

‘Really, really dangerous’

Though now mostly calculated using heat and humidity readings, wet bulb temperature was originally measured by putting a wet cloth over a thermometer and exposing it to the air. 

This allowed it to measure how quickly the water evaporated off the cloth, representing sweat off of skin.

The theorised human survival limit of 35ºC wet bulb temperature represents 35ºC of dry heat as well as 100 per cent humidity — or 46ºC at 50ºC per cent humidity.

To test this limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the United States measured the core temperatures of young, healthy people inside a heat chamber.

They found that participants reached their “critical environmental limit” — when their body could not stop their core temperature from continuing to rise — at 30.6ºC wet bulb temperature, well below the previously theorised 35ºC.

The team estimated that it would take between five to seven hours before such conditions would reach “really, really dangerous core temperatures”, Daniel Vecellio, who worked on the research, told AFP.

The most vulnerable

Joy Monteiro, a researcher in India who last month published a study in Nature looking at wet bulb temperatures in South Asia, said that most deadly heatwaves in the region were well below the 35ºC wet bulb threshold.

Any such limits on human endurance are “wildly different for different people”, he told AFP.

“We don’t live in a vacuum — especially children,” said Ayesha Kadir, a paediatrician in the UK and health adviser at Save the Children.

Small children are less able to regulate their body temperature, putting them at greater risk, she said.

Older people, who have fewer sweat glands, are the most vulnerable. Nearly 90 per cent of the heat-related deaths in Europe last summer were among people aged over 65.

People who have to work outside in soaring temperatures are also more at risk.

Whether or not people can occasionally cool their bodies down — for example in air conditioned spaces — is also a major factor. 

Monteiro pointed out that people without access to toilets often drink less water, leading to dehydration.

“Like a lot of impacts of climate change, it is the people who are least able to insulate themselves from these extremes who will be suffering the most,” Raymond said. 

His research has shown that El Nino weather phenomena have pushed up wet bulb temperatures in the past. The first El Nino event in four years is expected to peak towards the end of this year.

Wet bulb temperatures are also closely linked to ocean surface temperatures, Raymond said.

The world’s oceans hit an all-time high temperature last month, beating the previous 2016 record, according to the European Union’s climate observatory.

RETOSACHI, Mexico — Romayne Wheeler sits at his grand piano overlooking Mexico’s Copper Canyon and plays music inspired by the mountains and remote Indigenous communities that he now dedicates his life to helping.

The 81-year-old California-born composer no longer lives in the cave where he slept with his solar-powered portable piano after arriving several decades ago in the Sierra Tarahumara in north-western Mexico.

But he feels as close as ever to the nature and Indigenous Raramuri people who welcomed him into their lives, sharing their food, music and culture.

“I feel truly that all of this area around me is my studio,” Wheeler told AFP in his stone house perched on the canyon’s edge, several hours from the nearest significant town along winding mountain tracks.

“Every tree, every plant, every flower — everything here has something to tell me,” he said.

Wheeler’s love affair with the Sierra Tarahumara began in 1980 when he was in the United States studying Indigenous music and a snowstorm made it impossible to travel to a Native American reservation near the Grand Canyon.

Leafing through a copy of National Geographic magazine, he came across pictures of the remote Mexican region and decided to see it for himself.

“It was like coming home,” he recalled, wearing the Indigenous-style shirt and traditional sandals that he now prefers to Western attire.

“The people that are most revered here are the musicians. They stand in high honour like the shamans,” he said.

The mountainous corner of Chihuahua state is part of the notorious “Golden Triangle”, a region with a history of marijuana and opium poppy production as well as drug cartel violence.

Wheeler identified so much with the philosophy of the Raramuri — also known as Tarahumara — that he came back for several weeks each year before settling there permanently in 1992.

They were “people who shared everything they had, who considered the person that is of most value is the one that helps others the most, and contributed something positive to humanity”, he said.

When he first arrived, the Raramuri — whose name means “light-footed ones” and who are renowned for their running stamina — showed Wheeler a small cave where he could practice and keep his electric piano dry.

“My friends said sometimes with the wind just right they could hear my little tiny instrument all the way across the canyon,” he remembered.

One young child, a neighbour’s son, showed particular interest, so Wheeler taught him to play and sent him to study in the Chihuahua state capital.

Now Romeyno Gutierrez, his protégé, is an acclaimed pianist in his own right who performs abroad and accompanied Wheeler on two tours of Europe.

“He’s the first pianist and composer of Indian heritage that I know of on our continent,” Wheeler said proudly.

Bringing his 1917 Steinway grand piano to the village of Retosachi was almost as much of an odyssey as Wheeler’s own.

The dream to put a piano on a mountaintop was born in Austria where Wheeler, a keen mountaineer, studied and lived for 32 years, but where harsh winters made it impossible.

In Mexico, he hired a professional moving company to bring the fragile musical instrument from the western city of Guadalajara as far as it could into the mountains.

It then took 28 hours to reach Wheeler’s home by truck along dirt mountain roads with the piano laid on its side, supported by piles of potatoes, he said.

“We went at a walking rhythm for most of the way because of all the potholes,” he added.

Despite the remoteness of his home, affectionately named Eagle’s Nest, visits from his neighbours and the company of his dogs mean that Wheeler never feels alone.

“I feel more lonely in the city because of all the people around that have nothing to say to each other,” he said.

He has 42 godsons in the area, one of the poorest in Mexico, where limited access to clean water, sufficient food and healthcare pose major challenges to communities that rely mostly on subsistence agriculture.

In the early 1990s, Wheeler decided to use proceeds from the concerts he performs around the world to establish a school, a clinic and a scholarship programme.

“They’re very good people. They help a lot,” said one of his neighbours, Gerardo Gutierrez, who was a child when he first met Wheeler.

“They gave away blankets when it was very cold. And sometimes they got groceries for the people here,” the 49-year-old added.

Giving back to the community has also given Wheeler a deeper sense of purpose.

“These years have been the most happy years of my life really because I feel like my music is doing something of value to help humanity,” he said.

HONG KONG — Hong Kong businessman W. Wong still remembers the day in 1972 when he first heard neighbourhood kids rave about a figure who seemed larger than life: Bruce Lee. 

Lee, a consummate martial artist whose films spawned a kung fu craze around the world, was one of the first Asian men to achieve Hollywood superstardom before his death at 32. 

His influence can still be felt in Hong Kong, where he spent his childhood and final years, as fans held exhibitions and martial arts workshops to mark the 50th anniversary of Lee’s death. 

“Every child needs some kind of role model, and I chose Bruce Lee,” said Wong, 54, who has led the city’s largest fan club devoted to the star for nearly three decades.

“I had hoped my life would resemble the Bruce Lee I saw: handsome, strong, with great martial arts skills and a heroic image.”

At a studio for Wing Chun — a style of martial arts Lee practised before inventing his own Jeet Kune Do method — the martial arts master is revered as something akin to a patron saint.

Studio owner Cheng Chi-ping, 69, told AFP his cohort began their training under the shadow of Lee’s cultural influence but “we could never match his speed, strength or physique”. 

Lee’s appeal had not diminished for the next generation, said Mic Leung, 45, who trained at the same studio and, as a teenager, sought out Lee’s movies on old videotapes. 

“When we talk about the ‘god of martial arts’, we could only be talking about Bruce Lee. There is no one else,” he said.

Born in San Francisco in 1940, Lee was raised in Hong Kong and had an early brush with fame as a child actor, supported by his father, who was a famous Cantonese opera singer.

At 18, he continued his studies in the United States and over the next decade taught martial arts and scored minor parts in Hollywood, before landing the role of Kato in the television series “The Green Hornet”.

But it was not until Lee returned to Hong Kong that he landed his first lead role in the martial arts film “The Big Boss”, which made him a household name in Asia after its 1971 release.

The next year saw two more box office hits — “Fist of Fury” and “The Way of the Dragon” — cementing Lee’s persona as a relentless, lightning-fast fighter.

Lee had completed filming his fourth star vehicle, “Enter the Dragon”, and was halfway through his fifth when he died on July 20, 1973 from swelling of the brain, attributed to an adverse reaction to painkillers.

Film scholar Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, who taught Lee’s movies at the University of Hong Kong, said Lee expressed a kind of Chinese identity that transcended national borders.

“I would call Bruce Lee a paragon of Sinophone soft power success with Hong Kong characteristics,” he told AFP.

In Hollywood, Lee represented a rebuke to racist stereotypes, showing that Asian men were more than just servants and villains.

The scenes where he bares his torso and flexes his muscles — what Magnan-Park called the “kung fu striptease” — were essential because they show how ripped bodies can belong to Asian heroes as well.

“He made Asian men sexy, and that is something I don’t think we talk about enough,” he said.

Despite Lee’s enduring fame, preserving his legacy in Hong Kong was no easy task, fan club chairman Wong told AFP. Government support was intermittent at best, he said.

Fans in 2004 successfully petitioned to set up a bronze statue of Lee on Hong Kong’s famed waterfront, but a campaign to revitalise his former mansion could not save it from demolition in 2019.

At a government-run museum exhibit commemorating Lee’s life, a woman surnamed Yip told AFP she wanted to share “a symbol of the old Hong Kong” with her two children.

Wong, who had organised a smaller exhibit in Sham Shui Po district, acknowledged a decline of interest among young people but said Lee’s philosophy always has the potential to become relevant again. 

He pointed to how protesters in Hong Kong’s 2019 democracy movement cited the martial artist’s mantra — “Be water, my friend” — as a reminder to adopt flexible tactics of resistance.