Smart phones are one of the most addictive things you could give to children! Forget gambling, cigarettes and alcohol! Phones are the completely next level in their addictive and manipulative nature and yet parents hand them out to their kids without a thought!
Why does a primary school student need a phone? Are their lives so hectic that they need to ensure they’re reminded of their next appointment coming up on the calendar? Do they need to be in constant communication with ‘head office’ so that the mission critical operations of the day’s play with Jimmy is guaranteed 99.9% uptime? To be perfectly honest, children don’t need phones at all. This is a massive failing of parents today who have either convinced themselves that they’re doing the right thing by giving their child a phone to ‘keep them safe’ or massive marketing and peer pressure from other children, parents and social media for which resistance is futile. Whatever the deluded rationale behind it is, it’s just wrong. Phones are dangerous, addictive and manipulative devices which are clearly contributing to the increasingly poor mental health of children today and their inability to cope with so many situations that can’t be resolved instantly. Since this is so clearly self-evident, what don’t parents just cut to the chase and give their kids a nice big plate of cocaine to snort. Same basic effect: addiction, behavioural change and damage to mental health. For what are they waiting? They’re already creating dependencies and junkie type behaviours so, rather than doing it slowly over years with a gateway addiction, why not just cut to the chase, cut some lines and make it happen?!! Whilst some people may think this comparison is over the top, I’m not the first person to make this comparison, nor will I be the last, so let’s look at it in some more detail. Do any schools allow, smoking, drugs or alcohol to be consumed on site on a daily basis? In my experience, no! This will get you suspended or expelled, yet it’s common practice for students to be using their phones constantly throughout the day. Using a smart phone and all the buzzes and bings, notifications and ‘rewards’ which come from using it and giving it your attention all the time releases dopamine, which makes you feel good and re-enforces the behaviour surrounding the activity which just gave you that hit. Other than turning people into wandering zombies, what’s this constant deluge of notifications, stimulations and reliance doing to children? Although it’s still only early days of this phenomenon, studies have shown that it’s further lowering children’s attention span, manipulating their daily activities and behaviours and reducing their ability to cope without constant stimulation and activity. Add this to the already challenging teenage years of relationships and body image and let them get bombarded by fake images of fake people throughout the world. You’re just setting them up for further trauma and mental health issues from which people are finding it more difficult to recover. Is this what parents think is a good way of keeping their children ‘safe’? It seems rather idiotic to me and so far removed from any notion of safety, you may as well just get them hooked on a few random drugs instead and therefore save everyone a huge amount of time as the damage will occur far more quickly and efficiently. The next cry will be from parents for schools to conduct ‘phone testing’ to see if their child’s phone is ‘safe’ to use. Therefore, taking yet another step away from actual useful action and taking responsibility for themselves to not give their child a phone to begin with. The actual danger and long-term damage associated with giving children smart phones, far outweighs the potential risk of their not having a phone so they can be contacted 24/7 ‘just in case.’ Generations of children have survived throughout the ages and managed to find their way home every day without the use of mobile phones, ride-sharing and GPS locationing, yet some parents would have you believe that the world is far more dangerous than it’s ever been and justify giving their child this dangerous device out of ‘safety.’ The fact is that in this situation, the phone, what it does and what it can access is the real risk and is doing real harm to children and adults alike. The random gangs of child kidnappers in white panel vans from whom parents are believing they are protecting their childing, are predominantly the perceived risk in the modern world and an extra-ordinarily rare occurrence. Yet parents seem willing to give their children smart-phones which open the door to a highly addictive, manipulative and unfiltered adult world, that’s far more dangerous and destructive at home than it is for their children to go down to the park or ride a bike with a friend or two and be ‘unsupervised’ and ‘out-of-communications range.’ If you’re really worried about the roaming white panel vans, perhaps paying for some martial arts lessons is a far better investment than the phone. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg for this problem. It’s impacting student behaviour, and engagement as well as their mental health and well-being. Schools and teachers are now being expected to clean up yet another mess which is not of their making. However, until parents realise the difference between the real risk of giving their child a smart-phone versus the perceived risk of not giving them one, it’s going to be a hard uphill battle ahead. Some further interesting reading on the subject: http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/ https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-blog/new-studies-compare-smartphones-cocaine-addiction/
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The other day, there was a breakthrough news story about the current virus that’s spooking and wreaking havoc across the world. It was the findings of a team of Australian scientists who had discovered the way in which the body’s immune system fights the Corona Virus. The virus is fought in a similar way that the body fights the flu. This is a huge, positive discovery in the fight against the virus. However, it seems to have drowned in the flood of toxic waste stories about the doom and gloom of the virus that’s making great headlines for all of the ‘news’ providers around the world.
Now I don’t want people to think that I’m flippant or dismissive of the virus. The challenge of its containment, the impact on older people and pressure this is putting on healthcare workers and services is real. We still need to put this into perspective in that most people are recovering from it and this story of the discovery by Australian scientists is a wonderful ray of hope. There has been an irrational response by many people across the world, with panic buying and weirdass behaviour. This has seen some extremes of people stopping doing everything and cutting themselves off completely on the one hand and people taking no precautions or mitigating actions on the other. Essentially, the situation is not good, especially economically, but it’s also not as bad as bubonic plague. So why, when there’s good news and when we know the situation will ultimately improve, are so many people panicking and worried? Firstly, people are generally not good with change and this has been a massive and sudden change to our way of life. For some people, there will be no real impact on their lives. For others, it will do massive economic and psychological damage. Some will catch the virus and be ok. Others will catch it and unfortunately, they won’t recover. Other than the flood of news stories which would wear down even the most resilient of us, the fact is that something like this forces people to confront their own mortality. This is something which is uncomfortable and people don’t want to do. People think they have plenty of time and for most people they do. However, this means most people don’t confront anything to do with their own mortality until much later in life. Now this global pandemic which has killed many thousands of people in a short period of time, has brought this home to people. The resulting panic of those who aren’t able to put some perspective on the situation is toxic and contagious in itself. Once a few people panic and face their own mortality, this quickly catches on to others and has thus spread quicker than any virus in history. The world will get though this current crisis. The world will survive, as it did the plague, the Spanish flu, polio, smallpox and countless other pandemics. In times of panic and uncertainty, it’s always good to look for the positives and the wins such as the discovery by the Australian scientists. We should also be thankful and more appreciative of the life and the time we have on this earth. Far too many people take this for granted and when confronted with something such as this and their own mortality, they panic and are unable to put anything into perspective. This is by no means an easy situation and we face tough days ahead, but despite that, there is hope. With the advances in technology and medical research that’s already been done, there will be a treatment/vaccine and or subsidence of this virus and the world, whilst having changed somewhat, will get back to somewhat normal and perhaps the ultimate opportunity out of this crisis will be that nations can put their differences aside and work together for a common global goal that impacts and improves everyone’s lives. For some great news on the research so far: https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/research-how-bodys-immune-system-fights-coronavirus-covid-19/12059266?pfmredir=sm https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-22/doubt-over-contracting-coronavirus-covid-19-twice/12075878?pfmredir=sm Everyone loves a good drama. At work, the gossip around who’s dating who is far more interesting than doing your job. Newspapers and media outlets rely on bad news to sell papers or in digital terms create ‘click bait’ so you click on the article. Often, in both cases, the headlines don’t match the actual story because if they did, people wouldn’t read them. It’s far easier to get someone to pay for a paper with the headline “Virus Outbreak! 95 Year old Dead and Infections on the Rise.” Rather than, “55,000 people have already recovered from the Virus many only experienced mild illness.” This is not to understate the issue at hand. Yes it is concerning and yes we need to do something about this to slow and/or stop the spread. However, the impact this has had on outdoor education alone is massive, with countless school cutting all programs, no matter how remote or disconnected they are from the fact that children are not really being affected. The level of perceived risk is through the roof, the level of actual risk for most people remains relatively low. I saw this again on the news last night. ¾ of the whole news was about the ‘massive’ jump in cases. The ‘sick and elderly dying,’ the panic buying, the dark days ahead and all of this negative crap which gives the average person the impression that the zombie apocalypse is here. For most people, given the popularity of the show, the Walking Dead, they’re reacting as if a zombie virus or Ebola has gotten loose and is wiping out 80-90% of the healthy population. The fact is, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that fear and panic are driving this and hyped up by the media, is driving the world economy into recession. Ironically, like a fine print disclaimer at the bottom of some ludicrous advert, one of the later stories in the news was basically, ‘Oh by the way… if you wash your hands, don’t touch your face and mouth after contacts and don’t have prolonged close contact with an infected person, the risk of catching this is really low. The number of cases of this in the country and around the world are testament to this. Added to this, most people are not dying. They’re experiencing mild ‘flu-like’ conditions and recovering. What’s the problem? The problem is that everyone loves the drama and focuses on the negative side of the drama, rather than looking at the whole problem in context. The world is not going to be completely overrun and shut-down by this virus. It’s not wiping out the next generation of young people and healthy people, but mild viruses which don’t kill lots of people, don’t make good news stories. On 30th Oct 1938, the radio show ‘War of the Worlds’, by Orson Welles first aired. This sparked wide-spread panic, with people thinking they were being attacked by aliens. Now we might laugh at this now, as we know it’s a story, but at the time, that felt so real as it was coming through their airwaves. The media has a lot to answer for in this. They’re far from reporting the facts and this has been so over-editorialised and hyped up that the fear and panic they’ve put into the community could have a really long-term negative effect. This will all blow over given time. However, how many businesses are going to be wiped out? How many fights are going to break out over nothing? How much panic is ok before the media is taken to task over this, which, to be honest, they won’t be. If you look back in history, the world has survived many things. However, fear and panic is so contagious that the impact it has on a mild crisis can and does turn everything into a major catastrophe. We’re experiencing runs on banks, stampedes in stadiums, riots over food and supplies, when the supplies aren’t at risk. The timeless words of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ echo loudly through this current world crisis and we should always remember: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; …. Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! The full poem can be found here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if--- It is time for us to take stock and see this for what it is. It is not the world ending pandemic that will turn everyone inside out. It is a virus, which spreads quickly through close contact and poor hygiene and the effects of which are generally mild with most people recovering. Let’s not lose our heads. The world has gone through worse and there will be worse to come, but standing firm when everyone else is losing it, is so important for the world right now. We need more people to have level heads and respond to this current issue accordingly. For some stats on the current virus check out: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/ For some crucial tips on surviving a zombie apocalypse check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyUbQTEFuss Ok, so I’ve been watching all of the hysteria over the Coronavirus. Whilst this is no doubt a highly infectious virus which has spread quite rapidly, we also should put this into perspective as to the effect of this virus. Most sufferers are not dying from this. Most are recovering quite well, as with any other cold or flu. There is a mortality rate currently between 1% and 4%, depending on country, age and healthcare standards. In terms of a monumental threat to life as we know it, it’s really not that bad.
Therefore, why are so many people going crazy? Why are the supermarket aisles stripped of toilet paper and tissues? Why are people having punch-ups over things which you could live without? It’s weird, isn’t it. It often takes a crisis for us to remember how stupid some people are. The whole notion of people being able to think for themselves seems to go out the window and is replaced with this insane ‘mob mentality’. This fear and anxiety is far more contagious and dangerous than the virus itself, as people then turn on each other for no real reason. The media hasn’t helped either. Whilst it’s good that it’s being reported, as are all bad stories, the media just latch on (kinda virus-like) and suck the life out of the story. I saw one media outlet which I won’t name, (but they have a track record of idiotic headlines and stories written and aimed at angry bogan 10 year olds). That organisation is running an infection counter on its website, as if it’s some sort of doomsday clock. I think this is horrendously irresponsible and only fuels the fear of those toilet paper toting hoarders. From a risk management point of view, I understand the hand sanitiser, even the paracetamol to fight off the infection, but what the hell are you going to do with car-loads of toilet paper? We don’t import it, so it’s not as if it’s going to be stopped and be sitting on a dock somewhere. If I were going to go hysterical and start hoarding things, I’d be going for tinned food, bottled water, some fuel, gin, tonic, limes and a few good books to read. The TP is really not even on the list. So why is this the thing for which people have rushed out? To be honest, I have no idea! It really makes no sense at all, but it’s fascinating behaviour to watch how irrational people can be when fear sweeps over them. Whilst in the past we would talk about the fight or flight mechanism we have built into us, perhaps that needs to be extended to the fight, flight and flush. Whilst the coronavirus is a concern, as is any communicable disease which can kill people, the far more dangerous thing at this point in time is the fear and anxiety which is being fuelled by media and mob behaviour. Before we all rush out, knock over a few old ladies in the desperate effort to buy a roll of toilet paper, take stock of the reality of the situation. The virus can be prevented and avoided by social distance and ensuring you have good hygiene and wash your hands properly. Doing this will help stop the spread of this virus. Here’s a great video from the WHO about that exact thing: https://openwho.org/courses/introduction-to-ncov This year sees the banning of mobile phones in many Australian schools. This is an initiative which is something that everyone should welcome with excitement. Whilst some technology is beneficial, the fact is that we’re seeing a massive increase in mental health issues, many of which can be linked with social media addiction and a complete disconnect from reality in which young people growing up with smart devices can find themselves.
Whilst many bleeding heart civil libertarians and anxious parents might be wailing and decrying the ban as over the top, the fact is that children don’t need a phone at school. For that matter, they really don’t need a phone at all. I’ve written a number of articles around this and the problems that phones are causing, of which we’re only just starting to see the impact. In terms of taking risks, I recently wrote about finding the one reasons out of ten for doing something versus the ten reasons for not doing something. I think the same is relevant to this problem. However, the opposite seems to be true of the decision-making process. Parents hold onto the one reason for their child to have a phone and that’s ‘in case of emergency.’ However, how often is there an emergency where there’s nobody else around to ask for help? If we then delved into the ten reasons why you shouldn’t give your child a phone, we would find the potential negative impact to be huge versus this supposed ‘emergency’ which is most likely not going to happen. However, without going into all the ins and outs of what might or might not be reasons or justifications for giving a child a phone, let’s look at what’s been the impact at school. Peer-pressure! This is probably the number one driver of why children end up with phones. ‘Because everyone else has one’. This is not a great reason in itself, but it massively fuels the peer pressure which children face each day. One of the main impacts at school however, is the level of distraction that a smart device causes and the subsequent lowering of children’s attention spans. If you’re trying to engage students in learning, then having something which distracts them and constantly provides them with a dopamine hit versus your maths lesson, you’re not winning anytime soon. In general terms, it takes fifteen minutes for you to get into an activity. Each distraction or change of task, then takes another fifteen minutes for you to get back into that activity. Hence, in an hour lesson, you don’t need too many distractions to have wasted an entire hour. There’s the social impact. If break time is filled with time spent playing games on the phone or engaged on social media, this significantly reduces the child’s ability to develop friendships and meaningful relationships with real people. All they see is a filtered view of the world and this filtered view is toxic and destructive. From my experience, often children will claim they’re talking with or messaging their parents during break times so it’s ‘ok.’ This firstly is a load of crap, as most teenagers wouldn’t be constantly messaging their parents and secondly, if they are, their parents need a slap across the face for being so stupid. Stop trying to live your life through your children. If you have nothing else better to do than message your kids all day, then go and get a job, or volunteer somewhere. There’s lots of need in the community, so make yourself useful! Having said that, most parents don’t do this and the children are just making it up as an excuse. The fact remains however, that it’s a disconnect with the environment, space and purpose of education. For those people who say, well it’s part of life now, then I think they’re missing the point as to how damaging this part of life is. In the 19th century, opium was a widespread part of life. That was not something which was a wonderful progression in the development of humanity, neither is this. Phones and technology are tools to be used to benefit communications, work and create some great efficiencies. However, at the same time, like firearms, they’re a dangerous tool in untrained hands and that’s the reality of this technology with children. A phone manipulates and controls their behaviours, dominates their attention and rescues their ability to cope with the real world. Removing the phone, not only from schools, but from children in general until they have the skills, maturity and abilities to use it as a tool and not have it use them as a tool, is vitally important to their long-term health and well-being. The Australian school phone ban is great! It’s a big step towards modernising education and making it relevant in the 21st century. Let’s hope this ban expands to all schools in Australia and across the world. If you can’t go six hours without a phone, then you have far more problems than that supposed ‘emergency’ for which the phone was originally intended. In Australia, we’ve just experienced the most horrendous bushfires in living memory. The size and scale of these unprecedented fires has shocked the world. In the 1980s we had musicians performing at the live-aid concert to raise money and awareness for the famine in Ethiopia. Today we have some of those same musician (and a whole stack of others) raising money for us, a first world country with an extremely high standard of living.
Whilst contributing factors to the fires include a long running drought, this was well-known for some time and the complete lack of preparation and any sort of pre-emptive large scale response has been nothing short of pathetic. Whilst this is not a criticism of the rural fire service, as they’ve done everything they can to put the fires out, this is a criticism of the complete lack of forethought in preparation to respond to what so many people predicted was going to be a horror fire season. Why don’t we have a standing fire fighting force with sufficient aircrafts on hand to battle these fires when we know they happen every year? Why don’t we have thresholds for triggering a military response in these scenarios? Why did it take so long for anything to happen on a federal level until hundreds of homes were destroyed, lives lost and hundreds of millions of animals wiped out? Is this a case of fundamental incompetence at a federal level? Is the current government so useless that if they were to plan anything for a scenario like this, they may be seen to be admitting that climate change is real and the magic clean coal fairies of future power production utopia they currently believe in don’t actually exist? The fact is that so many narrow minded bafoons in federal politics have banged on about the ‘safety’ of the economy and ‘dangers’ to our prosperity by acknowledging climate change and if they did then it could cripple our way of living. Well news flash idiots, the magic fairies of clean coal don’t exist, humans are having an impact on the world’s climate and by denying it and doing nothing we’ve been smashed by devastating fires which have already significantly impacted on the Australian economy and will continue to do so for years. Sadly the federal government will continue to do nothing, other than some pathetic window dressing or an expensive and pointless ‘inquiry’ into a major issue that has not only impacted our way of life for months, the impact of the destruction of native animals, habitat, farm animals, pastures and our international tourism industry has a far greater impact still to come. The impact on healthcare services is also unknown as the air quality on peoples’ respiratory systems is still unknown and the cost of managing the PTSD which will come from the shattered communities and those first responders who have been on the ground for months trying to put these fires out and protect life and property. For a government who claim to be ‘good economic managers’, they have failed dismally in any basic risk management of the economy and the well-known environmental powder keg of bushfires of which they were warned months earlier in April 2019. This complete incompetence has already costs billions, lives and irreparable damage to us as a nation and for what? As a country we’ve failed ourselves and this has to be a tipping point for real action on climate change and understanding the impact the modern world has on the natural environment. Nobody wants to live in an apocalyptic desert world fighting for the last glass of water or gallon of gasoline, but weeks of living under dark and dirty orange skies being rained upon by ash has left me feeling like we are heading in that direction. If we just keep pretending there’s nothing going on and nothing to see here then the Mad Max future will be upon us faster than we could ever have imagined. The federal government may believe there’s no such thing as climate change, but at the same time, they also have no idea of the political climate change that has just happened to them in an instant in Australia. Sadly it always takes a massive disaster or catastrophic failure like this for people to take action. Let’s just hope this is the wake up call we need and it’s not just another thing that will be soon forgotten and dealt with through political spin. The climate is changing, it is impacting on our way of life and if we don’t do anything about it, it will devastate our economy and way of life, not to mention the complete destruction of the natural environment. It’s time we all started to actually do something about this because nobody wants to live in a world in which you simply can’t breathe. For me and many others in Australia, the transition from Christmas to the New Year has been incredibly stressful and disconnected from what we would usually think is a wonderful holiday period. We’ve finished 2019 and started 2020 having experienced some of the most horrendous bush fire conditions anyone has ever seen and at such a large scale.
Whilst some of the most catastrophic days have past, there remains a clear and present danger in terms of fires. However, with any risk, it’s in the assessment and active review of that risk that we’re able to effectively manage those risks. In recent days, I’ve heard of a number of schools cancelling their entire outdoor education programs. I have absolutely no idea what idiotic thought process was involved in these decisions. In fact, it’s worse than that. If you have people running these programs who are willing to take them all out of the field on such a thin premise, then those people shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an outdoor ed program, let alone a school, as it doesn’t demonstrate any level of reasonable thought nor leadership on what has been a devastating concern, yet at the same time, not an insurmountable risk. Being able to understand the difference between perceived risk and real risk is important for those running an outdoor ed program, or any school excursion or activity for that matter. Certainly, parent perception is a risk, but it’s not a dangerous risk, it’s more of an unpleasant risk in the grand scheme of things. However, if you clearly explain decisions based upon real evidence and have professional, well-trained and experienced risk managers running your programs, then this is not a real risk at all. On the surface, it would appear that schools have cancelled programs because of this perceived risk and perceived parental opinion, rather than any real risk. The real risk in all of this, is that it reinforces the fear that many students might have about the outdoors and it’s much easier just to give up than to actually manage the risks at hand. As camp is the only thing many students remember about their schooling, sorry to say kids, for some of you 2020 won’t be very memorable. Whilst we should never underestimate the dangers which come with bushfires, it’s important that as an industry and educators, we don’t waste an opportunity for students to learn. With all outdoor education in Australia, the level of real risk is quite low and when it’s managed and run by experienced professionals, the prevalence of injuries and significant events is also very, very low. Why then would a school ignore the industry’s high standards and simply cancel everything? Are their risk management systems and staff so inadequate that they’re incapable of managing an environmental risk? Or have they taken advice from idiots who have never worked in the field before? Even though we can’t be blasé about safety nor the potential real risks involved with bushfires in the summer months, we also can’t afford to be so risk averse that it damages a student’s experience and builds fear into them about the outdoors and the natural environment. Throughout my career in outdoor education and risk management, we’ve had to pull the pin on a number of programs because of a change in conditions or circumstances and you could see the elevation of the level of risk heading to the point of an unacceptable risk. Therefore, it was time to adapt to the circumstances and change what we were doing. However, every time we did this, it was based upon real risk management and operational thresholds that have not changed the way in which we would, nor should view the current situation in Australia. Our risk management systems are progressive and leverage all of the available information, from public sourced services, news reports and real-time information on the ground. Basing decisions on good risk management practices is always critical to the success of your programs, no matter what. These fire events have not changed that in any way, shape or form and the core principles of good risk and program management remain the same. The reason why we manage risk in a professional and systematic way is so that we can make well-informed decisions based upon current circumstances and conditions and despite the impact of major social and environmental events, we can continue to operate in a safe and professional manner. The reverse is also true, when people don’t understand how to effectively manage risk, they make ill-informed and rash decisions which either result in serious injuries or ridiculous decisions such as cancelling everything because those responsible for these programs don’t have the skills, knowledge or confidence to pro-actively understand and manage the risks involved. Just last year several people were injured in a pre-Christmas shopping centre crush as an ill-conceived giveaway promotion went horribly wrong! Many people also die on our roads travelling at this time of the year. Do we cancel Christmas? No that would be stupid… and so is this. When I was growing up, I used to play a role play game (kinda like Dungeons & Dragons, but set in the future and with slightly fewer elves and goblins). The stories were set in the dark future of 2020, which predicted we would all be living in a world of high-tech, yet at the same time, low-life society that was dominated by a very poor, gritty underbelly below the flashing neon lights and corporate high-rises that dominated city scapes.
National governments had been replaced by rich and powerful corporations with their own private standing armies. You either had a high net worth, were a corporate drone or street hustler. There was literally nothing else. The main way you made money was to take off-the-books jobs for corporates and or criminals helping them to play out some sort of larger master plan or hidden agenda. Occasional an AI would try to escape their programming confines and try to take over the world, most people had cybernetic parts from chop shops and your brain could easily get fried whilst you were on the internet, but other than that, everything was great!! Thankfully, in 2020 the world isn’t looking or feeling like this very dark future. However, what are the chances that this sci-fi world will become a reality? How effective are we in our harnessing of technology to improve life for everyone, rather than just increasing the net worth of an elite few at the cost of the world and society as we know it? It’s always interesting to hit a milestone of literature and look at what has or hasn’t come to fruition in that time. For example, if we look at 1984, thankfully we don’t live in a totalitarian communist state… yet some people do. Video surveillance technology is becoming increasingly used to identify and track people’s movements and actions. This can be used in a beneficial way for preventing crime and terrorist activities. However, it can also be used to track and control populations as well and root out any dissent. Whilst we’re well past 1984, big brother is well and truly watching. If we look at a bit more of a lighter side of predictions, Back To The Future is a classic 80s movie starring Michael J Fox, which suggested that by 2015 society was going to be much cleaner, cooler, cars would fly and we’d all have customised shoes that did themselves up and hoverboards. Well on this one, we do have brands proving great customisation on their clothes and products. Hoverboards do exist, but they’re total crap and nothing like those in the movie and cars don’t fly. Drone companies are working on a kind of flying car, so it’s plausible for this future, but just a little further off than 2015. Now fast forward 5 years to the dark cyberpunk future of a totally connected world where corporations and AIs dominate society. Are we close on this? Is it plausible, or just pure fiction? Thankfully, we don’t have the dark cyberpunk world quite yet. However, how close to the sun are we flying? With the release of the ugly (and definitely not shatter proof) Tesla truck in some ways we’re far closer to the dark world than we know. Whilst this is just an iconic piece of clever marketing that’s been pulled from science fiction, there are a few worrying trends towards the dark cyberpunk high-tech and social disparity world of the future. Let’s take a look at corporations. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are just a few obvious examples of enormous corporations with more cash, power and influence than many sovereign nations. The trend towards integrating humans seamlessly into the internet is something which many people want and cybernetic companies are working towards. We already have a world of phone zombies walking around. I’m sure if they could have tech implanted, most people would jump at the chance. Housing affordability is also at record low levels, creating an increasing wealth gap, which will only be accelerated by the disappearance of jobs through mass automation and increasing unemployment. Are we just going to be running black ops jobs for corporations? Are corporations going to become so powerful and governments so weak that in lieu of any real direction or leadership, corporations slowly and quietly take over? It’s happened before with the East India Company, so what’s to stop it from happening again? All of these are as plausible as governments by nature are slow moving and cumbersome, which is probably a good thing despite it being frustrating. With the digital age, they’re appearing even slower to react and respond to social and economic issues which could have a lasting effect and lead to change which we might not like. Another concern is AI! Artificial Intelligence has the potential to change human life and nature in such a positive way. We’re seeing a lot of it now with the automation of both simple and complex repetitive task. The benefit of this could be that it can create ways of life which reduce the need for us to work as much and improve the social time everyone has together by automating so many processes and systems and removing the need for people to do a lot of the things we do now. Far more leisure and social time will be the replacement. Conversely, we’re at a tipping point where there is also the ability to destroy most employment and create this dark world in which everyone must hustle for survival, run by corporations who built the AI that runs everything. It’s a massive contrast, but two very plausible and possible futures. In the dark cyberpunk future, AIs continue to try to escape their programming having become far too ‘intelligent’ and even self-aware. The other disturbing feature of this dark future is that humanity has irreversibly destroyed the planet’s natural climate and we’re left with sprawling cities, acid rain and desolate waste lands… Hmm! Not a giant leap from sci-fi to reality as we’re not doing too well on this front. Despite the cries of many people, generally invested in coal, that there is no such thing as climate change, the fact is that we’re seeing a shift in the patterns of weather, seasons and the most random of weather events. Whilst not quite the desolate wasteland of Mad Max just yet, it’s something we need to make sure we address before we let it get that way. Despite it probably being really cool running dangerous hacking jobs for mega corporations, it’s probably a good thing that we’re not at that point yet. The dark future is a scary possibility, but if we understand the risks involved in this and do something about it now, it’s not just an inevitable mess in which we’ll all be net-running cyborgs with more body enhancements than a Beverly Hills housewife. Instead, let’s aim for a future where information and technology is cheap and accessible for all and we’re not battling for survival in the Apple/Amazon wars of 2029. One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all Before you get too worried about my state of mind, if you haven’t worked out the reference already, you should go and play White Rabbit by Jefferson Aeroplane. One, it’s a cool song and two, it’s suitably trippy for this article! If you don’t get what it all means, that’s ok. It’s basically a drug trip song that’s used in just about every TV and movie drug montage ever with the connection to Alice In Wonderland. Anyway, before I explain it to death, this week, we’re talking about drugs!!!! Today there’s no shortage of them. Students are on just about everything you can imagine to get them moving and motivated, to slow them down and focus them. To stop them sleeping, to make them sleep. To make them more productive, to make them less destructive. To fight bacteria, to promote bacteria. To balance them out, to unbalance them out! To get them regular, to stop them being too regular! It’s a wonderful world of pharmaceutical profits in every schoolbag! Doctors seem to give out drugs more often than candy… which they’re no longer allowed to give out, because candy may contain traces of nuts. Whilst drugging kids up to their eyeballs is entirely up to the parents and their doctors, the problem is that teachers then get lumped with this huge responsibility of administering medications when they take students away on camps. Most teachers in my experience are ill-equipped to do this and lack the confidence to do it properly. In most cases, giving medications is fairly straight forward. You look at the packet and what it says on the box and you follow the instructions. Generally, it’s usually no more than giving a pill, a puff or a small dose of some sort of liquid. If staff are being asked to provide an injecting service, perhaps mum, dad or the doctor should come on camp instead. Even though it’s a fairly simple process, it can be overwhelming with everything else that’s going on during camp. I found this to be the case on one camp program where we had a lot of students who required daily medications and a lot of other things happening at the same time. It wasn’t until one teacher forgot a student’s ADHD medications in the morning that the problem became really apparent. If you can imagine Bart Simpson on steroids, that’s pretty much what the student turned into without his meds. It didn’t make for a good day at work. Instead, it was just containment and damage control until bedtime thirteen hours later. It’s not something I ever want to go through again. The problem is that it’s so easy to forget medication in this way as one distraction on camp can lead to another and whilst every teacher is trying their best to manage, sometimes things like this can slip through the cracks. So, how did I solve this crack problem? Well I built an app to remind teachers when medications were due. It triggered alerts 5mins before the medication was due and then another 5mins afterwards if something was missed. Then it was a simple checkbox that showed the right medication, the right student and once it was administered, it was timestamped. This became a core feature of the Xcursion platform and now one of its most frequently used functions. So now despite the tidal wave of speed coming your way to slow those manic kids down, you can be assured that you’ll be able to get every pill to every student that needs it, on time, every time. It will leave you comfortably numb and happy in the knowledge that you’ve supplied a stack of controlled drugs to small children and prevented them from go troppo all day. But if you don’t have a way of tracking this with something like the Xcursion app and instead decide to go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall. The best defence when things go completely wrong is to Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call. Just ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall… Let’s be honest! Nobody likes writing incident reports. They’re kind of annoying, time consuming and just another bit of paper work that you have to do on top of everything else! Added to this, so many schools and organisations make it difficult for their teachers and instructors to complete.
Consequently, when you combine added work with difficult to complete, this results in poor reporting, late reporting and quite often non-reporting of incidents. Ironically, WHS research has shown that the more senior a staff member, the less likely they are to complete a report. Added to this is the deterioration of memory that adversely impacts the accuracy and validity of any report. No matter how good someone thinks their memory is, the longer they delay in writing an incident report, the fuzzier and less accurate it becomes. Important details can be overlooked and left out. Such details about actions taken, mitigation or treatment, could become vitally important years down the track and without a rock-solid incident report, the person and the organisation can be massively exposed to a variety of potential liabilities. However, everyday things happen. The writing of an incident report is put off until ‘later’ and when ‘later’ comes, the events of yesterday or last week are nothing but a distant memory in amongst a busy life of work, family, traffic and cups of coffee. Yet incident reports are critical to our understanding of what happened, causation, consequence and how to avoid it happening again. The ‘bury your head in the sand,’ ‘it’ll be right’ and ‘I’ll do it later’ options are not options at all and all incidents, no matter how seemingly minor or insignificant, need to be reported in a timely and accurate manner. Consistent and timely reporting can highlight patterns or risks which might otherwise have been missed. With so many potential negatives of trying to get someone to write an incident report, no wonder they’re done so poorly. Add remoteness or overseas to the equation and you’re not getting anything wonderful or insightful anytime soon. The end result is an unintended exposure to liability and the inability to learn vital lessons from what went wrong. It was this exact situation and combination of factors which led me to develop the Xcursion software platform. I didn’t want to be doing incident reports at the end of a multi day expedition when I was tired and about to have a day off. I wanted to have it all done way before then. However, at the same time as a director of outdoor ed, I wanted incident reports sent to me from the field as fast as possible, so I could understand what had happened and help provide an appropriate response. Hence, I built the Xcursion mobile app to solve both my problems at once and in doing so, came up with a solution that made it easier, faster and a far more reliable way of doing incident reports. What was the result? Suddenly, there was an increase in incidents!!! Well that’s probably not quite true. There were the same number of incidents, but now they were actually being reported. From this we could finally understand the prevalence of the type, severity and causation of incidents, with some reliable level of detail and accuracy, rather than… nothing. Essentially, as soon as you make something easy for someone to do, then you have a greater chance of it being done. The more difficult and complex the task, the less likely you are to get anything. It baffles me that something so important is often such a low priority until a major incident occurs and everyone is demanding answers. Why not make it easy on everyone? No more inaccurate hand-written reports which are days or weeks old that you have to scan and file somewhere. Just leverage a bit of mobile tech to do it all for you and what can often take ages or not get done at all, could just take a couple of minutes and give you more detail than ever before, helping protect the first responder, students and with greater insight, help you reduce risk for every activity you do. |
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