Willis's Walkabouts Newsletter 97, August 2018 — New Ideas

Insurance By The Gram

Insurance is something we pay for but hope we never need. Mostly we pay in dollars but, for bushwalkers, sometimes we pay in grams. A few incidents on our trips show just how important this can be.

Rain

On two of the trips I did in 1986, the first year for Willis's Walkabouts, we had unseasonal rain. In Kakadu in July, the rain lasted for days and made the rivers look the way they do in the Wet. A plastic painter's drop sheet weighs less than 200 grams and can make an incredible difference to comfort if you do get an unseasonal rain.

ID

Accidents happen. We don't plan to have them, but some tiny thing goes wrong and suddenly there is a serious problem. On a Kimberley trip this year, one person slipped and broke her wrist. The Flying Doctor Service sent in a helicopter to bring her out. It brought her to Derby. Her mobile phone and all her ID and credit cards were either back in Kununurra or in the car. Think about how you'd cope in a similar situation, thousands of kilometres from home, hundreds of kilometres away from your documents. It wasn't easy. Not having her mobile was a hassle, but that was nothing compared to no ID or credit cards. They weigh only a few grams. Why not be safe and bring them?

Normal Insurance

While bringing a few extra grams is an important form of insurance, so is normal travel insurance. Evacuation is a grey area but airfares and cancellation fees are not. We've had people who have saved thousands of dollars by having travel insurance and others who have lost thousands by not having it. Your choice.

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Facebook and Google — You Are the Product

"20 per cent of global spending on advertising goes to Facebook and Google"

That incredible statistic comes from an article in New Scientist, How Google and Facebook hooked us — and how to break the habit
Here are a couple of quotes from that article.
  • "Big tech companies avoid taxes and have taken over our lives and created monopolies — but what can we do about it and how much change do we really want?"
  • "Take the Like button. On the face of it, there is a lot to like about it. Why bother typing out a negative comment to a post, when you can communicate a positive response to something else with a click? 'It was a conscious exercise to inject more positivity into the world,' says Rosenstein. But it also unleashed a monster inside us. Desperate for the approval of others, and never long satisfied when we get it, we became hooked into an endless loop of posting and reciprocal clicking: thrilled when the Likes clocked up, despondent when they didn't."

Facebook and The Lost Art Of Critical Thinking is full of good quote like "When something is free, you're the product."

If either of the above piques your curiosity, you might want to have a look at one or more of the following.

• Delete Facebook
  "Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place — human connection. It is a cancer."
• Facebook Identifies an Active Political Influence Campaign Using Fake Accounts *
  "A coordinated effort, involving 32 pages and fake accounts, included amplifying division around white supremacy and the #AbolishICE movement, the social network said."
• Facebook Grapples With a Maturing Adversary in Election Meddling *
  "The influence campaign revealed on Tuesday is adapting and evolving to better disguise itself, which limits the social network's approach to stopping it.
• The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley *
  "They have weaponized social media, and we are all paying the price."
• How Facebook turns your data into billions of dollars of profit
• Your Data Is Crucial to a Robotic Age. Shouldn't You Be Paid for It? *
  "Getting companies to pay for the information they reap from people's online lives will improve the data and may counteract a concentration of power."
• iPhone update could save smartphone addicts
  "Many of the new features address recent concerns about the 'attention economy; that is, the effect digital device use has on our collective mental wellbeing."

Marketing people keep telling us that we need to be on Facebook. I can't help but wonder how true that is.

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More On Families & Children

Education

The article below is from America so it talks about 'math' as opposed to 'maths'. It is, however, just as relevant here as in the US. Just as in the US, Australian students rank appallingly low in maths compared to other countries.

Make Your Daughter Practice Math. She'll Thank You Later. *
  • "The way we teach math in America hurts all students, but it may be hurting girls the most."
  • "Today's 'understanding-centered' approach to learning math, combined with efforts to make the subject more 'fun' by avoiding drill and practice, shortchanges children of the essential process of instilling the neural patterns they need to be successful. And it may be girls that suffer most."
  • "All American students could benefit from more drilling: In the international PISA test, the United States ranks near the bottom among the 35 industrialized nations in math."
  • "All learning isn't — and shouldn't be — 'fun.' Mastering the fundamentals is why we have children practice scales and chords when they're learning to play a musical instrument, instead of just playing air guitar. It's why we have them practice moves in dance and soccer, memorize vocabulary while learning a new language and internalize the multiplication tables. In fact, the more we try to make all learning fun, the more we do a disservice to children's abilities to grapple with and learn difficult topics. As Robert Bjork, a leading psychologist, has shown, deep learning involves 'desirable difficulties.' Some learning just plain requires effortful practice, especially in the initial stages. Practice and, yes, even some memorization are what allow the neural patterns of learning to take form."

Children and Nature

If we don't expose children to nature, they are unlikely to see any reason it needs to be preserved when they grow up.

7 things to remember when taking kids on adventure
An article from Wild as relevant now as when it was published in 2016.

The VNPA program Wild Families "is about helping families of any size, shape and structure to enjoy, discover, learn about and look after nature together. We have a range of activity pages for families with children aged up to 12 years old." If you have children (or grandchildren) and live in Victoria, you might want to join in. If you know of similar programs in other states, please let me know so I can pass the info along.

While on the subject of the VNPA, our VNPA offer is finally in print, page 31, far right (p 16 of the download)in the March 2018 edition of Park Watch.

Finally

• We still have a few places left on our Kakadu Family Walk No. 3: 30 September - 6 October
• We've already got bookings on Kakadu Family Walk No. 1: 13-19 April 2019
• For some general information, see our Walking With Children in Kakadu page.

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Your Health

The truth about what downing energy drinks really does to kids
"What sets energy drinks apart is the combination of high sugar content and powerful stimulants, mainly caffeine, which rapidly and temporarily increases alertness, attention and energy in consumers. This can be followed by drowsiness and a slump when the effects wear off."
"This sudden rush is reportedly causing problems in classrooms. In a survey of thousands of UK teachers in 2016, 13 per cent blamed poor pupil behaviour on energy drinks. A 2015 study by Yale University found that students aged 11 to 14 who reported drinking energy drinks were 66 per cent more likely to be hyperactive or show a lack of concentration."

Drink, drank, drunk: what happens when we drink alcohol in four short videos
Very informative.