Wollemi wrote on Jun 13
th, 2010 at 9:48pm:
1. What a absolute farce of the education system. Honours for a clown's trick?
2. You/your student/your education facility/your employer/your insurer were displaying paranoia. Many people have cycled solo across the Nullabor, via the highway and the remoter railway service road prior to the popularity of EPIRB-type systems.
Wollemi, what a disappointment. Here was a nice topic with people sharing information on a new technology and you have to take on a critical and judgemental tone that is not really that helpful.
Clowns don't generally have to write 40 000 words on riding a unicycle, now to judge the value of crossing a continent on a unicycle probably worth giving the guy the benefit of the doubt until you've read his thesis or had a chat to him at the very least. Not gonna cure cancer but in a field dominated by qualitative research I've seen less substantive exercises in research.
As for the paranoia, risk management these days may seem that way. As we are all aware our society is becoming selectively risk averse. Real and perceived risk is a tricky balance and if you read some of the risk perception literature you will see that most of it is as accurate as reading entrails of small furry animals. I am aware that my risk perception is flawed as is any person and what I am doing for my organisation is doing the best I can from the knowledge that I have and complying to legislation, etc. Hopefully between a bunch of us working together we can get pretty close. I've gotta say, out of any organisation I've worked for I feel well supported with access to world leaders in safety research, specialised safety consultants, an insurance consultant and direct access to a solicitor. This is what you get when you work for a large organisation, which I've gotta say is very rare in this industry. Then again it is a large bureaucracy.
For under a couple of hundred dollars having a small device can save you thousands of dollars in damage caused by a bad reputation. Most people are aware here that a single device does not make you safe but may prove itself a valuable tool when needed. As you demonstrated with your story maintaining a redundancy of management is probably the ideal and in your case it worked well.
Thankyou for reminding us that we have that backup of local authorities, who love it when they know someone is out there. 4 years ago I was at an industry conference when one of the Police Rescue team encouraged a room full of people to call them as soon as you know something is going wrong rather than waiting to see if you can solve it yourself. You can always tell them later that you have everything under control and they will be happy to go home knowing that no one was hurt.
I hope we can continue this in a positive tone and share more of the experience in this new technology. Like it or not we will all be challenged by this technology change and what is acceptable risk to our clients and ourselves.
Cheers
Al
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