{"id":22402,"date":"2015-10-16T09:56:01","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T14:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=22402"},"modified":"2015-10-16T11:53:30","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T16:53:30","slug":"problem-solving-inertia-and-the-trouble-with-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/10\/16\/problem-solving-inertia-and-the-trouble-with-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Problem solving without technology: Two stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

Two of my favorite podcasts, Radio Lab<\/a> and Quirks and Quarks<\/a>, have stories bout how inertia and reliance on technology can inhibit our ability to find easy, cheap solutions to problems.<\/p>\n

Story One<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first story, at Radio Lab<\/a>, was about a nursing home in D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany.\u00a0 As patients age, nursing homes risk that they will become disoriented and “escape” the nursing home.\u00a0 Often, they are trying to return to homes in which they lived previously, desperate that their children, partners, or even parents are worried and\u00a0waiting for them.<\/p>\n

When they catch the escapee in time, the patient is often extremely upset and an altercation ensues.\u00a0 If they don’t catch them in time, the patient often hops onto public transportation and is eventually discovered by police.\u00a0 The first outcome is unpleasant\u00a0for everyone involved and the second outcome is very dangerous for the patient.\u00a0 Most nursing homes fix this problem by confining patients who’ve began to wander off to a locked ward.<\/p>\n

An employee at the\u00a0Benrath Senior Center<\/a> came up with an alternative solution: a fake bus stop placed right outside of the front doors of the nursing home. \u00a0The fake bus stop does two wonderful things:<\/p>\n

(1)\u00a0 The first thing a potential escapee does when they decide to “go home” is find a bus stop.\u00a0 So, patients who take off usually get no further than the first bus stop that they see.\u00a0\u00a0“Where did Mrs. Schmidt go?”\u00a0 “Oh, she’s at the bus stop.” \u00a0In practice, it worked tremendously.\u00a0 This meant that many disoriented patients no longer needed to be kept in locked wards.<\/p>\n

(2)\u00a0 The bus stop diffuses the sense of panic.\u00a0 If a delusional patient decided that she needed to go home immediately because her children were all alone and waiting for her, the attendant didn’t need to restrain her or talk her out of it, she simply said, “Oh, well… there’s the bus stop.”\u00a0 The patient would go sit and wait.\u00a0 Knowing that she was on her way home, she would relax and, given her diminished cognition, she would eventually forget why she was there.\u00a0 A little while later the attendant could go out and ask her if she wanted to come in for tea.\u00a0 And she would say, “Ok.”<\/p>\n

Listening to this, I thought it was just about the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard.<\/p>\n

Story Two<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second story, from Quirks and Quarks<\/a>, was regarding whether it is true that dogs can smell cancer.\u00a0 It turns out that they can.\u00a0 It appears that dogs can smell lots of types of cancer, but people have been working specifically with training them to detect\u00a0melanomas, or skin cancers.\u00a0 It turns out that a dog can be trained, in about three to six weeks, to detect melanomas (even some invisible to the naked eye) with an 80-90% accuracy rate.\u00a0\u00a0 If we could build a machine that was able to detect the same chemical that dogs are reacting to (and we don’t know, at this time, what that is) it would have to be the size of a refrigerator to match the sensitivity of a dog’s nose.\u00a0 When it comes to detecting melanomas, dogs are better diagnosticians than\u00a0our best humans and our most advanced machines.<\/p>\n

Doggy doctors offer some really wonderful possibilities, such as\u00a0delivering low cost cancer detection to communities who may not have access to clinical care.\u00a0 A mobile cancer detection puppy bus, anyone?<\/p>\n

Both these stories — about these talented animals and the pretend bus stop — are fantastic examples of what we can do without advanced\u00a0technology. I fear that we fetishize the latter, turning first to technology and forgetting to be creative about how to solve problems without them.<\/p>\n

This post originally appeared in 2010.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. Two of my favorite podcasts, Radio Lab and Quirks and Quarks, have stories bout how inertia and reliance on technology can inhibit our ability to find easy, cheap solutions to problems. Story One The first story, at Radio Lab, was about a nursing home in D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany.\u00a0 As patients age, nursing homes risk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":68158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[349,155,329,252,1777],"class_list":["post-22402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ageaging","tag-animals","tag-emotion","tag-healthmedicine","tag-nation-germany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/10\/22.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22402"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68159,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22402\/revisions\/68159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}