The Skippers Canyon helmet-cam experiment

No mountain bikers were (permanently) harmed in the making of this film.

Hello darling. What's with the axe?

I came across this on Ockam's Razor, the Radio National science programme last night, about Australian Aboriginal astronomy:

"[The Yulngu people] tell stories about Ngalindi, the Moon-man. He was a fat and lazy man (that's the full Moon), who demanded that his wives and sons feed him. His wives got fed up with his behaviour, and attacked him with their axes, chopping bits off him. So he became thinner (that's the waning Moon) and eventually died of his injuries. After remaining dead for three days he rose again (that's the new Moon) growing fat and round, until, after two weeks his wives attacked him again."

Is it just me, or does that story sound strikingly familiar to any one else?

Beyond the astrological illustration of how spousal conflict is eternal and universal, it's a pretty interesting yarn in general. You can listen to the rest of it here.

Feel the Burn

A few quick shots from last weekend's jaunt up the Earnslaw Burn. Enjoy.

- Mark

Could mocking your manager be saving lives?

I’ve just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers: the story of success” it’s a great read, if only in that Gladwell takes a topic that could have so easily fallen into the already overflowing category of self-help drivel and moulds it into an engaging, thought provoking read… even for a cynic like myself.

But I’m not here to jot superlatives about Outliers. The thing that I’d like to share, the thing that really stuck in my mind about the book was Gladwell’s look at the idea of power-distance.

It’s a concept first developed by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede in the seventies as part of an IBM sponsored research project into the way different national cultures work together*. Hofstede explains it like this:

“Power-distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders.”

What this means is, in a low power-distance culture, managers are seen as just other co-workers who happen to have a bit more responsibility, whereas in a high power-distance culture managers are seen more as the ruling class, they’re cut from finer cloth than lowly workers. In a high power-distance culture, you do what you’re told, you don’t ask questions in the hope that maybe one day you’ll prove yourself worthy of making the step up to a better life.

“in an environment like, say, the cockpit of a 747, subordinates being squeamish about questioning superiors can make a big impact – literally”

So why does that make a difference? Well, if you’re working in an environment like, say, the cockpit of a 747, subordinates being squeamish about questioning their superiors can make a big impact – literally. In these sorts of complex, high-consequence environments, the difference between respectfully suggesting your superior checks the instrument panel again and saying, “Hey Bob, what’s that red light…oh crap, you’ve forgotten to put the undercarriage down!” make the difference between smooth landing and fireball.

OK, so flashing back home to Queenstown, the adventure tourism capital of New Zealand. Where do we fit on the power-distance scale? Right at the lowest end, New Zealand is in the bottom five. That’s great right? Well, yes and no.

Thanks to a quirk in our immigration laws, Queenstown receives a large proportion of its workers from Latin America. Which is fantastic - I’ve always maintained that without immigration and tourism Queenstown would be like any other farming town, just with bigger mountains. The thing is, Latin America is a textbook example of a high power-distance culture.

So what we have occurring increasingly frequently is low power-distance managers (who expect to be questioned) working with high power-distance staff (who don't ask questions) in adventure tourism – an industry which lends itself to complex systems and high consequences – just like a 747 cockpit.

Recent events like the Outdoor Pursuits Centre tragedy, the river-boarding death of Emily Jordan, the jet boating death of Yan Wang and numerous near-misses stand as evidence that in adventure tourism, unless every box is checked and cross-checked, things can go horribly wrong.

So what are we to do? Well, I’m no expert (plus, bloggers don’t solve problems, we create them! :-) so I’m not going to try to offer a panacea here. But it would seem that Queenstown’s business community needs to ensure that we keep our low power-distance culture, and encourage visiting workers to join that culture.

Perhaps a instituting a points-based reward scheme to encourage a healthy disrespect for authority could work: steal your boss’s parking space - that’s a point; make a joke about your manager’s new haircut - that’s two; pin a childish caricature of the CEO to the company notice board - that’s five. Whoever scores the most points at the end of the week gets to take Friday afternoon off.

Who would have thought all that time Kiwis have spent ridiculing the boss behind his back – and in front of it – was actually fulfilling an important occupational health and safety function.

*The study identified five ‘cultural dimensions’; power-distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term verses short term orientation. There’s a good summary on Hofstede’s website - http://stuwww.uvt.nl/~csmeets/index.html

Out There - in print!

Check out January’s edition of Wilderness Magazine for the first installment of the Out There column, exploring the etiquette of bringing music into the wilderness. The story is the first in a series on philosophy and travel that I’ve agreed to co-author through 2010 (and hopefully beyond). The column’s brief is a dream: a thousand words on philosophy and travel – basically explore with your mind or your feet… then write it up. It’s going to be a fun year!

This Kiwi Christmas, think of the environment; kill a tree

These days the whole Christmas thing seems to be a bit past its used-by date. It’s had a good run: the festival that started out in the spirit of charity and camaraderie has been kicking on for nearly two millennia, well and truly outliving its Pagan creators.

Unfortunately, true to the laws of entropy, over the years the feel-good fest has decayed to a point where it’s now really just about absolving your guilt for neglecting friends and family by buying them crap they don’t need and you can’t afford. Bah humbug!

However, if you pick over the carcass of Christmas, moving carefully past the poisonous bits – the consumer fads, the nauseating carols, and inevitable family squabbles – you can still find some delicious titbits, sometimes in the most unexpected of places.

Take for instance the whole Christmas tree thing; the custom of chopping down a small evergreen tree, bringing it inside and festooning it with so much tinsel and fairy lights that the boughs creak under the strain.

There are a lot of theories floating around for why it’s become a tradition, the most logical being that in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, having a bit of greenery inside during the cold and dark of the winter solstice was a comforting reminder that spring is on its way – pretty irrelevant for forty-five degrees south, where Christmas falls in the heat of summer. Or is it?

You see, New Zealand’s South Island is faced with a bit of a thorny (or should that be needly) problem. Forestry is one of our biggest industries, earning us about 3.5 billion export dollars and directly employing over 20,000 people in 2007. In my limited understanding, as far as large scale agriculture goes, forestry is one of the good guys - turning atmospheric carbon into houses, books and stuff. But, from a local point of view, the industry has a big downside.

The average eight-year-old radiata pine, (the species of which 90% of our plantations are composed) will produce thousands of wind dispersed seeds each year – and spread them over a ten kilometre radius given the right conditions. The resulting seedlings, known as "wilding pines" out-compete our native plants, eventually turning iconic kiwi landscapes like Central Otago's alpine tussock meadows into very North American looking pine forests. It’s a phenomenon that, according to the Department of Conservation, threatens over 210,000 hectares of public land.

The good news is; the average seven-year-old radiata makes a particularly handsome Christmas tree, and if every household in the South Island had one decorated and dying in their house this year, we’d be well on the way to getting the problem under control.

So, this Christmas, rather than erecting a petrochemical plastic monstrosity in your living room, why not pick up a saw, head into the highcountry and chop yourself down a tree. You'll be doing the environment a favour.

Here's my excuse

I like to think of myself as being an optimist. But if, in fact, my life does prove to be a crashing failure, serving only as a warning to others, this’ll be why:

When you think deeply about life, love, culture and politics, from the United Nations General Assembly to Altitude Bar on a Friday night; it’s all really just biology.

When you look closely at biology; muscles, hormones, cell reproduction, and DNA; whether you’re talking about the physiology of an Olympic athlete or the mating behaviour of a Kakapo; it all boils down to chemistry.

When you study chemistry in its fundamental parts; molecules, protons, neutrons and electrons and the finely choreographed sub-atomic dance happening all around us; it’s all really just physics.

If you’re bright enough to study physics in detail; matter, motion, energy and force; it’s really all just mathematics...

...the thing is, I suck at maths.