Tag: tablets

A personal story about hearing loss

dog-with-hearing-loss
Only people without hearing loss could ever use this means of communication.

Here is a story  about hearing loss from the early days of Friday on My Mind, January 16, 2013. Nothing much has changed in 12 years except to give those new to hearing aids a heads up – they need replacing at least every five years. My hearing loss took a bit of a dip in 2020 but that proved to be due to a physical ailment. Nevertheless I forked out a few grand for a new pair of hearing aids in 2023 and yes, they have a charging station. We still need the debate about a simple piece of technology that has just one function yet costs four times more than a laptop or tablet which can deliver, well, anything.

By Bob Wilson

This story begins with a famous pangram (a phrase using all letters of the alphabet) – The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. We’ll get back to that later.

When I went to the bedside cabinet drawer on Monday to change my hearing aid batteries, I had just two left (they last about 7 days). Next day I rang my service provider who said they would post some to me, as per the terms of their 12-month contract. Australians dispose of approximately 156 million lithium hearing aid batteries per year. That is a serious amount of lithium in the landfill. Some hearing aid manufacturers now sell rechargeable hearing aid pods (the batteries last for a year). It’s about bloody time.

It started off being wryly amusing. For years I thought Jimi Hendrix was singing, “S’cuse me while I kiss this guy”, (now the name of a website which chronicles mis-heard lyrics). Is Billy Joel really singing, “You made the rice, I made the gravy”? Does the line in Toto’s Africa sound like “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do?” Or Canada’s national anthem – “Oh, Canada, we stand on cars and freeze?”

After five years of asking people to repeat what they said and seeking refuge in my favourite three words – “What?’ “Pardon” or “Mm,” I had my hearing tested.

Six months into the quixotic world of hearing devices, I have mixed feelings; good days and bad days and also much for which to be thankful. Gone are the days when I thought my wife said “Hearty Elephant” when she actually meant “hardly relevant”. I could go on, but you hard of hearing blokes out there know about which I speak.

If you are losing the high frequencies (and we all do as we age), if it gets too bad you won’t discern between words like ‘list’ and ‘fist’, you will turn the TV up louder than your partner will like and you’ll avoid going out to places where people gather.

But hearing loss is not just a problem for older people. The Ipod generation and those who frequent dance clubs and rock concerts are at high risk of damaging their hearing. There’s a lot of difference between the 50 to 60 dB level of normal conversation and the 140 dB pumped out by some of the world’s big stadium bands.

Phillip Adams is one of the few mainstream writers who confessed in public to needing hearing aids. Adams canvassed themes with which I had become entirely familiar, through five years of denial and hogging the TV remote.

“I developed a preference for foreign films with subtitles,” Adams wrote in The Australian Magazine, December 2012, adding that he rather enjoyed the self-censorship which came with deafness “..allowing me to ignore a bombardment of banal conversation or unattractive views”.

BHA (Before Hearing Aids), we’d be watching the splendid US spy thriller Homeland (with subtitles) which might read “birds chirping” or “dog barking in distance”. I could not hear those sorts of noises at all. AHA (after Hearing Aids), as the audiologist warned me, flushing the toilet evoked memories of a trip to Niagara Falls in 2010. I no longer heard faint chirping in the Bottle Brush tree next to our front veranda – I could hear and identify honeyeaters, wrens, whip birds, cat birds as well as the sound of frogs and the creek gently running at the bottom of our block, 100m away.

They say it can take your brain a year to adjust to being able to hear high frequencies again. The audiologist patiently heard the problems I reported when playing guitar or whistling. I complained it sounded like an effects pedal and there was feedback and other unpleasant sounds. After some tweaking of compression and other frequencies, these problems diminished. Now I am finding the handiest thing about these devices is the volume button. I turn it down if people’s voices sound brassy and loud up close and up when, say, listening to a speaker in an auditorium. Oh and the wonderful music programme button – four-part harmonies and fiddle/mandolin solos never sounded so sweet.

The amazing thing, considering the estimated 1.45 million Australian who have hearing aids, is why there is so little dissent about the disproportionate cost. Even mid-range hearing aids can set you back $3,000 each and if your hearing loss is serious or your job depends on hearing every word, you’ll be in double that figure in no time. Meanwhile, you can go to a computer shop and walk out with the latest Mac laptop for less than $2,000 and enough computer power to run an international online business. Or you can use a smart phone’s GPS, telecommunications suite, camera, video, skype, email, internet access and hundreds of apps for no money at all. Just sign here and pay your bill every month.

While hearing aids fall into the category of a big ticket retail item, it pays to shop around. There are sales-oriented hearing clinics out there which will lure you in with a free assessment and then push you fairly hard to sign a contract.

I got assessed by a couple of private clinics then went with the Federal Government’s voucher system (for the over-65s), opting to pay for a “top-up”. My mid-range, programmable hearing aids (I have two) cost me $3,400 and the government paid the rest.

Choice magazine surveyed 525 people to find the main reason people get hearing aids is to overcome social disconnection and isolation. But half of the people interviewed had problems with their hearing aids and one is six were dissatisfied, so it is no simple fix.

Choice said people also shop around online, citing a member who was quoted $12,000 for a pair of top-end hearing aids and ended up buying online from a UK retailer for about $4,250. The retailer programmed the hearing aids according to his audiogram. The member later found a local clinic to service his aids for $100 to $200 per appointment.

There can be warranty issues taking this approach, but increasingly, older Australians are starting to add hearing aids to the list when they go to Thailand or the Philippines for dental work or knee replacements.

Whatever the options, I can say I’d rather have my hearing aids, imperfections and all, than go back to the muddy pond that was once my hearing.

Meanwhile, for those of you who do not (yet) suffer hearing loss, consider this. Occupational health and safety advocates nonprofitrisk.org says the permissible top limit for noise exposure over an eight-hour period is 90 decibels.  If you don’t know what that means, here’s a short list:

  • 80 decibels: city traffic, manual machine, tools;
  • 90 decibels: lawn mower, motorcycle, tractor;
  • 100 decibels: woodworking shop, factory machinery;
  • 110 decibels: chainsaw, leaf blower;
  • 120 decibels: ambulance siren, heavy machinery, jet plane on runway;
  • 130 decibels: jackhammer, power drill.

So if you’ll recall the pangram we cited in the first paragraph. If you’ve got moderate hearing loss, Australian Hearing says this is what you will hear:

__e _i_ brown _o_ jum_ed over _e _azy dog.

Scary isn’t it!

Friday on My Mind was a weekly column by Bob Wilson, published by Bob & Laurel Wilson Consulting Pty Ltd. You can now catch up on occasional post-2023 Digressions or troll the archives on this website.

 

 

 

Seniors becoming savvy about digital technology

Early PC, complete with floppy disk drives source Wikipedia

During a frustrating hour or two updating our websites, I realised I am more savvy than the average 74-year-old when it comes to digital technology. Or so I thought. Later, you will read about how Covid-19 prompted many older Australians to start interacting with Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp and other communications systems.

In what has been a busy month (editing the U3A newsletter, updating three websites, updating our self managed super fund and writing a new song), I am finding time to create a short course in basic computer skills for U3A members. Most of our members are in the over-70s age group and a few do not have access to the Internet. I am hoping some will find a use for U3A’s laptops, which have been in hibernation since Covid broke out in early 2020. In preparation to run the computer course, I took these laptops home and updated them.

It wasn’t too difficult, but these laptops were a reminder of how quickly digital technology becomes obsolete. I was reminded of that last Friday when the WordPress website which hosts this weekly essay “broke”. That’s WordPress community geek-speak for not doing what it’s programmed to do. Therefore, WordPress followers who had subscribed to the blog did not get last week’s email with a link to the website. The blog was still posted to the website, but the electronic sharing didn’t happen. It turned out I’d been ignoring reminders to ‘update your PHP’, which is the software within WordPress that interacts with plugins (or apps) that make the website work efficiently.

(That sound you hear is me snoring, having fallen asleep. Ed)

I am convinced that everyone who uses a computer has a ‘blind spot’, that is, a technological advance with which they cannot cope.

My blind spot would be anything to do with coding, editing the registry, updating drivers or any one of a dozen under-the-bonnet programming tasks. In this case, I asked Craig P from Inmotion Hosting to do the hard work updating PHP (the older versions are ‘deprecated’), and I’d take care of the detail.

Computer hardware and software companies are continually updating their products, to fix glitches in the system and to improve security. They also do it to sustain cashflow. There was a time when you could buy the complete Microsoft Office programme at a retail store and use it seemingly forever at no extra cost. Now they want an annual subscription (which includes updates and support).

I’ve been using a computer at home since the mid-1990s and came into daily newspapers at a time when they were leaving the old technology behind. I learned a lot, but don’t ask me about programming.

She Who Sometimes Shouts at her Computer told me the other day she studied Base 2 in grade seven. Base 2 is a field of mathematics that is particularly germane to computers.

As Wikipedia explains, the base-2 numeral system is that in which each digit is referred to as a bit, or binary digit. Because of its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry, the binary system is used by almost all modern computers and computer-based devices.

Got that? You can log back into Facebook now and carry on regardless.

While kids are learning computer science and coding at school, we of the older cohort rely on the ever-changing versions of Microsoft Windows to make it easy. There have been 11 versions of Windows since 1985. Some, like Windows ME, 2000, Vista and Windows 8, were not perfect, so Windows moved on to 7, 10 and now 11.

One of my contacts in information technology tells me that Windows 11 is the best operating system yet because Microsoft has looked at security first and everything else second.

I haven’t upgraded from 10 yet. I limped along with Windows 7 until it got the point where Microsoft wouldn’t support it at all. As of this month, people with Windows 7 won’t even get security updates.

I set off with this idea of teaching older people how to take control of their computer because the conventional wisdom is that older people struggle with new technology. Our reflexes have slowed and we have leathery fingers – ask anyone.

But maybe not so much in Australia. A recent study by The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) set the record straight.

While older people have trouble navigating touch screen gadgets like smart phones and tablets, in the four years from 2017 to 2020, many were on an IT learning curve and probably still are. ACMA’s report, produced in May 2021, noted changes in the way older people engage with the online world.

While most use the internet at home, they also used a mobile phone to go online when out and about. Their adoption of other digital devices like smart phones, tablets and fitbits is also on the rise.

In mid-2020, ACMA found that 93% of older people had internet access in their home, up from 68% in 2017.

In 2017, only 6% of older people used apps and digital devices to go online. In June 2020, 26% of older people used five or more types of devices to go online.

ACMA says that parallel with their uptake of digital devices, more older people are using the internet for a wider variety of activities and tasks.

“Almost all older people now use email, while banking, viewing video content, and buying goods and services online have increased substantially over the previous 4 years, to become relatively common behaviours for this age-group.”

There was also a quantum leap in the numbers of older people who use apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to make voice calls, video calls and send texts. In 2019 the figure was 33% – a year later it was 55%.

The Pew Research Centre, which keeps tabs on this topic in the US, also noticed growth during the pandemic but observed that 7% of Americans aged over 65 are not online at all.

The Pew Centre said there were notable differences between age groups when measuring the frequency of internet use. Some 48% of those ages 18 to 29 said they were online “almost constantly”.,compared with 22% of those 50 to 64 and 8% of those 65 and older.

Joelle Renstrom, writing in ‘Slate’, an online magazine, said computer and digital technology companies are not designing devices that older people want. Renstrom cited research by Bran Knowles who studies how older people use technology.

Knowles says tech companies don’t see older people as valid stakeholders.

“That’s evident in how they fail to consider seniors’ needs, even when manufacturing products like the Jitterbug, a phone with extra-big buttons.

“Button size doesn’t dictate seniors’ decisions about tech use, and such presumptions highlight Silicon Valley’s bias toward youth.”

The people who drive tech development “can’t imagine what it’s like to be 80”, said Knowles.

Meanwhile, big organisations and governments continue to drive their customers/clients (young and old) to online accounts and digital apps.

RACQ’s Road Ahead magazine reports in its latest edition that drivers will have access to a ‘digital licence app’ in 2023. Queensland’s Department of Transport has been conducting trials since legislation was passed in 2020 to allow development of a digital licence (which will have equal weight to a physical licence). Drivers can store their digital licence on their mobile phone and use it for ID purposes as they travel. The Road Ahead article notes that the new digital licence will be ‘opt-in’ and not compulsory. Phew, we all said.

So, WordPress readers – did you get it?

One in three Aussie kids have a mobile phone

aussie-kids-mobile-phones
Image by FunkyFocus from Pixabay

Is there anything more likely to bring on a panic attack than misplacing your mobile phones? It’s around the house somewhere, isn’t it. You tried calling the number but alas, the battery is flat.

Those of you who cannot bear to be parted with your mobile phone might not know that 33% of Australian children between six and 13 own one. Another 14% of Aussie kids have access to a mobile – for example,  if they are going out alone, Mum might lend them hers. These numbers were collated in 2020 by the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA).

I texted a mother of three to see what’s allowed in her house. We’ll call her Outraged Mother of Three (OMOT). She replied (on one of her 4.4 devices), that all of her kids (Grades 3-8) have phones.

“The youngest has a phone but it is not hooked up to a Sim or Wi-Fi. It was just the spare and now it’s lost.

“Due to excess use of said phones our children now no longer bring the phones to (our weekend retreat). They also have limitations on when they can use their phones.”

If you didn’t know, most Queensland schools do not allow children to use their mobiles during school hours.

OMOT says the main reason her children have phones is purely to be able to contact her, particularly when school is out.

ACMA’s research shows that children primarily use smart phones for playing games, using apps, watching videos, texting and keeping in touch with family/friends.

OMOT said one outcome of her kids having their own phones is they no longer watch TV, preferring YouTube videos.

“They also find it as a really good way to have group chats. Both of my older kids have group phone messaging with their mates from school.”

The impetus for revisiting mobile use in Australia (apart from changing last week’s distressing subject), was a blog I wrote seven years ago. In that column (May 2014), I recounted losing my mobile while on holiday in New Zealand. It was a new phone on a two-year contract, so losing it was a bit of a disaster.

The good news was that a Kiwi out jogging found it lying in the long grass outside my nephew’s house. His enterprising wife looked up the call log and dialled my wife’s mobile (as we were filling up the hire car and looking at travel insurance options). A 20 km detour later I was reunited with my then new android phone.

In 2021, after relying on them during Covid, Australians (and their children), are increasingly bound to their devices. They use them for a wide range of business, personal and entertainment communications. They send and receive emails, send and receive texts, check the odds on the footie, do internet banking and watch videos. They might check in on Facebook and interact with ‘friends’, send PM’s (private messages) to their close friends and maybe watch a music video or two. Very occasionally, they might ring someone up and have a convo (conversation).

The technology is amazing: really, it is. Thirty years ago when you were in a community choir, the choir director handed out printed scores on rehearsal night. The director would have ordered them from a music publisher and then waited weeks until they arrived in the letterbox. Now we can find and download scores (on our phones, even), print them out, and also find (free) audio rehearsal files.

The irony is that few people use the full capabilities of a smart device. I was chatting to a doctor at a barbecue when a helicopter flew overhead.

“That’ll be the rescue helicopter,” she said. She showed me an app on her phone which verified that it was indeed the rescue helicopter. The app showed where it had come from and where it was going (and when it would arrive). That’s no ordinary app, I’ll grant you, but it shows what is possible. In the days when we could travel the world, language apps were all the go. Just wave the phone at the waitress in Tokyo (who would hear a Siri-type voice intoning Shīfūdo ni arerugī ga arimasu (I’m allergic to seafood).

In 2014, when I wrote Hold the Phones, there were 11.9 million smart phones in Australia. Deloitte’s Mobile Nation report showed there were 17.9 million in circulation in 2019. It’s not just smart phones – the average internet user has 4.4 devices they use to interact with the net. The most popular devices were smart TVs, wearable devices and voice-controlled smart speakers.

See how you go with this list (5/8 for me).

  • Australians spend three hours a day using their smartphones;
  • 94% take their phones with them when leaving the house;
  • Almost 25% watch live TV on their phones at least once a week;
  • 23% stream film/TV series weekly;
  • 48% check their mobile phones at least once every 30 minutes;
  • 71% feel safer when they have their phone with them;
  • Just over 90% took at least one active step in on-linesecurity
  • 53% worry about over-reliance/addiction to their devices;

The results of a survey commissioned by ACMA showed that “nearly all Australians” (99%) accessed the internet in the previous six months in 2020 (up from 90% in 2019). I assume this includes the approx 1.7 million or so kids aged 6 to 13.

Nevertheless, the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 2.9 million Australians were not on-line because of affordability, location or lack of digital literacy. Who knows how those people struggled last year.

ACMA’s survey (by Roy Morgan) found that Covid lock downs contributed to a significant increase in Internet-based activities. The use of communications apps soared, with 72% of Australian adults using one (up from 63% in 2019). Facebook Messenger was the most popular app (66%), followed by Zoom (43%).

There has been exponential growth in mobile data consumption – 9MB a month in 2018, according to the ABS, but growing at 40% a year.

So yes, the person opposite you staring at a screen on the commuter train is probably catching up on Mare of Easttown. This would account for the lack of eye contact and casual conversation and the panic when she realises she has gone past her stop.

It’s all very well to learn that children are already tech-savvy, but we need to find better ways to connect older Australians to the digital world. A report by the eSafety Commissioner found that  8% of Australia’s 8 million people aged 50 and over are  “digitally disengaged”. This means that 640,000 older Australians (74% of them over 70),  do not use the internet at all. Moreover, 6% of this target group showed no interest at all in improving “digital literacy”.

(By contrast, my 94 year old Godfather began using an Ipad long before I did. Ed)

As this research found, family and friends can play an important part in helping older Australians learn some digital tricks.

It seems like a no-brainer – get those digital-savvy kids to give Oma and Opa a few lessons – after they’ve done their homework, of course.

FOMM Back Pages:

Last week: I’m still not holding my breath.

The demise of Page Turner

Paige Turner 02
Beth Allen turns the page for Wendy Harper, accompanying soprano Marina Poŝa at Lift Gallery

Technology’s great, except when it does you out of a job. My friend Spike trained in the 1960s as a hot metal typesetter, a printing technique dating from the late 1800s. This industry relic was replaced by phototypesetting, which produced columns of print ready to be ‘pasted up.’ This last bastion of the printing trade was made obsolete by digital newspaper publishing systems, the personal computer and desktop publishing software.

In the music world, the traditional role of page turner is threatened with obsolescence by the advent of clever new apps for Ipads and tablets, controlled with a foot pedal. You may have seen singers at gigs with an Ipad attached to their mike stand – foot pedal optional. This is the modern musician’s answer to the wind snatching your chord charts or lyric sheets from the music stand during the four bars between the end of the chorus and the next verse. The job of piano page-turner, however, is a little harder to render obsolete, because the pianist relies on a human being to know, by visual cues and musical knowledge, just when to turn the page.

Our photo today shows Beth Allen turning the page at a critical point in the aria La Maja y el Ruisenor (The Maiden and the Nightingale) by Granados for Wendy Harper, accompanying soprano Marina Poŝa at Lift Gallery.

This is old school and Beth, who is a good sport, puts up with her partner Kim’s jokes, introducing her as ‘Miss P. Turner!’

Just so you know, Page Turner is a Korean TV drama and there are at least two people who go by a similar moniker, one being Daniel Frank Kelley, aka Paige Turner or Showbiz Spitfire, an American drag queen, comedian and singer.

There’s more, but this is a family show, so I won’t be directing you elsewhere.

The classical music page turner does indeed have to read music, pay attention and not beat the pianist to the turn. Wikipedia describes the typical page-turner as ‘a friend or acquaintance of the pianist and preferably a pianist as well’. The job is a handy earner for music students; to wit, notes left on conservatorium noticeboards – “free-lance page-turner, available nights and weekends – attentive and reliable.”

Now there are Ipad apps which will turn the page for you, including Tonara for Ipad and Pageflip, an Ipad app which comes with a foot pedal. Ipads and tablets have become quite the thing among musicians and sound engineers. You may have been at a live gig and seen the sound guy wandering around the room, tablet in hand – that’s his mixing console.

My versatile musician friend Silas Palmer scored a gig last year accompanying octogenarian balladeer Kamahl on a tour of Queensland. They were using backing tracks, with Silas on whatever brand of grand piano was in residence at the various venues. I noticed he had a tablet on the music stand, where pianists normally put their scores.

“What’s with the tablet?” I asked after the show.

“Oh that’s just chord charts,” said Silas, “and the set list”.

But getting back to the human page turner, sitting patiently to the left of the pianist, watching and waiting for the moments (there could be dozens of turns, depending on the length of the piece), to show their skills. Some classical musicians scoff at the notion of using a tablet or Ipad, saying good page turners have a ‘job for life’.

Organist Michael Hammer, someone whose knowledge of page turning seems beyond reproach, has devoted an article (with photos) to the subject, leavened with a noteworthy sense of humour.

He advises page turners to ask the pianist to perform a “windmill’ with their arms so the turner can judge how far away to sit, given that some pianists can get a bit carried away. It is also important, he says, to watch the pianist to see where they are up to on the score.

“If he is short enough, you might be able to make out when he is at the top of the page. Despite their good looks, it is still advisable to look at the music and not at the pianist.” 

But on to more weighty matters

I came to this subject after pondering the business world’s most common response to declining revenues: making do with fewer people. Along the way, big business appropriated the words redundant (defined by dictionary.com as the state of being not or no longer needed or useful) and retrenchment (the act of retrenching; a cutting down or off, as by the reduction of expenses.) The meanings of these words are so closely entwined the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) considers them interchangeable. (Some, perhaps more sensitive, employers try to soften the blow by explaining that it’s the job, not the person that is ‘redundant’. However, given that ‘the sack’ is still the result, it is questionable whether this does actually make the ‘sackee’ feel less unwanted. (SWSLTHAS) (She who sometimes like to have a say.)

The hardest form of retrenchment is the list posted on the cafeteria wall of those whose jobs will go on (date). The softer form is what is known as ‘a round of redundancies’, typically offered to well-paid middle managers, those whom upper management may have identified as not delivering value for money. So they go home, do some sums on the back of an envelope, talk it over with their spouse and maybe go to work next day and say “Yes thanks, I’ll take the redundancy.”

Some big companies offer up to four weeks for every year of service, plus accrued holiday and long service leave entitlements. The trouble with waves of redundancies and retrenchments, they are often linked to companies doing it tough or going broke, usually at a time in the economic cycle when it is difficult to find another job, especially when your last position was made redundant. The word has some pejorative connotations that cannot be easily shrugged off.

According to the ABS, retrenchments peaked at 7.3% of employed persons in 1972, fell away to 4.1%-4.6% between 1986 and 1990, but rose again to 6.5% during the 1990s recession.

We can compare those historical figures (almost half of those retrenchments happened in the manufacturing sector, by the way), with the period 2000 to 2013, when the rate fell from 4.0% in 2000 to a low of 2.0% in 2008, before increasing sharply in 2010 to 3.1% and remaining at that level through 2012 and 2013. But it does depend where you live and work. The Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia had the highest retrenchment rates, harking back to February 2000 (6.0%, 5.4% and 5.1%).

The future for manual workers looks bleak. A study by real estate firm CBRE and capital management group Genesis forecasts that robots will make 50 occupations redundant by 2025.

And if you are training (or re-training after a redundancy), this Daily Mail report includes two handy lists: (i) which jobs are most likely to succumb (e.g. telemarketers, photographic process operators and tax preparers) and (ii) those occupations which may prove to be retrenchment-proof (e.g. chiropractors, orthodontists and supervisors of correctional officers).

Journalists did not make either list, which is surprising, given the recent flood/spate/outrage/raft of media redundancies. This scary story by Ross Miller in The Verge is cause to ponder the omission: