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If you want to try yourself if you can identify drowning, there's this great educational 'game': http://spotthedrowningchild.com http://spotthedrowningchild.co
by Confiks 5y ago
If you want to try yourself if you can identify drowning, there's this great educational 'game':
http://spotthedrowningchild.com http://spotthedrowningchild.com
It's pretty hard to spot it before your hear the lifeguard blowing their whistle. Turns out [1] that the game was actually inspired by a HN thread on the same article in 2015 [2].
[1] https://github.com/FrankSalad/spot-the-drowning-child https://github.com/FrankSalad/spot-the-drowning-child
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237
- spywaregorilla 5y agoI was a lifeguard and I never felt very confident in it tbh. But I do win this "game" every time. So... idk, what that says.
- codetrotter 5y agoSounds like a good mentality for a lifeguard I think, probably keeps you alert. And combined with the fact that you are good at spotting drowning people means that you really are a good fit for the job.
- ineedasername 5y agoI think that's the only way I could do this job, if I was pretty much constantly terrified I might miss something, never comfortable, not at all. That has to be a hard state of mind to maintain when you might go a fairly long time in between crisis.
- dgan 5y agoWatching these videos make me extremely emotional :( I had no idea that's how drowning looks, I am also scared of water, so I guess (?) I am safe on that..
- cogman10 5y agoIMO, it's important to take swimming classes. You never know when it'll come in handy and there are bodies of water everywhere.
- smadsen 5y agoI agree, if there is a life skill you need to have, it would be knowing how to swim.
- alach11 5y agoI also think in terms of effort vs. reward, swimming is a tremendously worthwhile skill to learn. You can become reasonably competent at swimming in 40 hours. Compare that to learning a language, which can take 1000s of hours.
- st1ck 5y ago40 hours of flashcards and practice can cover maybe 90% of your typical tourist conversations for many languages. Where are you from? What is your name? What do you do? How much does it cost? Can you give me a discount?
- gpderetta 5y agoI can swim reasonably well and I'm not particularly scared of water. They still made me extremely emotional as well. I'm the father of two small kids, and really had to force myself to watch a few of them just to get an idea to what to be on the lookout for.
- secondcoming 5y agoThose inflatable tubes can't help a lifeguard's view of the pool.
- tstrimple 5y agoNo, but they help my gaming mindset. The majority of the issues arose when someone fell off of a tube in water too deep for them, so that's what I optimized for. I'd probably be a terrible life guard but I do just fine at the "game" version.
- Natsu 5y agoI'm pretty sure this is what most of the guards were watching for, too. Quite often they react instantly once someone goes under, so you know they had an eye on the kid climbing on top of their tube before that.
- bruiseralmighty 5y agoI used to be a lifeguard. I am glad I never had to deal with a pool like that with so many people and inner tubes in it. Makes line of sight so much more difficult.
- dgfitz 5y agoWhen I was a lifeguard we forbade floats. They're lifeguard-resistant deathtraps.
- BuildTheRobots 5y agoBecause of people getting trapped underneath?
- tj-teej 5y agoBecause you can't see underneath, a pool is 3D and if we can only see the surface we're missing the most dangerous part.
- jdavis703 5y agoThis is why jobs like lifeguard or airport security frequently rotate workers during a shift.
- cm2012 5y agoI saw someone trying to help just get in the lifeguard's way in one of the vids - the pushed a huge gloat towards the kid but it was too high for him to reach. But they pushed it in the path of the lifeguard so it slowed down the rescue by a good 3 seconds.
- MattGaiser 5y agoIt seems easy to spot once you see the first one, but it really just looks like a child bobbing up and down until then.
- ineedasername 5y ago> http://spotthedrowningchild.com http://spotthedrowningchild.com Wow, even knowing there would be someone in danger, I didn't spot until, at best, the lifeguard jumped in and usually a little after that. And they didn't know something bad was about to happen, and had to be scanning the entire pool constantly. I should have had a few seconds of advantage on that at least. I think I would be terrified to have a job like that... 99.99% of the time everything is fine, which would make it hard to maintain constant vigilance when you might go multiple days without an incident. while needing to be prepared for that extremely small window of crisis.
- Natsu 5y agoAfter you watch enough videos, you learn to look for kids doing unsafe things (e.g. climbing on flotation devices) to spot things ahead of time. Sure, you learn what drowning looks like, but if you watch, the lifeguards often react instantly which means they predicted that person would get themselves in trouble ahead of time and reacted as soon as the person went under. I got a lot better at it after a little bit of practice and most of the improvement was figuring out who was doing dangerous things that you needed to keep an eye on.
- mbeardsworth 5y agoI worked as a lifeguard for a few summers in high school and college, mostly as a supervisor in the latter years. You're trained to develop a scanning pattern, and to not overly fixate on potential problem cases. Otherwise your tunnel vision might cause to miss something important that you hadn't noticed beforehand. I found that I got a pretty good intuition for things not looking "right".
- ineedasername 5y agoWhen I had my 3rd child, the hospital made us watch about 2 hours of different videos about dealing with a < 1yr old child. I found this particularly interesting because: 1) It made perfect sense. You have to demonstrate a certain level of competence to get a driver's license, why not a child also? 2) For child #1 & #2 they just let us take them out of the hospital, which really felt surreal. Sort of like "Don't they know we have no idea what we're doing?" Anyway, the point of that is to say that it probably makes sense to include something about swimming into those videos. Or to have the equivalent of annual "professional development" training for parents to educate them on the issues facing them in the next year of their kid's development. Not required, that would be difficult to accomplish. But strongly encouraged & nudged repeatedly. Heck I can't go a year at my job without annual computer security educational programs to refresh staff on safe computing protocols, but parents are left flying blind to piece things together based on their own experiences growing up & whatever they've absorbed from pop media.
- ineedasername 5y agoThis one is particularly interesting in revealing the situational awareness of the lifeguards [0]. One jumps in from the left, then another when it looks like there could be more than one person that needs help. At the same time, the two other lifeguards on duty on the right side reposition themselves: one stays on the right, the other moves to the left side of the pool, and both begin stalking up & down the pool length to monitor the pool as their colleagues deal with their situation. It has the feel of a well-oiled machine to continue keeping the other swimmers safe even when overall monitoring capacity is reduced. A very good example of the need for-- and effective use of-- multiple redundancy layers in the realm of human safety. I feel compelled to keep watching these at random until I can pick out the person in crisis by the time the lifeguard jumps in. After reading the article I am terrified of not being vigilant enough when my kids go swimming. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdu3Kq8bmxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdu3Kq8bmxc