(Calculator) Screen Time Is OK for Kids | How Nudge Tech Halved Opioid Overdoses

A nudge — provided by a cloud-based app — can go a long way when it comes to treating addiction patients.

It wasn’t a flood or a tornado that caused the police chief of Huntington, West Virginia, to call the National Guard on a warm mid-August day in 2016. No, the disaster was a sudden avalanche … of heroin overdoses. Twenty-six in just four hours.

Somehow, against the odds, there were no deaths that day. But the incident woke up the country to what residents here already knew: that the opioid epidemic was in full swing in the Mountain State. West Virginia has the highest rate of overdose deaths in the U.S., and Cabell County, where Huntington is located, had the most overdose deaths of any county in West Virginia two years running: 152 casualties in 2017, and an average of five overdoses per day.

Gripped by the crisis, Huntington — a city of 50,000 that’s been hemorrhaging jobs and people since the 1950s — turned to big data. And it appears to be working.

Man-made facilities are democratizing surfing by reaching landlocked athletes worldwide.

On a frigid January day in 2002, 14-year-old John Luff and his friend Tommy Coates swapped boots and gloves for wetsuits at a beach along Maryland’s Eastern shore. The sand, caked with a layer of ice, cracked under their feet as they hurried toward the water, surfboards in tow. Winter storm and nor’easter patterns meant that winter months promised the best waves for East Coast surfers like Luff and Coates.

Luff ruminated on the conditions he’d create if he could wave a magic wand. For starters, he’d warm the water enough to feel his feet and shift the wind to face offshore. That’s when he began thinking about making waves beyond the ocean. It’s a dream that’s spurring more entrepreneurs and surfing enthusiasts into action.

Kids love this simple low-tech solution. But there are bigger questions for the parents.

The smartphone has become the dominant piece of technology of our age, sucking even more of our attention into its brilliantly engineered clutches. It’s bad enough for adults — hold on a sec, I just got six Slack messages — but keeping the phone from warping the brains of young kids can be a challenge.

My 2-year-old twins are constantly grabbing at my phone because they see me doing the same — stand by, I’ve got to reply to this group text — and they like the way it lights up. They also grab at plenty of other forbidden things (curtains, knives, their father’s throat), but the phone is becoming an increasingly hard thing to deny them. One possible solution? The humble calculator.