Word: rsi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hour to type out a paragraph-long email, I can with difficulty design a spreadsheet, my twelve-year-old cousin has his own website. In fact, recent articles in technology journals like Wired and PCWeek worry that "Nintendo thumb" in children might prove an early harbinger of future RSI troubles. Podolsky sees this exponential growth in computer time behind what has been perceived as the ephemeral public life of RSIs. "In the past," she pointed out, "it was a bigger deal in grad schools." While the RSI Action Group, an undergraduate organization, was founded this year, its graduate school analog...
...third reason for the relative paucity of RSI in clerical work is that, in the past, not everybody went into the secretarying (or scrivening) business. If one couldn t type for long periods of time without pain then one chose a different profession. Now, however-and increasingly as figures like President Clinton tout computer ubiquity as the solution to our abysmal public schools-more and more kids grow up rattling away at the keyboard for hours...
...everyone sees a drop, however. Rachel W. Podolsky 00, co-chair of the RSI Action Group, attests that there is a significant number of students who are reporting RSIs this year, a population she labels a "large but silent majority." Indeed, Dr. Coley s numbers do not show a total disappearance, merely a dip. Even this trend, however, is puzzling. Why, in a student population that uses computers every bit as much as it did last year, should the RSI flag? Where, for that matter, did it come from in the first place...
...secretaries? Indeed, a skeptic at the most recent RSI Action meeting wondered just that. Secretaries have been taking dictation, dashing off letters, typing out memoes and generally making their living by typing for over a hundred years. Why haven t they reported RSIs? One explanation is that computer keyboards are, in a sense, too easy to type on. Unlike the unbroken skittering of keyboard touchtyping, the motion of typing on a typewriter is a larger one, involving more than just the muscles of the fingers. In addition, the need to reset the page at the end of each line...
...maybe the RSI story is a success story. Dr. Coley believes that it is. He sees the drop in cases stemming from an increase in awareness and the concomitant employment of preventative measures. These are the beginnings of what he hopes will be a "culture of healthy computing." For him, RSIs are "largely mechanical problems," and the solution is therefore mechanical as well. As he noted, "Recent studies of white-collar work environments show that enforced ergonomic changes have helped with the problem...