Word: rsi
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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...
...Chris Coley is the closest thing there is to an authority on RSI (or, to be technically correct, RSIs; RSI is, in the words of a Harvard-Radcliffe RSI Action Group handout, "an umbrella term for a variety of injuries: tendinitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, etc.") at Harvard. A physician at University Health Services (UHS), Dr. Coley has made a professional hobby of the disease. He candidly admits that "It s really something that most physicians know very little about." A survey he has conducted collaboratively with the Computer Science Department will, once examined, hopefully provide a quantitative...
...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...