Posted by
timothy
on from the mmmm-lcds-are-great dept.
SunPin writes "Slashdotters are doomed. An article from Reuters describes serious health problems from using CRTs (they call them "VDT") for too long. Studies show that we need more studies." So go ahead and expense a three-head LCD setup for your desk.
This means my insurance will cover the 23" Apple Cinema HD Display I've had my eye (pardon the pun) on right?
In Other news ....
by
EvilCabbage
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Scientific leaders today made the discovery that too much of anything, might just be bad for you.
Yes, even beer.
Study this!
by
Blackneto
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's not just the CRT, it's the SITTING. All day in one position, gee I wonder if thats going to have an effect on you. The only damage I've had from sitting in front of a monitor at work for 10 years is 100 more pounds on my frame than I should have.
-- Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
Re:Study this!
by
e8johan
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Ok, they mainly complain about the screen, but the conclusions says that it is sitting in front of a computer that is the problem, not radiation from a CRT.
From this I draw two conclusions: 1) the original article is better than the rewritten summary and 2) LCDs is not the solution.
I have two tips myself to solve the problem: 1) get an adjustable dest that you can stand or sit at and 2) make sit-ups each morning and evening to avoid back pains. These two points helped me!
It's not just the CRT, it's the SITTING. All day in one position, gee I wonder if thats going to have an effect on you. The only damage I've had from sitting in front of a monitor at work for 10 years is 100 more pounds on my frame than I should have.
10 years and only a 100 pounds? Heck, I've been sitting in front of this monitor for the last 20 years. Continuously.:-P They've had to replace it a couple of times. The weight's not what's bad, it's these damn IVs and catheters. I can't walk anymore (not that I've really tried), my eyes can stand the sunlight, and I don't even remember my name anymore. But other than that, no real effects from sitting in front of a CRT, no.
Re:Study this!
by
IIRCAFAIKIANAL
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Interesting points. Could be junk science. Personally, I never believe headlines and I won't even pay attention until there have been several studies from independant sources.
The problem is we see this stuff published every day - it often gets retracted, but that rarely makes the news.
-- Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I have two tips myself to solve the problem: 1) get an adjustable dest that you can stand or sit at and 2) make sit-ups each morning and evening to avoid back pains. These two points helped me!
The first tip is a great one, which will save you fro a lot of pain, if you have back problems. The second tip is a disaster, as any chiropractor will tell you. Don't do situps if you have a back condition.
But you wouldn't take medical advice from/. anyhow, would you ?
-- Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
The article doesn't mention or theorize why these symptoms are occuring. We don't know that LCDs are necessarily a solution to the problem, even if they're generally better on the eyes.
Mental symptoms such as lethargy, anxiety and "reluctance to go to work," as well as sleep-related problems including insomnia and fatigue, were most common among workers who spent more than 5 hours a day glued to their computer screen.
Maybe it's just from staring at a fixed object without moving for long periods of time? Staring at a textbook for five hours would probably give me those symptoms as well in the short term.
Sounds like a classic case of SJS (Shitty Job Syndrome) to me. Vacations and alcohol tend to be the most commonly perscribed treatments.
I'm sure another study would easily find that people who are generally dissatisfied with their jobs feel exactly the same way regardless of what they actually do.
And in other news, studies show that eating ice cream increases your risk of being attacked by a shark. (Think about that for a moment...) =Smidge=
"So go ahead and expense a three-head LCD setup for your desk."
To who, my mom and dad?
--
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
crt's? what??
by
mshurpik
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
OMG. 20 replies so far and pretty much every one of them mentions either CRTs or LCDs.
The article mentions displays NOT ONCE.
The closest it comes is "eyestrain," which is one of several symptoms they examined.
This article is not about displays, it is about sitting in front of the computer.
"Reluctance to go to work "
by
guybarr
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I can see it now:
Yes dear, I know I need to go to work and feed our kids, but , you see, those big bad monitors at work are giving me hell. And I have referenced scientific article to prove it !
people working with monitors are reluctant to go to work. scoop.
-- Working for necessity's mother.
Mental Symptoms
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
From the article...
Mental symptoms such as... "reluctance to go to work"... were most common among workers...
Yeah right, that has nothing to do with having a prick of a manager and doing demeaning and stressful work all day for little reward.
One year after starting my job I got all the symptoms mentioned. I have to sit in front of the computer all the day (>8hrs). I had pains in my shoulders, neck, and lower back, I had eyestrain, and my index finger hurt from using the scroll wheel (that's why a 1-button-mouse is a good thing:-). I also developed some neurotic behavior including anxiety (9/11 helped much to make things worse:-(), and I didn't like the job very much, also the colleagues and the whole environment is really great - also the job is easy and well paid.
I coped with it mostly by doing one thing: sports. Since I go to the gym 3 times a week, everything went back to normal. No pain, no fear.
Take it all away...
by
DarkHelmet
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The more time an office worker toils in front of a computer, the more likely he or she is to suffer a host of physical, mental and sleep-related ills, Japanese researchers report.
Yeah, and if I go out and have sex, I am more likely to catch the clap or something like that...
I feel celibate enough by visiting this site 20 times a day. I feel pathetic enough oggling over female slashdotters who get karma points. Now you wanna take away my 21" CRT to boot.
Being currently embroiled in a statistics course at university, one of the things that has been recently drilled into my head is that a correlation of factors does not mean at all that the one factor causes the other.
Firstly, the term "statistically significant" means that the relationship observed was unlikely to occur by chance. This does not mean that there is definitely a correlation, but that there is a probability of finding a correlation.
Secondly even a very strong correlation when found, does not meant that there is causation, just that there is something interrelating those factors. For example there could be a strong correlation between a person's age and their owning a car. This does not mean that your growing up will cause you to own a car, or that owning a car makes you older. The two variables are interrelated in a system that involves many more complexe factors, but which yields results that keep certain observed factors grouped together. Finding actual causation is much more difficult.
Thirdly, this type of study is called an observational study, where you send out questionaires and look for correlations. These types of studies have very unclear results generally, and really cannot show causation. There is no talk in the article, for example, of what types of people were responding to the study. Often in voluntary response studies you find that there is an unusually high number of people of one particular tendency who respond more readily than another, so that will skew the results. What you would need to do in order to find actual causation is a set of experiments, with control groups, to show an actual causal relationship between VDT use and health. What observational studies are useful for is drawing attention to a subject and saying we need more attention to this issue.
Anyway, here I am rambling on to little point. They say in the article that they need to do more work, and that is my whole point. Its just that often people read articles like this and jump to conclusions like "my computer is going to make me crazy and depressive". So just relax and don't worry... yet!
--
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Slashdot Mirror
This means my insurance will cover the 23" Apple Cinema HD Display I've had my eye (pardon the pun) on right?
Scientific leaders today made the discovery that too much of anything, might just be bad for you.
Yes, even beer.
It's not just the CRT, it's the SITTING. All day in one position, gee I wonder if thats going to have an effect on you.
The only damage I've had from sitting in front of a monitor at work for 10 years is 100 more pounds on my frame than I should have.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
That's why I'm not getting laid! Stupid monitors!
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
"So go ahead and expense a three-head LCD setup for your desk."
To who, my mom and dad?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
OMG. 20 replies so far and pretty much every one of them mentions either CRTs or LCDs.
The article mentions displays NOT ONCE.
The closest it comes is "eyestrain," which is one of several symptoms they examined.
This article is not about displays, it is about sitting in front of the computer.
I can see it now:
Yes dear, I know I need to go to work and feed our kids, but , you see, those big bad monitors at work are giving me hell. And I have referenced scientific article to prove it !
people working with monitors are reluctant to go to work. scoop.
Working for necessity's mother.
Yeah right, that has nothing to do with having a prick of a manager and doing demeaning and stressful work all day for little reward.
One year after starting my job I got all the symptoms mentioned. I have to sit in front of the computer all the day (>8hrs). I had pains in my shoulders, neck, and lower back, I had eyestrain, and my index finger hurt from using the scroll wheel (that's why a 1-button-mouse is a good thing :-). I also developed some neurotic behavior including anxiety (9/11 helped much to make things worse :-(), and I didn't like the job very much, also the colleagues and the whole environment is really great - also the job is easy and well paid.
I coped with it mostly by doing one thing: sports. Since I go to the gym 3 times a week, everything went back to normal. No pain, no fear.
Yeah, and if I go out and have sex, I am more likely to catch the clap or something like that...
I feel celibate enough by visiting this site 20 times a day. I feel pathetic enough oggling over female slashdotters who get karma points. Now you wanna take away my 21" CRT to boot.
To hell with you!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Being currently embroiled in a statistics course at university, one of the things that has been recently drilled into my head is that a correlation of factors does not mean at all that the one factor causes the other.
Firstly, the term "statistically significant" means that the relationship observed was unlikely to occur by chance. This does not mean that there is definitely a correlation, but that there is a probability of finding a correlation.
Secondly even a very strong correlation when found, does not meant that there is causation, just that there is something interrelating those factors. For example there could be a strong correlation between a person's age and their owning a car. This does not mean that your growing up will cause you to own a car, or that owning a car makes you older. The two variables are interrelated in a system that involves many more complexe factors, but which yields results that keep certain observed factors grouped together. Finding actual causation is much more difficult.
Thirdly, this type of study is called an observational study, where you send out questionaires and look for correlations. These types of studies have very unclear results generally, and really cannot show causation. There is no talk in the article, for example, of what types of people were responding to the study. Often in voluntary response studies you find that there is an unusually high number of people of one particular tendency who respond more readily than another, so that will skew the results. What you would need to do in order to find actual causation is a set of experiments, with control groups, to show an actual causal relationship between VDT use and health. What observational studies are useful for is drawing attention to a subject and saying we need more attention to this issue.
Anyway, here I am rambling on to little point. They say in the article that they need to do more work, and that is my whole point. Its just that often people read articles like this and jump to conclusions like "my computer is going to make me crazy and depressive". So just relax and don't worry... yet!
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
i think you just lost your audience =)