Medical Journal Accepts Paper by 13-Year-Old on “PlayStation Thumb”
From a story on CNet,
A 13-year-old girl has become the youngest author to be published in South Africa’s main medical journal for her research on “PlayStation thumb”.
Safura Abdool Karim interviewed 120 of her former schoolmates for a science project about whether they suffered problems after playing computer games.
Symptoms of “PlayStation Thumb” include blisters numbness and tingling, mainly in the thumb, she wrote.
…
She said she herself did not own a PlayStation because they were a “waste of time”.
This put a smile on my face. It’s pretty funny. I can’t want to see the look on my son’s face when I show him this news! I look forward to reading the whole paper.
If anybody finds it online, please drop me a not or comment here. I can’t seem to find it, so it may not be available online yet.
Posted: June 24th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from J.W. Koebel
Time: June 26, 2005, 11:29 pm
I’m not sure I believe that what she did really qualifies as “research” in any meaningful sense of the word.
I am doing real research about the interactions of families and technology, using hard data obtained from measurement devices and direct observation. This girl doesn’t even own the device she’s studying — she’s in no way qualified to write about it. Especially at 13, when the research she’s doing is probably science-fair level, nothing great.
Wow, I sound really bitter tonight.
Comment from Mark Sicignano
Time: June 27, 2005, 6:07 am
Well, according to South African Medical Journal’s deputy editor, Professor JP van Niekerk, “I think it’s a jolly good article. It was accepted on merit, but we also thought it was great fun.”
So we’ll have to wait and see when it get’s published.
I did have fun handing the news article to my son and watching the look on his face when he read it.
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