Parents Sue School Over Use of Wi-Fi Network

Iphtashu Fitz writes "Both news.com and Wired are reporting that an Illinois school district is being sued by parents over their use of a Wi-Fi network at a local elementary school. Apparently the parents of 5 students are concerned about potential health risks to their children by the Wi-Fi radio signals. The parents are seeking class-action status for their suit, which seeks to halt the use of wireless networks but does not ask for monetary damages. The complete complaint is also available for your reading pleasure on wifinetnews.com." I would never have guessed that the emissions from a wireless network are bad, unlike the healthy emissions given off by the now inescapable cell phones that are everywhere in public.

Comments

Sad

[captain_craptacular]

Unfortunately, the school district will now have to expend a significant amount of money to defend themselves against these bogus charges. Money that could otherwise be spent for some better cause such as, lets see, educating our children?

Re:Sad

[scoove]

expend a significant amount of money to defend themselves against these bogus charges

Unfortunately this appears to be what happens when you combine a society fixated with junk science with a political class ruled by trial attorneys.

The State of Missouri had an issue a bit more than a year ago with a state legislator that was trying to get all communication towers banned. The reason? "It might harm children." A few folks did some research on the legislator pushing the bill and guess who one of his largest financial supporters was? Incumbant local telephone companies (the competition to wireless providers). Save the children unfortunately has become code for political and legal system payola.

Unfortunately this poster touches on the reality of the current US legal nightmare: many defendents cannot afford the fight for what is right due to the complete lack of financial accountability of irresponsible plantiff attorneys and their clients. I'm predicting the school will back out and turn off their wireless devices. Their students will lack the access to information that other students might have. Unless other parents get vocal and oppose this luddite activity, they'll further the progress of their children towards a future job at Burger King.

Per the allegation that the school has been ignoring evidence that electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi networks poses health risks, I'd invite the luddite parents and their attorneys to have a radiofrequency engineer show them what the airwaves in the classroom (or better, at home) look like. 802.11b/a/g is background noise compared to many of the narrowband signals out there. Better shut off the FM, AM and TV broadcasters immediately. Throw away that cellphone (you don't hold that anywhere *near* your head, do you?) Better start packing candles in the kids lunch bag... those fluorescent lights are little RF monsters ("to quote: while the intentional radiation of fluorescent light tubes lies in the visible light range, such tubes also generate very low levels of microwave and RF white noise (Mumford, 1949)... microwaves? That's not a classroom lit by fluorescents, it's a Easy Bake Oven from Hell!). Lock up the school TV sets - what do you think that gunnplexer is firing at your eyeballs? Get weather, aviation and police radar shut off immediately (sure hope that speeder doesn't crash into the school bus). And god forbid you have one of those Air Force E-4B 747's fly over your home as they do mine... one of those bastards wipes out my TV amplifier every time it flies over my farm! Heck, we haven't even thought about RF experiments like HAARP that can probably melt a human in milliseconds!

Of course, the final step for the trial attorneys and their luddite clients will be banning the ultimate producer of raw RF. Once that's done, we can all rest assured that no RF deathrays will harm us.

*scoove*

Re:Sad

[dattaway]

Light dimmers and motor controllers are major offenders found around the house that would put a shielded microwave oven to shame.

We better shut off the electric grid. Start thinking of the children for God's sake.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighting dimmers (the typical type used in homes) are NOT rheostats!

A typical (cheap) lighting dimmers is rated for about 600 watts of connected load. (You can get fancier ones rates for 1200 watts or more.) A rheostat capable of handling a 600 watt load is about 8" in diameter and 2" thick! (Hint: it wouldn't fit in the little rectangular J box used for home light switches and dimmers. Not to mention the fact that a high power rheostat dissipates the unused electrical current as heat - something it couldn't possibly do if crammed into a J box on a wall surrounded by fiberglass insulation.)

So how does the typical home lighting dimmer work, you ask? Well, it uses a solid state switch known as a TRIAC and a technique known as "phase control" to chop up the AC waveform. Basically, a timer circuit is reset at zero crossing (the start of an AC half cycle) and waits for a portion of the half cycle before switching on the TRIAC. If the delay is equal to one half of the half cycle, half the AC waveform is delivered to the connected lights, which glow at about half brightness.

A waveform with a relatively sharp edge is created when the TRIAC switches on part way through the AC cycle meaning lots of harmonics which ultimately means the wire running from the dimmer out to the lights acts as antennas and spew out the upper harmonics as RF / EMI. The harmonics are greatest when the half cycles are chopped in half (when the dimmer is set at approximately high brightness) - if you listen closely lighting dimmers buzz (mechanical vibration due to the lower harmonics) and you will actually notice this buzzing is at its worst around half brightness.

There is a related (patented) technique called reverse phase control that is built around a relatively new type of switching transistor called an IGBT. Same basic idea but (as the name implies) in reverse - instead of the half cycle starting in the off state and switching on part way through, it starts in the on state and switches off part way through. The elimination of the sharp turn on edge significantly reduces the harmonics generated.

The reverse phase control patent is owned by the Rosco theatrical products company (used in their IPS lighting control systems.) You can imagine that the harmonics generated by a typical theatrical lighting system (often up to 100,000 watts of lighting being controlled) can be a serious problem. (So much of a problem that electrical panels with oversized neutral buses are required to prevent the neutrals from melting and special power factor correcting transformers are required to prevent this noise from contaminating the rest of the AC system.) Anyway, the reverse phase control eliminates most of this problem - it also results in smaller equipment cabinets, less fan noise due to lower heat production, etc. Pretty neat.

Umm??

[dcstimm]

2.4ghz Cordless phones use the same freq! What are these parents smoking?

Re:Umm??

[japhyr777]

Wait until they find out about Baby Monitors... That'll get them worked up..

All those hours of the day the poor baby was taking in the radio waves. Possibly right next to it's head. Bzzzzt..

Re:Umm??

[GammaTau]

2.4ghz Cordless phones use the same freq! What are these parents smoking?

I don't know... but whatever it is, don't tell the kids. It might be bad influence.

Welcome to the 21st

[agent dero]

This is the 21st century, radio, UV, and all sorts of electromagnetic waves float around us. These schools are not sticking unborn fetuses in microwaves, they are simply putting up a radio network.

Why not sue the sun because it's barraging Earth with all these bad rays, sue cell phone companies for placing cellphone towers where your children may be. Sue HOT 95.5! for transmitting that crappy music.

Go get your aluminum foil beanie already.

Tinfoil hats

[Carnildo]

Does anyone have the address of these people? I've got a load of tinfoil hats they can use to protect their children!

Re:Tinfoil hats

[nsample]

The parent post is a pretty funny comment, and one that should be appreciated by the majority of the /. readers. However, as a new parent, a scientist, and a PhD, I'll admit that I too have worries about WiFi and growing children. And I don't wear a tinfoil hat.

We had a WiFi network in-home before my son was born, but removed it during my wife's pregnancy. We *still* have a cordless phone, but stepped back to 900MHz. Why? Well, there's enough evidence out there to say that it's worth it to worry. We don't have a complete story, and that's the issue. Unfortunately, there were no equivalent localized high frequency sources in homes and schools 30 years ago. We don't have enough data to say definitively one way or another that something's safe or not.

And that's what scares the shit out of parents. We don't know enough to rule anything out yet. I know enough that I wouldn't live next to a cell tower, even though I'll risk holding a cell phone to my ear just about everyday. However, when it comes to my kids, I don't take that chance.

Re:Tinfoil hats

[theonetruekeebler]

Welcome to being a new parent in a new era, because you're certainly talking like a parent rather than a scientist: "We don't have enough data to say definitively one way or another that something's safe or not." Safety is the absence of danger, and when is there ever enough data to prove the absence of a phenomenon? And thirty years ago, between your 1960s color television and the flourescent lights in the supermarket where your mother, pregnant with you, filled up her cart with fatty, chemical-laced foods, you were being exposed to a hell of a lot more radiation that your Wi-Fi, and believe me that's the least of the environmental poisons you were exposed to in 1973. Yet you still managed to grow up to get a PhD.

There's a lot of money to be made by scaring the shit out of you. When it comes to technology, the magic words are "there is not enough evidence that this product is safe". Remember when they were screaming that power lines were killing babies? Remember when saccharin was killing babies? Remember when Y2K was going to kill all of us and our babies?

Try this: "There may be a link between measles vaccinations and autism". Okay? Now, wrap your scientist mind around that word "may". It means non-zero probability, so good luck disproving the proposition. And I hope your math skills are up to the task of comparing the "may" above to the "may" in "measles vaccinations may prevent measles", because I made that up about autism. Scared you, though, didn't I? So welcome to the new era of parenting.

And the fearmongers are never going to shut up. Twenty year studies that turn up no statistically significant link between their pet fear and reality obviously didn't look long enough or hard enough. They like the attention, and their lawyers like the money.

What a waste of money

[doomdog]

Schools are always short of money -- not enough for textbooks, teachers, better facilities, computer upgrades, etc... And now they're being forced to spend money on lawyers to defend themselves against a lawsuit brought up by a few ignorant parents??? Yeah, that's a great way to spend the education budget...

If we had serious tort reform in this country where the losing party had to pay the legal expenses of the winner, these kinds of stupid lawsuits would never be filed in the first place...

This is beyond ridiculous

[MoceanWorker]

Only in this country would you expect to find people sueing a person/company/organization/etc.. for such trivial nonsense.

As I type this post right now, the monitor in my room, my radio, lights, cell phone, speakers are all giving off radiation. Not to mention, objects in my room (i.e. fork) are strengthening these signals.

Radiation is around us.. everywhere.. We can't stop it. The big question on hand is, do we sacrifice technology and all its benefits for the risk of potential radition which may or may not hinder ones health and/or possibly lead to cancer?

Please, out of all those parents sueing.. how many of them smoke, have 5 TV's in their house, drive a car, use a computer, etc.. you get my drift.

I hope there's somebody out there in Illinois who can smack those parents around a bit.. and I think I say this for most of the /.'ers..

Re:they worry about THIS?!

[wo1verin3]

Little billy's immunization record ..... aren't really super-sensitive information.

You don't consider personal health information sensitive? That disturbs me.

Dateline--Backwoods, AL

[Jouster]

Backwoods, AL--A group of parents in this small town, calling itself "Citizens for Safer Classrooms", is suing their school district over the installation of what they call "massive portals designed solely for the purpose of subjecting our children to radiation." They claim these portals (which the school district contends are called "windows") are made of material carefully selected to ensure the maximum range of radiation is hitting their children.

"Well, I think it's an outrage," said Patti Jo, a mother of two children in the school district and one of the plaintiffs in the suit. "It's becoming more and more obvious that they're maliciously subjecting our little boys and girls to a whole host of EMR [electro-magnetic radiation], simply so they can save a few pennies on their electricity bill." She started to cry softly. "We intend to petition for a criminal trial, too. We're claiming it's premeditated murder. The school board should fry," she added.

Although both sides are trying to reach an agreement on how best to contain the situation, a school board member we contacted, speaking on condition of anonymity, was resolute. "Sure, they get a little UV radiation burned at times," the anonymous boardmember stated. "But have you looked at the cost of fluorescent tubes lately?"

Punitive damages, if the plaintiffs succeed, are expected to be in the millions.

Jouster

Re:Stupid Parents

[mOoZik]

Why does this surprise you? The average person is a moron. Yes, I said. The average person doesn't understand technology and its effects at the same level that /.ers do. They get their information from the mainstream news, which equally is stupid and irresponsible and instills fear in people for ratings. What a wonderful world we live in, eh? A world of ignorance.

WHAT?!

[MrScience]

This is insane. My company rolled out 802.11 a while ago, and they had a few statistics they sent out to address safety concerns.

Stuff like, "Since these run at low transmit power (.03 Watts), it's 1/10-1/20 the power of a cell phone." and "You'd have to hold a body part within 2cm of the antena for 30 minutes while the radio operated continuously at 100% capacity for that time."

Just look at IEEE C95.1 1991, which details the maximum safe exposure for any EM radiation.

Or, gosh, here's a thought... what about OSHA?! They've got a bazillion links on the research involved.

I hope this gets thrown out of the courts faster than you can blink. The last thing students need is to be shoved back into the backwaters of technology.

They don't need wifi, though

[localghost]

I might care more about this if the district had a legitimate use for wifi. It's an elementary school district, grades K-8. None of the students have laptops, and the majority of the teachers are incapable of using anything other than Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Gradequick.

Now the high school, on the other hand, could benefit from wifi. One student in my math class recently got a tablet PC, and we were talking a couple days ago about how nice it would be if there was a school-wide 802.11b network. Unfortunarly, our school is way behind the times as far as technology goes. We watched laserdiscs the other day in psych.

Money isn't an issue for either of them, though. Both the elementary schools and the high school have more money then they know what to do with. The middle schools just built two new buildings, and the high school got a new $3 million artificial turf football field, an artificial turf soccer field with stadium lighting, and built a parking garage. The issues are stupid parents and stupid administration.

(In case you couldn't tell, I attended the district the lawsuit was filed against)

simple solution

[Casca]

There is a simple solution to this really. The geek kids all need to get together and kick the shit out of the kids whos parents are suing. Damnit, nevermind...

RTFA

[BlueboyX]

Sorry, but they are seeking $. The pdf outlinging their wannabe class action suit does include "injunctive relief," as well as "other and further relief" immediately after "threatened immediate, irreparable harm." Further up they clearify what they think this harm is "threatened with irreparable harm by Defendants' conduct in that they have been exposed to grave health risks, many of which lead to permament injury, disease and death."

That is the language you use when you are trying to get a few $million per kid. They are indeed seeking vast amounts of money, which is the only sane reason for this suit to begin with.

*sigh*

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

Actually, compared to the amount of RF energy travelling through most homes, WiFi *IS* background radiation. You don't need a fancy source for that. All you need is a little technical data.

WiFi is limited to 80mW or less of power output. The leakage alone from a 900W microwave oven is considerably higher than this, and in the exact same frequency spectra. The power output of radar of various types dwarfs either, although the distance normally provides some protection (inverse squares and all). And don't even ask about the output from a 20,000W AM radio station.

The X-Rays from an average CRT (including that television set) are much more harmful, since, unlike the microwave radiation used by the above, X-Rays are ionizing radiation and *DO* cause cellular mutations (basically, anything longer wave than UV, including visible light and microwaves, doesn't have the energy to ionize the cells in a human body (photoelectric effect), anything shorter wave (including the deadly UVC, X-rays, and Gamma rays) will ionize cells, break down DNA, and other wonderful things).

Tinfoil hats...

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

... might be useless against alien mindprobes or whatever it is that conspiracy theorists keep ranting about, but they do work pretty nicely to block radio waves, especially at higher frequencies.

So just have the paranoid parents send their kids to school wrapped up like a baked potato. Sure, the resulting bullying might be unhealthy, but the kid won't be exposed to the evil 2.4GHz radiation.

Purity of Essence

[Latent Heat]

There was a time when it was the right-wing nuts who were charging every kind of conspiracy and risk to health. Remember fluoride in water and how the issue was lampooned in Dr. Strangelove?

I had a libertarian friend who liked to poke fun both at the right-wing nuts who were upset about fluoride along with the liberals who were in a big huff about how bad the conservatives were. He offered up the "fluoron" theory: fluorescent light bulbs emitted "fluorons", subatomic particles smaller than an electron so they were not yet detected by science, but they were shaped like a hammer and sickle (the Soviet emblem), and if one penetrated your skull it would explode a brain cell and turn it into a Communist idealogue. Light exposure (small number of Commie brain cells) turned you into a liberal while heavy doses turned you into a pinko -- and fluorescent lights were everywhere in public schools and government buildings.

I guess we have come full circle and now the loony Left has become what the loony Right once was.

Re:Why the fuck weren't these parents sterilized?

[fmaxwell]

Explain, since when is any form of electromagnetic radiation not harmful?

You're right! Quick: Run around your house and unplug your lamps, flourescent lights, computer, television, cordless phone, microwave oven, anything with an electric motor, since they all emit electromagnetic radiation.

Low band low energy radio is not very harmful while high energy gamma rays aren quite harmful.

So let's just extrapolate from gamma radiation to WiFi networks. That's good science.

Wifi is pretty energetic so has the capability to dislodge atomic structures and hence arguably is carcinogenic.

Then show us reputable, peer-reviewed studies published in reputable medical journals like The Lancet or New England Journal of Medicine that bear out your theory when it comes to the low-power 802.11 networks that we're talking about here.

Next time when you talk about sterilization for stupidity include a clause that when in retrospect you are the stupid one they can stop your machinery from working...

That was implied from the beginning. But there's no chance of that happening any time soon because, unlike you, I value science more than google results that show up a bunch of blog entries from pseudo-science nutcases.

Have you ever used google like for http://www.google.se/search?q=radiation+wifi+healt h

Have you ever used Google like for http://www.google.com/search?q=aliens+roswell+UFO.

Run for your lives! The extraterrestrials have landed on the Earth.