Slashdot Mirror
University Bans wi-fi as Health Concern
BaltikaTroika writes "A Canadian university has banned wi-fi, since the university President sees a possible link between electric and magnetic fields and brain tumors. According to the head of the university, "the jury's out on this one, I'm not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students." Is anybody outside of this university's administration concerned about this?"
I have a wifi router under my couch, hope my nuts are OK!
But it's not like all those other electro-magnetic waves just hit the walls of the campus and stop dead in their, uh, tracks...
WTF?
Better ban cordless phones, too, and everything else that uses 2.4 Ghz.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
Have they also banned cell phones? Because students tend to hold those next to their heads instead of on their lap. Since the power drops off as 1/r^3 (roughly), the distance between your brain and the antenna is a big deal.
[+] Tinfoil, helmet
How's wifi different than any other radio signal? Sure, it's a different frequency and bandwidth, but radio waves are passing through us all the time. Are they gonna ban radio stations now cause it might be cancerous?
Seems a little far-fetched.
google.slashdot
Carcinogenic inks in the paper
Alcohol
Cigarettes
Vending Machines
Money
Pesticides on the grass
Asphalt roads
Air Conditioning
Natural Gas heating
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
When I graduated from the University of Tinfoilhats, Ottawa campus, in 2001 with my degree in Paranoia Studies, I thought my hallowed school would never make the mainstream media. And, more importantly, that I wouldn't know if it was, because paying attention to the mainstream media allows the brain worms to eat your thoughts.
go get it
I've read the article, and this, I hope, is a joke.
There are many benefits to studying at Lakehead University. Ubiquitous wireless Internet access, however, isn't one of them.
I'm sure living in a grass hut is nice and all, and yes, everything (might) cause cancer.
This place deserves what's about to happen. I hope, maybe, that something was taken out of context. Maybe. Otherwise I don't even know where to start.
100% safe? NOTHING is 100% safe. Nothing is even 100% certain in science, except maybe that you will fail dynamics if you don't do your homework.. heh
..don't panic
Gee, where have we all been hearing THAT phrase lately?
Fact: Nobody has ever demonstrated in a repeatable, peer-reviewed, properly-controlled study that low-level RF radiation at nonionizing wavelengths has any biological effect whatsoever. For every study that shows correlated effects, two more show none at all.
Fact: WiFi adapters, even the gray-market 100 mW jobs you buy on eBay, transmit 1/10 to 1/100 the power of a cell phone.
Fact: Your microwave oven leaks more 2.4-GHz energy than your WiFi card emits intentionally. For best results, cut a 1" slit in package wrapper and rotate dish after 2 minutes on HIGH.
Fact: DNA damage from 2.4 GHz radiation at athermal levels would require a form of matter-energy interaction that is currently unknown to physics. There's a guaranteed Nobel Prize for anyone who can document such an interaction, because as far as anyone knows, we pretty have all the fundamental interactions covered at this point. Get cracking!
(Probable) fact: This joker has some sort of financial interest in a local commercial ISP whose business would be threatened by a campus-wide network. Nobody that stupid runs a university... but conflicts of interest aren't exactly unheard-of in that line of work, are they?
Ban Girls! They're too distracting. Like this one, she's
that the earth is one giant magnetic field
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The very same university that banned masturbation because of concerns over loss of sight.
cat
What is he, crazy?
Hasn't he ever heard of magnetic therapy?
This is the most stupid ban I've seen in a long time.
Yes, the high frequencies that wireless networks use can be dangerous to cells,since higher frequencies and radio waves are more dense. but basically the whole spectrum can cause damage as well. As we speak now, there are radio waves passing through our bodies. These come from television, amateur radio, broadcast radio, public service radio, cell phones and other wireless services.
Wireless networks are generally low power and you would have to be sitting directly near your antenna before you would be affected. A cell phone will probably fry your brain faster, since it's right next to your head.
An amateur radio operator told you that!
~Later~
If we are to ban everything that is "possibly" dangerous, then we need to ban everything. Literally.
No, the jury isn't "out on this one". That would imply there is evidence that WiFi causes any sort of health consequences- and further, that it is equal to evidence it does not. That's simply not the case.
People have been looking for this supposed cancer/mind-ray/whatever link to cell phones and other wireless devices. They still haven't found it. That doesn't say "the jury is out"- it says "research conducted thusfar has found no evidence."
It's like doing a study on whether there are little green moon men. Twenty research projects are conducted, scouring the moon with telescopes and satellites, and researchers say, "well, we haven't seen any green moon men." Then some nutjob comes along and says that "the jury is out on whether there are little green men on the moon!", simply because the researchers (like proper scientists) guardedly said "we didn't see any moon men", not "there are no moon men."
Please help metamoderate.
No shit, Maxwell!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
... at which water molecules resonate. Microwave ovens use 2.4 GHz because that's where the FCC said they could go. It has absolutely nothing to do with water-molecule resonance or any other bogosity.
Jeez, I wish people who have no earthly clue what they're talking about would refrain from posting.
I actually GO to Lakeheadu University (5th year comp-sci) and from what I understand this decision is because of our University President. Our school paper did an article about this issue earlier this year and if I remember correctly his reasons for the ban were "the unknown effects on developing brains" which I belive was related to his field of study. IMO it's all ignorant BS.
but I do love that this issue has reached slashdot!
This guy's obviously a bafoon, but he's got half a point (misdirected, but still...). I think we all know the link between mobile phones and cancer (despite what the telcos say). There's also a suspected link between mains electricity (and it's associated fields) and cancer:
e ws/2002/10/06/nemf06.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/10/06/i xhome.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
So the point being, the frequency is irrelevant, it's all to do with the magnetic and electric fields. When one or both of these are far in excess of ambient, they cause problems.
The new-age movement goes further to infer that all electrical devices give off 'bad vibes' in the form of positive ions (which make you feel tired, depressed etc). Clearly, transmitting devices are designed to propagate a signal, so it follows that they create more of these ions. Again, there's some science behind this, although arguable.
It looks like this guy is a bit misguided, but looking out for such things. For it to be any use at all, he'd have to ban phones, high current cables, and most of the engineering department, oh, not to mention around about every computer on campus.
People in my office have raised concerns over Wifi and health and I was unable to find anything useful which explained the issues and where the 'generally safe watermark' is if there is such a thing, I would still like to see this issue advanced by someone clear on specifics of emmision levels and related health/scientific research.
Wikipedia's page Wireless electronic devices and health stated the following: Anyone else want to quote some sources which may shed further light..
"... president Fred Gilbert won't allow it until he's satisfied EMF (electric and magnetic fields) exposure doesn't pose a health risk, particularly to young people."
The article makes it obvious he was trying to be a big hero at a town hall meeting. In actuality, he knows nothing about electromagnetism, but is not afraid to pretend that he does. We see a lot of that in recent years, as people pretend to know more about computers than they do.
Anyone worried about radio waves causing cancer can try to make that theory work. There is a huge barrier, however, in the form of a very very small number: Planck's Constant. Planck's constant = 6.626068 × 10-34 m2 kg/S. It's that 10**-34 that makes it difficult for low-energy electromagetism like wireless transmissions to interact with chemical reactions. Thirty-four zeros is a LOT of zeros after the decimal point.
Off topic: I've linked to the Encyclopedia Britannica above because the article about Planck's constant is very short. The article in Wikipedia is long. I've frequently seen the Encyclopedia Britannica be misleading because of the severe limitation placed on size of the articles due to paper costs. Wikipedia does not have that problem.
--
Cheney: Killing small animals and Iraqis for fun and profit.
If you have ever done any research on universities in canada you would know that lakehead isnt exactly the best school to attend, either academically or otherwise. So this is no real surprise as they are just trying to appeal to some strange subset of youth that think cell phones are dangerous to use so as to boost admissions.
The way I figure at least these people will get a little education, better than not attending a university at all, so let Lakehead have its coffee.
cheers
Joule-seconds...That's the dimension of Planck's constant - not meters-squared-kilogram per second
They are equivalent:
Joule -> kg m^2 / s^2
Plank's constant = h
Frequency of EM radiation = f -> 1/s
photon energy (Joules) = h * f
Since the unit of f is Hz or 1/s, Plank's constant can be represented with the units J*s or equivalently kg m^2 / s.
QED
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I see a lot of wannabees rant about this university being run by unscientify crackpots. And that the sun and radio and tv is more radiation blah blah ... :-) . Her life isn't that fun though. When her neighbor above leaves his 20" CRT on she can't sleep. She's got other trouble with that aswell and people often don't believe her and think she's crazy.
I've got news for you: Microwaves damage health. Period.
The debate is at which intensity do they start doing that.
I generally turn my Wifi of if I'm not using it and have stopped carrying my cellphone close to my body, since it's on all day. I turn it off at night. I also hold it away from my head when I make a call until the cell handshake is over and the remote connect is there. My Siemens M35 even has a beep to indicate when the connect is there. Smart people the Siemens engineers, aren't they?
Handshake you ask? That's the high-power meep-meep-meep you hear in nearby active FM radios just before you make or recieve a call. It's what establishes the conection to the cell network for communication. I even know a woman who can sense the cellphone handshake (she has e-magnetic field sensetivity) from meters away and has the habbit of anouncing cellphone calls seconds before a phone rings. Fun to watch with unsuspecting others near by
On it goes:
My father was a high profile radar electronics engineer - with Military (Nato, Cruise Missile), Airbus, Nasa/Grumman Aircraft (Lunar Module, Space Shuttle, etc) and some others. He forbid us to have a Microwave oven (they ALL leak Microwaves) and steared clear and went the other way whenever we got to close to a radar bubble when going hiking.
There are people who've had terminal brain tumors due to intense cellphone usage and I work with doctors (medical IT) who keep all equipment far away and well cased according to TCO.
Bottom line:
Don't think it's not unhealthy just because most people don't care. A little common sense and forsight is needed when handling technology. You don't get universal flawless wireless conectivity without a tradeoff. Anyone who believes that is a crackpot himself.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca