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Future Desks to Charge Gadgets Wirelessly
IronMan writes "Future desks may allow us to charge our phones, iPods, PDAs and other gadgets wirelessly. Office equipment maker Herman Miller is one of the first companies to license the eCoupled inductive coupling technology from Fulton Innovation, Engadget reports. The desk will allows wireless transfer of energy through a magnetic field. Motorola is working together with eCoupled, but still is not sure when the first consumer devices with this technology will appear on the market. From the article: 'Of course, cordless charging isn't an entirely new concept, with HP recently showing off some of its own ideas for juiced-up furniture, and Splashpower talking up its charge-on-contact system for a few years now. We guess we'll just have to wait and see if this new power-happy desk becomes the same status symbol for the Web 2.0 crowd that Herman Miller's Aeron chair was back in Web 1.0 days -- assuming we haven't moved on to Web 3.0 by the time the desk actually comes out, that is.'"
I can't seriously be the only one tired of hearing about Web x.0.
You're exposed to radiation everywhere, every day.
Your cellphone, your power mains, radio signal, TV broadcasts, 2-way radios, WiFi, you name it. All of them surround you in radiation.
I'm not so concerned about adding one more source.
Zing!
The problem here is that you are asking for proof of a negative. You see, in science, when someone asserts the condition X may have effect Y out of the blue like that, the only proper response is "I have seen no evidence of this, so unless you can show evidence of a link, I must assume it to be false". Claiming "just because it's not proven doesn't mean it's not true" is foolish and childlike. Claims must be supported by proof. The burden is not on the rest of the world to disprove. Science is built on facts, not speculations. Logical thinking--- it works!
It still amazes me how many people there are out there that apparently need this explained to them.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Once the word RADIATION is heard, most people cringe. They lump all EM radiation into the same category as UV, X and Gamma rays, or even confuse it with particle radiation. Anyway, I seriously doubt that this desk will emit anything higher than a few millivolts at a couple hundred Hertz.
I'd be more concerned about eh power wastage / efficiency concerns. Electricity ain't getting any cheaper (quite the reverse), and I can't say its *that* onerous a task to plug in a device only when it needs charging. Is this an always-on solution? because if so, that seems horribly wasteful to me.
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To but into this discussion of yours, your counters are not convincing and extremely weak. For instance claims of research that will come some time soon to prove them wrong is meaningless within science. Such claims would only be believed from trusted sources and only to the point of that point possibly being true. Claims that someone else should find the work for you is unreasonable, other people are not here to helpfully feed you the information you need.
In this case the grandparent was nice enough to already give you a place to look and I suppose to give an extra hand, you could try looking in pubmed as well, considering it contains alot of freely accesible articles next to the less freely accessible ones.
I will also add my voice to the grandparents one in stating that all research I've ever encountered on magnetic influences on biological organisms and humans in specific have shown no harmful effects except in special circumstances (which was shown in a Russian research I believe). In practice this situation doesn't appear to occur though as checking on all people who are affected shows no effects at all, the previously quoted leukemia research was later shown to be in error as well. As such unless you can show actual real evidence of some kind of appliance causing actual harm or has a real chance of causing harm, I have little choice but to not take your word for it.
In our risk adverse society, it is not unreasonable to expect for people to want something new to be proven to be safe vs. "well, we haven't seen any negative side effects yet, so it must be safe". "Proof" only coming with time and widespread use which introduces the chicken and the egg problem.
As a counter point to your argument, look at lead and uranium based paints. Some one correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that anyone thought there was anything wrong with lead based paint until its use was widespread enough that kids were eating it. As for uranium paints, science didn't understand radiation well, so it wasn't until later that people realized that maybe it wasn't the best thing to paint plates with.
Finally, science is not build on facts, but rather ton the idea that everything is suspect until it has been tested repeatedly. Then it, in an ideal universe, graduates to "our best understanding at the moment of what is going on". While we have a fair understanding of a lot of things, we do not know nor can we observe everything.
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
Actually, we don't even have to show a zero-negative effect.
At this point, we can fairly safely put an upper bound on any negative effects of magnetic fields. If they were, for instance, instantly fatal, we'd know. If they increased your bone cancer chances by 1000 times, we'd know. The maximum negative effect must be pretty small, or we wouldn't be sitting here arguing about it, we'd be pointing to the 99.9%-confidence studies.
Meanwhile, we have very real benefits from the devices generating these fields. Refrigeration alone saves an unbelievable number of lives every year, and that's just one example.
The upper bound of negative effects of magnetic fields is certainly well under the benefits of the things that cause those fields, and at this point, most likely below the noise floor of any negative effects we could determine. And "below the noise floor" is as good a definition of "no negative effect" as any.
It literally is such a small concern that it wasn't worth my time to write this debunking. (However, I'm charging this time to "educating others", which is worth it; I have to live with the lunatics that insist on determining danger levels of things by whether or not your fear glands are spewing hormones into their bloodstream, rather than, say, actually finding out.)