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How Bad Can Wi-fi Be?
An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"
Think of the children!!!
Seriously, it's sad that supposed "news" programs air things like this just to get ratings. What's even sadder is that lots of people believe them, so tech-savvy people like us now have to spend time explaining to Aunt Jane that the big evil wifi will not give her cat cancer.
this was all over the news and may cause wifi to be stopped in schools - so any feedback is useful
All day we're around Microwaves, XRays, High voltage lines, lights, televisions and Radio signals. There are TONS, of course... but how much more is actually from outside the atmosphere?
The only thing that's frying our kid's brains are their ideas. I'm not overlooking child safety, but there are WAY more harmful waves out there than WiFi.
In the meantime, their children are outside getting burnt without sunscreen.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
I suggest aluminum foil hats.
Typical wifi - 100mW. 2g Cell tower - 20-100W. In cities they are using micro cells, which typically have about 3W power. There are experiments which show cell phones are a little dangerous, and there are scientist, who tried for years to show there is big danger, but found none and converted to "no harm" camp. So YMMV.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
802.11b/g uses 2.4GHz radio waves. That's the same frequency range as microwave ovens. Microwave ovens work because the microwaves are absorbed by the bonds in the water molecules of food (which is why dry food does not cook in microwave ovens).
So yes, human tissue that contains water can absorb WiFi radiation. That is a fact.
What is not known is: how much absorption of that radiation is bad for the kids?
So... the news is that there's alarmism?
Thanks. I'll be sure to watch out for it.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Gah! Won't someone think of the children!?
If we use 802.11, the terrorists win.
I'm sure it's worth study, and I personally think WiFi is used too much. I'm not saying we shouldn't use it a lot, but I know some homes and businesses that might just be better off with some CAT cables. I mean, if all of your computers in your 1 bed apartment are desktops, why go WiFi?
all this deadly EM radiation will kill our children, and than there is this bad, bad, bad radiation from the stars, gamma ray burst anybody? So let's destroy all this stars, maybe with a, a ...star destroyer, uh wait, never mind.
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
And in other news from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6676129.stm
Of course they can. Everything does. Notice how when you put your head near a source of radiant heat it feels warm?
"Do not look into laser with remaining eye" is also appropriate here...
I quit!
TFS seems to read as a warning to rampant FUD about to be released about wifi.
I agree, Wifi is dangerous, but only in a computer-security, not a biological integrity, sense.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
not a pretty sight, is it?
the FCC has specifications of radiation density versus frequency that are limits in their rulebooks, limits used to isolate access to radio facilities from microwaves to commercial broadcasters... to ham radio operators burning electrons in the basement. these have been codified by medical research. if you're going for an advanced ham license, you have to study the milliwatts per meter limits, the question occasionally comes up on the test.
so there are 3/4 million americans who know this, not just ten academics in the tower.
where the hell did this whining of Luddites come from, and why wasn't it left there?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Here
Basicaly in the old country they have a government official who is unprepared to admit radio waves, mobile phones etc, are safe; no matter what the evidence.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Mobile phone towers are many, many times more total output. Yes, both transmit in the microwave spectrum, but the 'notch' in the microwave spectrum that resonates water (and thereby heats your food, cooks your brain) is extremely tight (2.45 Ghz). If you're above it or below it, the water molecules in your body (or food) simply won't vibrate/resonate and there's no heating. And yeah, people use 'radiation' all the time to invoke the panic of ionizing nuclear radiation (bad) with electromagnetic radiation (mostly harmless). (Meanwhile these same people go suntan in the name of health, basking in the glow of an unshielded fusion reactor. Yay humanity.) ...People who live by the sword get shot by those who dont.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
I've been using wi-fi for years, and I haven't noticed any brain damage amage amage amage.
stuff |
Exactly. It's just a bunch of "well this could happen and this may happen and bla bla bla."
If I wanted predictions of death and doom I'd ask the crazy guy on the corner.
Frankly the BBC was irresponsible in showing this episode of Panorama. I'm against censorship, but informational programs produced by a tax-payer funded media outlet should not be spouting such paranoid, biased crap as Panorama did last night.
This is arguably the worst case of the BBC scrambling for ratings I've ever witnessed. Never before have I seen them stoop so low to try and raise viewing figures. I was sat watching it waiting for the part where they offer the opposing view of the situation to allow people to make their own minds up, unfortunately however, that never came - it was one sided anti-wifi propaganda all the way through, from start to finish.
About the only attempt at offering an opposing view was the brief mention that the WHO states that there is no known risk of wifi at this time, this brief mentioning was followed by a couple of minutes of slagging off the credibility of the WHO.
I'm no expert when it comes to wifi, radiation and so forth and I'm not claiming that wifi is 100% safe - it may well pose risks. The problem with the program however seemed to be that it's entire argument is based on the premise that there is some other danger to human health from radiation other than the heating effect, and from what I've read elsewhere, there is absolutely no evidence that there is any effect other than the heating effect. I'm sure those with better scientific knowledge may be able to correct me on this if I'm wrong, but if it's true as has been reported by other news outlets (and in fact even by the BBC themselves online) then the majority of the program was fundamentally flawed in it's arguments.
What bothers me most is that we've gone from one lazy teacher looking for an excuse to get time off work claiming that wifi gives him headaches to a national wifi scandal. The worst part is that most reports that refer to the teacher in question who sparked this row ignore the fact that in scientific tests the teacher could neither a) tell whether wifi was on or off and b) now claims he gets these headaches wherever he is, even when not around wifi!
If Wifi does indeed pose a threat then I agree we need to do something, but thus far this seems equivalent to the whole terrorism/think of the children/drugs/computer games make people kill FUD.
My son was diagnosed with leukaemia (AML15 for those interested) on his 1st birthday. My first trip home from the hospital I turned of the wireless router, cordless phones and my mobile/cell. He's now 3, built like an ox and hopefully fixed for good.
My neighbours all have wireless, cordless and mobiles so I eventually turned all mine back on. Two years on and no-one else in the house, including my 2 other boys, have cancer.
Who knows what caused it. Live life to the full, make the kids smile and if low power wireless gadgets worry you, please get out more.
hell, global warming. isn't that that piece of crap those european scientists promote just to anger and disgruntle the whole hummer-driving-air-conditioning-the-whole-place-am erican-folks? yeah, that's FUD at it's best. actually it's all about selling more european, pseudo-eco-friendly products in the states, to ruin the american markets and thus stopping the war against terrorism by an act of countercultural inner corrosion.
So if WiFi can give you cancer, what can a bunch of loose network cables strewn on the floor give you?
It's not the flight I'm afraid of, it's the notebook's landing that's the dealbreaker.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It's odd how the blame essentially everything on Wi-Fi. If only someone would invent a pill that helps the body cope with radiation (like potassium iodide, but for wi-fi) and then sell it to the UK health service at a tremendous markup! Then the children would be safe.
We can even make scary sounding slogans to remind people to take their pills. "Why die for wi-fi? Take PlaceboXL and live!"
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Damn that global conspiracy of nearly 100% of the world's climate scientists! Even the politicians are finally getting in on it, after decades of dedicated FUD spreading by those evil scientists. They must be laughing, laughing I say, all the way to the... err...
From TFS: Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any
Well, Your Honor, we've plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.
Come on, this is obvious.
Radio waves are harmful. We know this. There is no cut-off point at which they suddenly go from harmless to harmful.
However...
We've been living with this stuff for years, and we're not noticably dropping dead in any way related to it. It's in the noise compared to all the other bad things in our lives.
This is approximately item #6589726 on our list of killers. Relax. Have a cigarette.
Er... I got better
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
I would be more worried about The long term exposure to X-Ray and other Radiation coming from CRT TV's that our fat little kids sit infront of all day eating potato chips, rather than Wifi Radiation. Maybe we shoudl do another dory on that.. the TV or the Potato Chips.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
They said that???!?! Hmmm.... I guess I'll have to take them a bit more seriously, then....
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
i think it was some kid whose science fair experiment consisted of showing how stupid most people were about basic science by scaring them about "facts" about dihydrogen monoxide. here is a good spoof site:
Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
-Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
-Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
-Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
-DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
-Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
-Contributes to soil erosion.
-Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
-Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
-Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
-Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
-Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
-Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
-Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
the point is, i suggest someone with more time than me put up a "dangers of 450-750 terahertz radiation"
did you know the following about 450-750 terahertz radiation:
-excessive exposure can cause blindness
-longterm exposure can damage the skin
-used in advanced military equipment
-children are bombarded by it on a daily basis and yet no government agency regulates our exposure
someone wittier than me can probably think up some better ones
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
FRAUD ALERT -- FRAUD ALERT -- FRAUD ALERT
Slashdot editors apparently don't read the comments on the stories they post. Also, Slashdot editors apparently didn't listen in Physics class. This is the fifth time in 3 years that they have fallen for the same fraud, if I count correctly. Some of my other comments:
Max Planck would be very sad about this.
Distinguish between real science and junk science.
Planck's constant is so small that interactions between electromagnetic waves and molecules cannot be chemically specific. The 2,000 MHz radiation from WiFi is felt as heat, a very, very small amount of heat, almost certainly not measurable.
Anyone may have theories. Someone could say, for example, that pigs have started flying and they have been eating the bees. (The bees are dying because of bad management; the organic beekeepers aren't having problems.) The only real science, however, is based on what is already known through experimentation. That requires an understanding of what is known.
"Voodoo Science", by physicist Robert Park, predates the recent health scares about wireless networking (effective radiated power: 100 milliwatts of non-ionising radiation), but talks about a similar health scare about cancer caused by high voltage power lines. In that case, no evidence was ever found to link power lines to leukemia, despite expenditure of billions of dollars on research due to public outcry. (Worth reading this book if you have not already - it's an accessible well-written science book).
Boo hiss to the BBC for encouraging hypochondriacs who think that radiation always means "causes cancer". Perhaps the BBC should turn off it's television transmitters to reduce the "risk" (typical ERP of a UHF TV transmitter: 1 megawatt)? At least that would stop the scare stories reaching Britain's hypochondriacs.
Of course, it doesn't seem overly healthy to me to put any kind of artificial radiation source near your body. But frankly, I think our health is being heart a great deal more by pollution, GMO foods, and the excess of allergens in our diet from things like soy, corn, dairy, and wheat.
This is garbage (probaly...see below). Wi-Fi frequencies are in thr non-ionizing range, and as such will not cause any tissue mutations or changes. The radiation is absorbed by tissues (usually by the water therein) and creates heat -- this is how a microwave oven works. However, unlike an oven, the world is not a resonant cavity so the energy dissipates very quickly and poses no threat other than a heating/cooling cycle.
In the ionizing range the high energy radiation actually punches out nuclear particles and cause aplha or beta decay. This is the cancer causing bad sort of radiation. However, there are no communication technologies that use such high frequencies.
Having said all that, there is still a small collection of researchers who believe that long term exposure to non-ionising radiation is an issue. It is a very difficult thing to study because of the prevalence of EM radiation in the world (try and find a control!). Further, modeling a complex system like a human head -- having dozens of different dielectric and conductive tissues and substances -- is extraodiarily complex.
Most RF scientist have come to a consensus that non-ionising radiation is safe, but there is still some research to be done. But hey, that is just responsible science, no?
- 1970's: hysteria about radiation from microwave ovens
- 1980's: hysteria about radiation from power lines (well, really the late 80's)
- 1990's: hysteria about radiation from cell phones
- 2000's: hysteria about radiation from wi-fi
I know of no imaginable mechanism that allows gigahertz-frequency radiation at low power levels to break chemical bonds. That's what you'd need in order to have microwave be harmful. End of story. The problem is that if you are dealing with a relatively rare disease (like a childhood cancer) it is extremely easy to produce a spurious correlation with almost anything. Since you're dealing with an effect right on the edge of statistical noise, and since a lot of researchers are less than diligent about making sure they aren't fooling themselves (they often "know" there is an effect and so they'll keep poking at the data until they get one). Top it all off with the sad fact that most people (many scientists, nearly all journalists) assume that correlation == cause.The operating frequency of microwave ovens was chosen to be in an unlicensed (ISM) frequency band, that would provide good penetration into foods, and lent itself to the mass production of inexpensive magnetron tubes.
The lowest resonant frequency for a water molecule is 22.235 GHz, or nearly 10X the operating frequency of a microwave oven.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Real scientists pose scientific hypotheses, then propose studies to test those hypotheses, then publish it and only then the media raises alarm.
Some scientists do not do that. Instead they go straight to the media. I have seen some in my field. They were ridiculed privately.
Lawyers that disbehave are disbarred. I wish something like that could be done to scientists.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I wonder how many of these soccer mom's who are worried about wifi "radiation" think nothing of taking their kids on Holiday and exposing them to a far more powerful form of radiation otherwise known as "Sunlight" and unlike wifi prolonged exposure to UV radiation has "proved" to be harmful.
But then it is mentioned on the BBC page about the program, and we know people don't read the articles :-)
Man I've been using wifi since... since... since...
Infiltrated dot Net
Consequently, all packets transmitted through WiFi will now need to have the text, "WiFi Kills".
Unfortunately, in the UK at least, the number of scientifically trained journalists can probably be counted on one of Ben Goldacre's fingers.
Interesting that none of the phone mast posts seem to have remembered the inverse square law - sorry if you did and I missed you - which mean that radiation levels at the ground are a tiny fraction of what you get from the phone. And that nobody has mentioned all the radiation we used to get from TV and radio sets. As I recall, the radiation you get from an old tube superhet set (from the IF) is much more intense than the radiation from WiFi. It is lower frequency, but then the skin effect is less, and as anybody who ever played about with NMR will recall, VHF does things to organic molecules.
We'd better take action now. Let's get rid of all that nasty radioactivity - oops, Madam, there goes your granite kitchen work surfaces and your low-sodium salt. And all the radiation sources beginning with the most intense. So we've now turned off the Sun, mobile phones, radio, TV, electrical generating. We can't use coal (have you looked at what you get in the ash). So we can just sit in the dark and freeze.
As for the leukaemia cases - I have long believed that a far more convincing explanation is exposure to farm chemicals, pesticides, and the new virus and bacterial strains resulting from population movement. It is possible that farming overspray with chemicals which have been subsequently banned is a more probable cause of leukaemia clusters than, say, living near a rural electrical supply line. In the UK, and probably in the US too, the parts of Government which deal with farming tend to be extremely secretive and their decisions are often hard to understand. To my mind, they are far more likely to suppress information about such things than the relatively open parts of Government which deal with non-farming health and safety.
Pining for the fjords
admitting in the brief write-up that there isn't any science behind this?
/. against ANY suggestion that wifi or cell phone signals MAY cause some adverse health effects is sloppy, anti-science thinking.
/. != FUD.
/. is FUD. /. is only anti-FUD in regards to its pet causes.
Maybe they read the article, which points out various scientists who argue that there IS evidence about it.
I've got to say, the ridiculously emotional backlash I see on
I personally don't believe cell phone signals or wifi signals are strong enough to cause health problems. But I'm certainly not going to be arrogant enough to proclaim that there absolutely are no health problems and we shouldn't even look at the problem.
I thought
Please, half of
Actually, 2.45 GHz isn't the maximum of the absorbance for microwaves. If it was, all the energy would be dumped at the surface of food, and there would be virtually no penetration. Water absorbs over a broad spectral range, at least in the liquid phase, where quantised rotational bands can be ignored.
And what you say about the different energies of radiation is mostly true, although EM radiation covers a range that includes UV, x-rays and gamma radiation, which are not very good for you.
It will take years of testing to figure out whether all this darned radiation is affecting our brains...but until then, since when was anyone hurt by a tenfoil hat?!
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
There were very few hard facts in the programme. The part showing the strength of the signal at a phone mast and laptop was very dubious. At no point were you shown what was being measured. All you were shown was a display that showed one value then the other. For all we know, it could have been showing dB levels which have bugger all to do with how strong the signal is.
Also the fact that Wifi signals are 600 times lower than the govt guidelines was glossed over as quickly as possible.
The usual string of scientist who would agree that the sky is pink in order to get on TV were trotted out.
Once upon a time, Panorama was a programme to be taken seriously. Now it is nothing more than a mockery.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
The microwave radiation from the sun is much more powerful than WiFi, so anyone worried about radiation should remain in his mother's basement...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What's the point? Tags no longer appear.
...since most of us have hacked our routers and boost them to well over 100mw. I've got three WRT54GS stations boosted to over 200mw in a WDS configuration to cover approx. 2 acres. One of these routers is in my sons room. Should I move it, or does he run a higher risk watching his after-school snacks cook in the microwave?
The frequency of wireless networks is well below that of light which is not dangerous. It only begins to become dangerous at around the frequency of UV radiation.
The only possibly danger (as with microwave ovens) is a heating effect, but the transmittors are far to weak and it would be relatively easy to prove if they were powerful enough.
The only thing that's frying our kid's brains are their ideas.
There are these "Zen Clocks" you'll see in catalogs for around $99 or more. They are battery powered. So one day, I'm in Asheville, NC and in this shop is one of those clocks for $100 - battery powered. I ask the store owner if he has an AC version, you know a clock that uses an outlet (He was confused by "AC") He says he hears that question a lot and tells folks that the company doesn't make plug in kins because of the dangers of electromagnetic radiation from the plug.
My opinion is that the company is making that cheap plastic clock for less then $5 (my dad is a cost estimator, he gave me the figure) a unit and suckering folks in at $99 and subsequently making a killing. Using the AC clock mechanism would mean another manufacturing line and subsequent tooling costs. And by giving people that line, they keep making the one clock and charging up the ass for it.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I've got two WiFi base stations. The minute I enter my house, I get a headache!
Strange, isn't it?
What's even stranger is that it only started when my girlfriend moved in with me.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I used to think that Panorama != FUD, too, until yesterday.
e p1.shtml (it's way too long and boring to add to this post too).
I was so annoyed after seeing it that spent a couple of hours going through the program rebutting a large number of the points raised and pointing out the inaccuracies (in many cases not inaccuracies in the science but inaccuracies in what the Stewart report actually recommended). The result was sent via the complaints form here http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/make_complaint_st
"Highlights" of the program include a distinct lack of actual measurements throughout - figures such as "high" were used without any context. Also the author of the ICNIRP* guidelines was introduced with the words "He's a controversial character". You couldn't make it up.
* The "international commission on non-ionizing radiation protection", whose radiation levels the Stewart report actually recommended that the UK government use (something else the programme omitted to mention).
No! Heating by microwaves is nothing to do with water bonds. Nothing special about 2.45GHz, except in terms of wireless regulations.
A microwave cooks because the changing electric and magnetic fields that form the microwaves create eddy currents in the food. The food is resistive, so the current causes heating (P=IV=I^2 R)
A perfect conductor (a lump of aluminium/copper) does not heat becuase there is not enough resistance - the effect of the eddy currents is to reflect the wave from the metal.
Dry food does not cook because its resistance is too high - so no eddy currents.
Try a lump of graphite - dry, but resistive and see what happens
Does this remind anyone of the current climate science "debate" where every single reputable phD feels strongly that humans are impacting the environment yet the shrillest and loudest of an incredibly small dissenting crowd (that happens to have powerful motives) are picked to broadcast their ignorance to the masses via the media?
Oh well. We might as well fold on this too, just like we'll fold on global warming and "democracy", let alone human rights. How can this not fail? It is in the conservative powers perceived best interest to make open communication and a free competative marketplace of ideas go away. It can only take power from the government. It will never empower the leaders.
http://iol.unh.edu/
Keep in mind this was an environment where we literally had hundreds of uncertified and untested wireless devices all around us. My job was going to be to read through the draft 802.11 standard, and write perl scripts that tested conformance to the standard. Well, the very first day the first thing they did was hand me a study that basically laid out that it would take at least a decade before any real conclusions could be drawn about the hazards (or non hazards) of wifi and human health. It mentioned that there was a correlation between ocular cancer and the radiation from television, and that it took something like 25 years before this was discovered.
Do I find it scary that we put so much into our environment and expose ourselves to so much that we don't understand? Yes. My big problem is that wifi uses the airwaves, so even someone who does not want anything to do with Wifi is having the air that surrounds them used by wifi. I'm a libertarian, and I consider the commons (earth, oceans, space, air, nature basically) to be something that each of us has equal rights to. I see this as the tragedy of the commons (read the book if you're unfamiliar). I would at least like to be able to tax those that use my air for purposes that I don't approve of, or have some kind of options. Right now, the FCC just decides using a decision making process that I find repugnant.
I see the potential health problem of wifi to be a symptom of a much greater problem.
http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/papers/gold sworthy_bio_weak_em_07.pdf
It's time to break out the lead clothing line to shield our bodies.
Facts are useless, they can be used to prove anything.
Do you think that there are crests and troughs of the multitude of signals out there that converge in certain locations, that may be many magnitudes more harmful then the signals individually?
You will die of heart disease, lung cancer from (passive) smoking, intestinal cancer from bad eating, prostate cancer from pretty much anything (only a concern for about 50% of the population/95% of slashdot readers), a car/plane/boat accident or some other freak thing looooong before mobile phones or WLAN get you. Hell, it's more likely that you choke on your goddamn mobile, using it while driving.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
What a waste of money. Tabloid TV, that's all it is. I used to look up to the BBC as a last bastion of worth-a-shit television in the face of garbage like ITV News. I can't be sure whether it's changed all that much or if I was just wrong in the first place, but I'm 100% sure that it's terrible now.
For the last few weeks, on both national and local news, the BBC has droned on and on about some little girl that went missing in Portugal. This is despite the fact that absolutely nothing newsworthy has happened there since the actual event itself. "Her parents are sad", "the police are looking for the girl", "somebody saw a girl" - all headline news according to the BBC, doubly so if you live in the north west. And has anyone seen the way they talk about the Labour Party lately? Personally, I think they fucking suck, but I'm not so insecure that I need the newsreader to reinforce my faith in this opinion. If that was the kind of news I wanted, I'd be watching FOX News.
It's like this all the time. Panorama is just the centre-piece. Every show has to have some kind of angle or agenda. Obviously, reporting their findings neutrally and objectively would be considered "boring" by too many people, so it's sensationalist garbage all round.
When I even bother with the TV these days, the only two sources of news I can bear are Euronews and France24, precisely because they just tell me what they know and then stop.
I thought /. != FUD.
You thought wrong. Particularly when it comes to anything with the potential for political ramifications, \. = FUD.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
That's why the FCC gave it to everyone as a free-for-all frequency range to use for anything and everything that is not intended for any critical usage/purpose. But ironically, users of 802.11b/g networking devices seem to keep *thinking* that their use of such devices is mission critical important. Fools, they are. 802.11b/g networking is a toy. It's intended for convenience and entertainment purposes, not mission critical data communications. The whole computer networking world has been sold a "bill of goods" with 2.4GHz wireless devices. PT Barnum would be proud.
There is good news on the horizon.... 802.16 WiMax technology using other segments of the RF spectrum in the near future will begin to put things right WRT wireless data networking. Now if only the FCC would give us the 960MHz - 1060MHz one hundred MHz slice of the lower segment of what's now allocated to ancient, legacy aviation radio/navigation, that would be an ideal spectrum for wireless data transmission. All the old analog radar systems used by the national aerospace system (1080MHz) need to go away anyway and be replaced by modern ADS-B digital systems where every aircraft in the sky has an GPS system on board that transmits its precise location, altitude, airspeed, and directional vectors. Such a system could make mid-air collisions a thing of the past too.
The topic here is not just the story. The topic is the fact that the linked story is FUD. It should be pretty clear from the summary, but I guess it could have been clearer.
It's been posted here so that the Slashdot community can iron out the details, and decide how much truth there is to the story, using facts and figures. That's the interesting part.
I did a little research while I was in college for using focused microwaves to create a "hot spot" in high speed flow and I found that water responds really really well in the 800MHz to 1 GHz microwave frequency range. You'd get the most rotation of the molecule on the rising edge of the wave at those frequencies (rotates back on the falling edge), hence the maximum friction between the molecules and maximum heat. Higher than that and the water doesn't have enough time to move before the wave is past it.
Microwave ovens are higher than that because of the loss of frequency as the waves penetrate the material, so they gradually get better at heating as the wave passes through whatever you're cooking. In this way, it will cook the middle instead of just burning the outside.
So look at it like this: If that old 900 MHz telephone didn't give you a surface burn (and it would have, had it been powerful enough) there's no reason to worry about a 2.4GHz source such as wifi, they don't operate on a vastly increased power output.
from one of our cellphone providers. They put up a new mast with a relay station.
Not a week later, they received a very angry letter from the locales, complaining about severe headaches and nausea in the vicinity of the mast, asking in no uncertain terms that this mast has to go or else...
Their (public) reply: "Good grief, imagine what it's gonna be like when we actually have power there to turn it on!"
In other words, stop hyping yourself into a frenzy. You're constantly being bombarded by EM emissions from radio, tv broadcasts, cellphones, electronic wiring and even cosmic radiation (ya know, that yellow, hot ball in the big blue room...), magnitudes stronger than anything WiFi could even remotely produce, even if it were allowed to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hasn't it been found that, due to the weakness of the signals, and the usual distance of the emitter to your head, you catch about one million times less microwaves with your brain than with cell phones? And that cell phones do not cause cancer?
You just got troll'd!
Some links relevant to the program...
m ber_2004/23-2_mobile_phones-hallberg.pdf
3 45510209JQ.pdf
e ws/2007/04/23/nwifi23.xml
The Stewart Report summary:
http://www.iegmp.org.uk/report/summary.htm
(there's a link to the full text there too)
ICNIRP Publications
http://www.icnirp.de/pubEMF.htm
Karolinska Institutet:
http://ki.se/ki/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=130&l=en
Long-Term Sickness and Mobile Phone Use:
http://www.acnem.org/journal/pdf_files/23-2-septe
PDF; a paper co-authored by Olle Johannson. It wasn't directly mentioned on the program but I guess has informed his views.
Electrohypersensitivity: State-of-the-Art of a Functional Impairment:
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/G78U4
PDF; authored by Olle Johannson.
Powerwatch:
http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/
The telegraph article that seemed to be the source of the "teachers demand no wifi" section of the program:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
This isn't supposed to be an unbiased list of views; it's just links relevant to the program (which in my view, wasn't unbiased). Anyway - read, look for more, and make your own mind up.
(posted AC; I don't need the Karma)
A surrealist British comedy show from the 1990s pretty much nailed these alarmist TV graphics. Called Brasseye, their animal rights special featured this classic homage to bad statistics and meaningless graphics:
1 0337503781&q=brasseye&hl=en
"'If you plot "number of animals abused" against "what makes people cruel" versus "intelligence of either party", the pattern is so unreadable you might as well draw in a chain of fox heads on sticks. And if you do that, an interesting thing happens: the word "cruel" starts to flash...""
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-19161265
5 minutes and 38 seconds in, to see it in its original glory.
Oblig. citation...
/ Documents/bulletins/oet56/oet56e4.pdf
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology
see page 15 for limits on acceptable uncontrolled exposure in the relevant frequency range (1 mW/ cm^2).
Guy Kewney there nailed it more coherently than I did in my complaint to the BBC. I guess that's why he's a journalist and I'm not.
Maybe it's time for http://www.theregister.tv/?
The FUD seems to be having an effect though. Last week I could pick up about eight different networks. It seems that after the programme went out, six of those network owners have switched off their routers.
Well I don't think programs that only exist to scare you are worthwhile. I've never seen a Panorama program that wasn't a scare-fest. When you watch one on a topic you know nothing about the scientists seem well informed and the threats seem genuine. It's only when you watch a Panorama program on a topic you're remotely familiar with that you realize what nonsense it is.
One of them was about the dangers of black holes. They'll boil the oceans, suck the life right off the planet, there's a super massive one at the center of our galaxy, they feed and then they stay silent, drifting through space until WHAM. Lots of sound bytes of scientists saying "it's only a matter of time", "you can't see them, but we know they're there", "we have no idea how many there are", etc. In only 5 billion years our galaxy will collide with another one, and we might drift right into that galaxy's super massive black hole, etc, etc.
It's that sort of programming, and if they convince laypeople that more money needs to be spent on researching this than is really necessary it only does damage.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Seriously, I'm really getting annoyed with use of the generalized word "scientist", in media, and especially news reports. Every field has specialties. You wouldn't care so much about what a civil engineer has to say about computer hardware design. And likewise, scientists aren't all omnicient about all disciplines of science. So we really need to do away with such a generic label.
You want a scientific reason why WiFi is harmless? How bout the fact that more radiation is emitted from a 60W light bulb than a 100mW AP.
That Scientific enough? It's not just that there is no science to back up harmful WiFi Theories, It's that their is evidence to the contrary.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
They got it all wrong. The problem isn't with WiFi, the problem is when the signal carries the kill bit, passing through your body and causing extreme cellular damage. That's why most of the time the studies show up nothing.
Sounds like a case for Mythbusters.
"the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme"
Wait, I thought the show was Slashdot's new darling after one of their interviewers got into a shouting match with someone from the Church of Scientology.
This post could, with a minimum of effort, be rewritten to sound exactly like a right wing diatribe against the alleged dangers of global warming. The author, exactly like the oil companies, dismisses the claims against WiFi because he himself likes WiFi. I don't have any serious doubt that the case against global warming is much stronger, but posts like these strike me as very hypocritical. When we rail against DRM or global warming, we should be willing to live by the same principles as we ask of others.
Digital Music (CD's and MP3 especially) are a source of ear cancer.
Come On !
"I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary." Through the looking glass and what
The news in the UK worries and whines about everything- global warming, genetically enhanced food, cell phone radiation, etc. Sounds like an island of sissies to me. Mod me down you thin-skinned Brits!
This is the logic:
If you get too close to a fire you will get burned. Fire is dangerous, and children have thinner, skin so they burn easier. We must stop using fire!
I am sick of the media exploiting children to get an emotional response out of their audience.
Have the BEEB ever actually been impartial? Probably at first, but now this is the typical programming we have to deal with. Rating grabbing nonsense from a corporation desperate to keep its viewing figures up. Oh my god, my brain just started to leak out my ears... I mean seriouslly, I have wi-fi on my mobile, in my car, I have a router in my house, a wii, two laptops and my 360 to name all I can remember off the top of my head, though my memory may be off because of all the deadly raiation... Get off it folks, it's not dangerous, I should know! Honest... I'm perfectly fine... *dribbles*
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
...if you throw them hard enough. History repeats itself. In the US at least, a scare from the last decade panicked people into switching to bird seed to throw at weddings. The story was that birds would eat dry rice, then when they took a drink at the next birdbath - the rice would swell up and magically kill them. One local TV station got the chief ornithologist from some college and asked them if rice could kill birds. He said yes. Take a 50lb bag of rice and drop it on a bird.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I suppose your skull could act as a resonant cavity. Let's say your skull is 9 inches deep and 7 inches wide. For a quarter wavelength that would correspond to a frequency range of 300 to 400 MHz. Even a baby's skull 3-6 inches, 560-900 MHz.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
There is no conclusive evidence that cell phone radiation does harm as has been stated. First I'll start by clearing up a common misconception about "radiation." When hearing "radiation" most people think of the bad stuff that we've been taught to stay away from (the stuff that comes out of nuclear reactors and a-bombs). Well, electromagnetic radiation comes in many different forms from radio frequency waves to visible light to microwaves to x-rays to gamma rays etc... The radiation that we really need to be worried about is any type of ionizing radiation. What I mean by ionizing radiation is any wave (or particle) that have enough energy to penetrate your skin cells and and have enough energy to knock electrons off of atoms (making them ions--hence "ionizing radiation"). Gamma wave radiation is the highest energy radiation can easily knock electrons off atoms. Additionally, the two other forms of ionizing radiation that's concerning is beta radiation (high energy electrons), and alpha radiation (high energy out helium nuclei (just the protons and neutrons, no electrons)). Now, x-rays can also be ionizing radiation and they are particularly dangerous as well. Ionizing radiation is able to split DNA in your cell and change it, causing a cancerous/tumorous cell to form. The new cell may be able to replicate and since it is not a normal cell, there's a good chance it will replicate at a greater rate than normal cells. Microwave radiation though is in the non-ionizing spectrum (it is lower frequency and thus lower energy). It can not split cell DNA to cause cancer. Though there may be a way that it can cause cancer than I'm unaware of. All electromagnetic radiation can cause heating of materials. Microwave ovens use a very high intensity source of microwave radiation to heat your food (or anything that can absorb 2.4ghz radiation). Now, this large amount of heat can make cancer-causing materials in plastics to drip into your food (so don't cover your food with plastic wrap). But cell phones, they have a very small intensity compared to the mw-oven so that they do not cause very much heating at all. Perhaps the small heating by cell phones does actually cause some kind of harm to us, but that's very doubtful because we are constantly bombarded with many, many forms of electromagnetic radiation all the time. Hopefully this was informative as that was the intention.
I have been plagued for years with an eerie knowledge of when my TV is on, even with no signal. It manifests itself as a high pitched noise that only I can hear, and I can tell with 100% accuracy when the TV is on or off.
It's not just you, it's anyone with good hearing.
That would be because the TV's horizontal deflection coil (part of the deflection yoke around the neck of the picture tube), and the flyback coil (part of the horizontal deflection circuitry that makes the high voltage for the picture tube's second anode) are operated at a frequency that many people (not just you) can hear. As people age they tend to loose hearing sensitivity at higher frequencies earlier - this is why many people cannot hear the TV's horizontal scan frequency; on the other hand, many other people have really good hearing and can indeed hear it.
No wacky pseudo science needed - it's just sound.
But now that I know there are others like me, we can form a support group and get recognition for our disability - maybe even get Medicaid compensation.
Medicaid compensation for having really good hearing? Sign me up!
Your results may give good heating under your conditions, but are not at the maximum absorbance. Unless you are observing conduction effects in solution, the maximum absorption will occur around 10GHz.
Getting the most rotation on the molecule does not cause the greatest heating. The key factor is the response time of a molecule to rotate. If the field changes too quickly for the dipole to align at all, they do not move and there is no heating effect. If the field changes slowly, the dipoles can stay in the lowest energy state - aligned with the field, and again there is no heating. Heating occurs where the oscillations in the EM field are of the same order of magnitude as the time for the dipoles to align. As such, they exhibit a phase lag where they are not aligned with the field, and consequently heating occurs as they are never in their lowest energy state.
Microwave ovens act as multimode cavities, and the microwave radiation is reflected through the food many times. The centre of a material in a microwave field can be hotter due to radiative losses at the surface. The radiation will not change in frequency as it passes through the sample, and the bulk is heated evenly (assuming penetration depth is large compared to the materials dimesnions).
The key thing is that the power given out by WiFi transmitters is tiny, and the energy of a microwave photon is tiny. Realistically, the UV radiation given out by the sun is much more likely to kill kiddies than the microwave radiation given out by WiFi.
"Except, you know...the nuclear radiation that is RF radiation...which is all of it."
So alpha and beta radiation are what kind of RF radiation?
> the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested
> wireless networking might be damaging our health.
I assure you, your sedentary livestyle is lopping far more years off the end of your life than this. Hell, more than this and cigarette smoking (direct, to say nothing of passive.)
> Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any
Hell, Johnny Mnemonic demonstrated this was a possibility! Come on, one of these has gotta "stick"! There's books to be sold, and shows to be talking heads on!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Let's face it: the watermelon left won't be satisfied until we're living at the subsistence levels that obtained around 1350, or thereabouts. WiFi is just another guilt to beat us over the head. Along with cars, cows, and cell phones.
We. Not them.
If they get their way, ee'll be hauling ploughs, shoveling cowshit from barns, milking by hand, dying from brucellosis, planting and harvesting roots by hand, never traveling more than five miles from the place of our birth, etc.
All so they don't have to endure any humidity as they saunter from their limos to their G5s, experience an "all circuits busy" message on their phones, or share the rod with the less-enlightened.
Makes me want to reach for my pitchfork, it does.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
This MUST be an Intel/Microsoft attack on OLPC as the OLPC makes extensive use of wireless mesh networking and is designed for kids. The anti-OLPC crowd will frequently refer back to this BBC story in the next few years challenging the use of wireless networks for education. They could even go so far as to say that the 1st world is intentionally harming kids in the 3rd world.
How many people are killed or maimed every year in accidents involving motor vehicles?
Is there a concerted effort to ban them? (The government certainly want to make it more expensive to drive a car, introducing new stealth taxes here and there to the point where it won't be long before some people will be forced to give up their jobs; but they aren't doing anything to give people an alternative such as making public transport cheaper or forcing the adoption of flexible working hours.)
We need more data points and proper double-blind trials before any conclusions can be drawn. Even then, the worst outcome is likely to be that some individuals experience a sort of allergic reaction. Proper understanding of the response mechanisms may well enable some sort of drug treatment, or even a surgical procedure for permanent desensitisation.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Dihydrogen Monoxide-related deaths each year number in the Millions! It is a contaminant found in virtually every part of the world, from the smog above major American cities to the seemingly pristine arctic wastelands. It's been very strongly linked to Cancer, Alzheimer's disease and just about every other major killer. Traces of DHMO contamination have been found in just about all foods and food additives, even those grown under the strictest "organic" guidelines. Nuclear power plants routinely release metric tons of the stuff into the atmosphere.
And yet the government does NOTHING!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
1) The wavelength of the radiation is significant in the damage it *might* cause. WiFi wavelength is a lot shorter than 60W globes. 2) Long term exposure to short length radiation is something that isn't thoroughly explored. 3) WiFi is not dissimilar to microwaves in terms of wavelength. Would you put an active microwave magnetron next to your brain for extended periods of time? Any wavelength, of sufficient power, will have a negative impact on humans. Just consider UV light. The question is whether mobile devices have sufficient power for negative impact. I am convinced that no study has sufficiently answered this question in the long term. I for one, will refuse to have mobile devices next to my reproductive organs until a few more decades of evidence has stacked up in favour of no harm.
is simple.
"C'mon freedom cage, roll me to safety!" - Philip J. Fry
Wifi uses frequencies of 2.5 GHz to 5 GHz, and power levels of transmissions are typically around 0.1 W.
However there is another technology also used in schools that emits electromagnetic radiation and is potentially more dangerous, because:
These facts suggest to me that this other technology is potentially a lot more harmful to health than wifi might be (although having said that it is entirely possible that neither technology poses a significant harm to health), and that consequently if wifi is to be investigated as a risk to health, this other technology should be investigated much more rigourously.
The name of this other technology? light bulbs.
Yeah, all those climatologists (the overwhelming majority, that is) are in fact Euro-agents out to trash the American economy!
(A pity there isn't a way to denote sarcasm, or that the parent is an absurd moron).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sorry, no. Wifi's wavelength is much longer than any lightbulb. Something like 12cm for the most commonly-used band, as compared to 400 to 700 nm for visible light. That's a few hundred thousand times longer.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
Ahhh..the first graduates of the AGSM (Al Gore School of Misinformation) start the next wave of political brainwashing...
Y'know, I dislike people like you. Science is NOT a religion, whatever you might make of it. Entire fields have been fundamentally wrong about their area of study before, and will be again. Given that the modern anthropogenic global warming schema is being driven mainly by political funding it is highly possible such is the case here, especially since it's such a young science. Of course, getting the religious fanatics to admit this is next to impossible, and rather disconcerting. Especially given the amount of ostracization that anyone who begins to speak out about the matter experiences.
#define TINFOIL_HAT_MODE
Who benefits from scaring consumers about wifi? The companies that run the wire into your house. WiMAX and
other wireless ultra high speed tech would be easier to deploy for newcomers, since they only need to be within range to supply the last 10 yards(metres, for you metircal types). The Telcos and cable guys all have invested in the wire to your house.
#undef TINFOIL_HAT_MODE
Yes. Although I doubt the skull absorbing it is the problem; rather, thinner skulls would absorb *less* radiation and allow more *through* to the soft tissues.
Yes, it's quite similar.
Energy falls with the square of the distance. Yes, they're more powerful, but they also cover a much larger range. So if you were standing right next to one, it's probably stronger than your typical wifi, but at normal range, they're probably more compareable in strength.
Yes.
Basically, this is something that seems like it could be a problem, but there's no evidence of it.
Microwaves rely on the concept of standing waves to operate. If you look on the back of the back of a given microwave, it should list its specific frequency. Crunch that by the speed of light, you get a wavelength. Measure the microwave and, what do you know, it's an even multiple. In fact you'll find that if you take a magnetron out of a microwave, it doesn't really do much. Mythbusters tried just that and with 4 magnetrons, couldn't get a glass of water to boil. No surprise, without the standing waves, they just are as effectual as you might imagine.
That's not to say I'd want to stand around one, but the difference is even bigger than the wattage would imply.
FYI, I know perfectly well how science operates. I was not making any personal judgement on whether global warming is real, caused by human activity, or by the flying spaghetti monster.
I was attacking the position (hopefully with a little humour) that global warming is all FUD. That position seems untenable; that a large majority of the world's scientists would all conspire to promote falsehood. They may be entirely wrong, but the majority are in broad agreement.
Given that the consequences of not acting on this information may be disastrous, the precautionary principle suggests that we listen to them. Taken to its logical extreme, you would be advocating never acting on any scientific advice, as it *might* be wrong.
and the whole time i've been trying to get more EM from my wifi...
Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation?
This is very easy to answer. Look at someone's skull. If it does not look shiny like a mirror then it is absorbing visible light which is EM radiation. If you really want to escape EM radiation then it will take some effort. You can't just go into a dark room: rooms are dark only because the black body radiation spectrum of room-temperature objects peaks in the infrared part of the EM spectrum which we cannot see.
To truly escape EM radiation you would need to be cooled to absolute zero (-273C). I think it is safe to say that this will almost certainly prevent you dying from cancer.
yes, science costs money and money has a tendency to influence people.
but it is a gross exaggeration to say that funders of research consistently have a specific result they would like to be produced. many funders, for example those who hope to make money by engineering things using the products of research, or those who want treatments found for diseases (e.g. groups set up by parents of autistic children) are actually just interested in truth, because they have an interest in the truth being found.
moreover, even in cases in which funders are looking for some skewed result, it is still going too far to say that scientists will consistently produce bogus results. yes, you can expect that to be the case with powerful funders who have the resources and ingenuity to find the right scientists who will produce the right results. but there are also a hell of a lot of scientists out there who, because of their training in scientific values, are likely to feel that a professional code of practice stands in the way, and either get funding from somewhere else, or stand by their results.
that is, in fact, why science is in general so successful. if it were all built on people making things up that people want to hear (as charlatan postmoderns influenced by dodgy arguments by people like bruno latour would have us believe), then there would be no particle accelerators, no aeroplanes, no polio vaccine, no computers, etc etc.
in other words, the proof is in the pudding. the pudding isn't perfect--it is, after all, a human product--but it IS pudding, and there's plenty of it.
I did love the part where they measure the 'radiation' 100m from the cell phone tower, and then right at the laptop (did I mention they had to invoke a download?), and then exclaim that it was 3 times higher... inverse square law anybody? The presenter probably wouldn't have a clue what that means.
:P) and then there is tin foil being cautious.
There is being cautious (not building schools next to highways/railway tracks/sex shops
Personally I say make it a mandate that all classrooms be RF shielded, lets see the little cunts try and text now.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
I agree with you on this, you make a valid point.
I think the problem here is that the boy has been crying wolf for too long, and this has always been a place that picks up on these sorts of cries... so we have heard it every single time. Is it any wonder we just yawn and dismiss it?
I would like as much as anything to give every issue a credible review of the real evidence. However, the fact is, we can't. Theres too much stuff out there, too many claims. We often have to go with what we know from the past rather than engaging every new bit of news with unbiased eyes.
The same will happen the next time someone claims to have invented a novel method for cold fusion.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Expect the USA to counter with "Freedom Packets"
Not my kids. Their skulls are incredibly thick and I haven't noticed them absorb anything directed at them.
If people are given real information about the technology their using (vs. just the social benefits), we would be spending more time trying to regulate (not cure) cancer or mental 'illness' than these studies. The science does say that EM is describe via power laws and energy. And the energy is pretty small, near natural occurring EM. It is not an absolute answer that cellphones and WiFi is good or bad.
If our bodies can't handle (i.e. cell repair) EM at that level, then we got bigger problems: think solar flares and natural radiation spikes.
what about cordless phones?
bluetooth?
PLL peripherals?
television?
terrestrial radio?
government radio?
solar flares?
gamma ray bursts from the depths of space?
They're using their grammar skills there.
yes, you can expect that to be the case with powerful funders who have the resources and ingenuity to find the right scientists who will produce the right results. but there are also a hell of a lot of scientists out there who, because of their training in scientific values, are likely to feel that a professional code of practice stands in the way, and either get funding from somewhere else, or stand by their results.
Did you even read what you wrote?
You wrote that the people with the most money only hire the scientists that will give them the results they want, and the scientists who only publish the truth don't get that money.
paintball
Look at Planck's constant. Spectroscopy is normally used with wavelengths that have 100,000 times the energy of the 2,000 MHz WiFi signals.
Visible light can be very efficient at promoting chemical reactions, provided that there is a lot of energy of a single wavelength, a situation that occurs only with lasers.
Also, there is the difficulty of coupling. The wavelength of 2,000 MHz electromagnetic signals is not able to couple very well to chemical processes, because it is so long.
So, 2,000 MHz is just heat, and WiFi doesn't use powerful signals. The signals are omni-directional, too, so the energy density is very, very low about 1 meter from the antenna.
Wifi emits radiation in the 2.4 GHz band at a maximum of +30dBm. Higher frequency radition is generally more damaging. So a device that emitted +30dBm of radiation in the 400-800 THz band would be more hazardous than wifi. But such devices are sold in hardware and grocery stores worldwide: 20W incandescent light bulbs. You can tell they're worse than wifi because they actually do glow without any special effects.
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Thank you for your rational viewpoint. I suspected there wasn't much point in posting in this thread, since most of the modded-up posts seem to be shrill demands for the BBC to apologise for having the audacity to broadcast something contrary to their own views.
....
We really don't need a balanced viewpoint on wifi - it is overwhelmingly accepted and is being rolled out at great speed in just about every Western country, in the form of wifi hotspots and wifi routers.
Doesn't anybody want to ask "Could we be making a mistake"? Now I understand that most slashdot posters are very much in love with their wifi and their cellphones and all the gadgets that use this technology, but should this really make you want to angrily dismiss any evidence that might suggest that wifi is not safe for everybody?
I imagine that the lobbyists for the cellphone companies must be very pleased that the slashdot groupthink is siding with them almost entirely. Which powerful organisations are there to argue the case that cellphones and wifi might be causing as-yet unknown damage to the human brain?
Ignore me or mod me down, hurray for the status quo
If this is all true ( which I don't believe ). Then I'm giving my neighbors cancer and they don't even know it! Just wait till they're on their death bed, and I tell them it was me who gave them cancer! HA HA HA!
Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!
If you're talking about cell towers, the maximum radiated wattage is a mere 16 Watts. For most "normal" WiFi, the max is about 100mW, or 0.1W. In reality, it may be a mere 28mW or 0.028W (Linksys, for example).
So, on one hand, 16W (cell) vs 0.028W (WiFi) is quite the difference.
However, the distance falls off in a square inverse fashion. If you're 1M away, you get 100 times the power as if you're 10M away, so as for how much power you get, it's all relative to distance.
If you are 1M from your Linksys and 10Km from a cell tower, I'd bet the cell tower "loses" (lay of land, atmosphere, and walls in home may change things, of course). If you're on the other side of concrete from your Linksys, in that scenario, the cell tower may "win".
If your Linksys or cell tower were VHF, instead of the high-frequency UHF that they both are, skin "absorption" might be quite different.
Everytime you use a technology, there is a risk associated with it. There are dangers everywhere in life today. The only way to be safe from dangers of modern technology would be to go back to the stone age. Cars are awesome!, but we should stop using them cuz a lot of people die due to car accidents every year. Why do we still use them? i wonder. It has not even been proven that WiFi is bad for health and people are already afraid of 'em. I don't think anybody is afraid when they turn the key in their cars. Maybe BBC should show a program on road accidents instead of something soo less dangerous.
I missed the program, but I've had an unrelated reason to make a complaint about the BBC before, and did so via that site. It basically got ignored, you're probably better off complaining to Ofcom as it seems that the Beeb have violated section 5 of the Broadcasting code. Unfortunately, my complaint was about the BBC online, so that avenue wasn't open to me.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
A supermassive black hole? OMGOMG! That would really SUCK!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I, and the other neighborhood kids, used to play on the big green transformer box in the next-door neighbor's front yard. We sat on it all the time when we were outside, playing. Nobody once told us back then that we were being exposed to "dangerous" radiation. There were 6 of us, and among the group, there has been no cancer, and all of the children born to this group have been perfectly normal.
I recommend this openbook, Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields (1997). Given its age, it doesn't address modern wireless, but it provides good aggregate information from a broad array of studies. The upshot is that:
1.) Yes, high tension power lines can cause leukemia... very rarely.
2.) Household EMFs, however, don't.
3.) At extremely high doses, there is some cellular damage -- but not genetic.
4.) High-dose EMF + carcinogens cause breast cancer in animals, but EMF alone does not otherwise seem to cause cancer in animals.
5.) High-dose EMF causes some behavioral abnormalities in animals.
So, there you have it. Weird.
By the way, if you missed it, you should be able to catch it view the BBC's Panorama page:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/programmes/panorama/defau
And also (via a Google Video link) for now at least from Ben Goldacre's blog:
http://www.badscience.net/
No amount of funding is too much for the issue of finding black holes. I still have 17 socks and a car key unaccounted for.
They are in your dryer. Really.
A couple of years ago, getting ready to toss out a busted dryer, I took it apart to salvage the motor. Inside the box, but outside the drum, was a double handful of single socks, and about $4 in change and bills.
Sadly, you don't know what the hell you're talking about, although you do apparently know a few big words like "mutagen" you apparently know nothing about the EM spectrum or nuclear radiation.
> Except, you know...the nuclear radiation that is RF radiation...which is all of it.
RF refers to EM radiation below infrared. Only gamma rays (high energy photons) are EM radiation. Alpha particles are helium nuclei (2 protons + 2 neutrons, no electrons) while beta particles are electrons. Please learn your quantum mechanics, you're badly deficient.
> What about UV? That causes mutations too. Does that have as much energy as gamma (the answer:
> not if the amplitude is the same)? This is just crap. Any kind of radiation can have three
> effects on cells:
> 1) It gets absorbed and dissipated before coming into contact with living cells
> 2) It gets absorbed by cells and damages them
> 3) It gets absorbed by cells and destroys them
I assume you mean luminance (number of photons released). Anyhow, the amount of energy in a photon is proportional to frequency (E = h/f, where E is the energy of the photon, h is Planck's constant, and f is the frequency), so anything below UV simply cannot eject an electron and thus, it's not ionizing. In other words, no matter how strong the source, microwaves will never ionize atoms. This is important because this ionization is how radiation can mutate your DNA and it's why it's so harmful. UV is pretty weak, that's why it only causes skin cancers (although these cancers can later spread biologically, without further UV damage). X-Rays can go through most of your body and cause internal damage. Low energy EM radiation like infrared light can't do much more than warm you, and you'd feel that happening.
Anyhow, if you knew your EM spectrum, UV rays are below gamma rays. UV and up are the only things worth worrying about. With anything else, you'd feel yourself overheating and get away if it were actually bright enough to do anything. As is, the low power wi-fi gear is probably less dangerous than your average light bulb.
What am I trying to say? Different parts of the EM spectrum have VERY different dangers. There's NOTHING that low energy photons can do but heat you up. Thanks to the photoelectric effect & QM, they CANNOT ionize anything, no matter how bright your source is. They just don't have the energy to eject photons because the energy of the photon is proportional to its frequency. So about all they can do is heat you up, and you can feel heat quite normally, so you should quickly realize it if that's a problem. Okay, I guess if you look into lasers or something, you can also blind yourself, but again, it's nothing you can't avoid with common sense and it's not the sort of thing that would happen unnoticed.
Remember! A 60 W light bulb is producing 20x as much EM radiation (light) as a 3 W commercial base station, and the photons emitted have more energy (all light is of higher frequency than RF)! So unless you get freaked out by light bulbs, you can relax already.
And be more suspicious of people throwing around "radiation" as a scare word with respect to RF. It's nothing like nuclear radiation, and even that isn't scary if you understand the dangers and know how to properly limit your exposure.
Verified:
With radio waves, wavelength * frequency = speed of light, thus frequency = speed of light / wavelength
The speed of light is 299792458 meters/second
1 Hz = 1/second
For wifi, .12 meters (with a resolution of 2 significant digits);
frequency = 2.4 GHz or 2400000000 Hz (with a resolution of 2 significant digits);
wavelength = 12 cm or
thus, 299792458 / .12 = 2498270483.333333333 or 2.4 GHz
For red light (the largest wavelength of visible light [most incandescent bulbs are yellow]), .00000065 meters (with a resolution of 2 significant digits);
frequency = 460 PHz (Peta = 10^15) or 460000000000000 Hz (with a resolution of 2 significant digits);
wavelength = 650 nm or
thus, 299792458 / .00000065 = 461219166153846.153846154
Do not misunderstand, however, the conclusion to which this leads.
Microwave radio frequencies give a wavelength of 1mm to 10cm, so the power level is a significant factor which distinguishes wifi from dangerous radiation.
It doesn't take much power to transmit data. It takes a lot of power to cook a turkey.
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
WiFi is in the GHz frequency range, visible light is in the hundreds of THz frequency range. Electromagnetic radiation wavelength is the speed of light (in metres per second) divided by the frequency (in Hertz, which is cycles per second). An important property should be obvious: as frequency increases, wavelength decreases. If one increases the frequency thousands of times (from GHz to THz), one decreases the wavelength thousands of times too. In this case we are decreasing the wavelength hundreds of thousands of times between the microwaves used by the WiFi gear and the visible light used by the pigments in our retinas.
So, you are exactly backwards on point (1).
Your point (2) follows from point (1). Even if you say that long term exposure to microwave frequency is not well studied or understood, you are wrong. There is a well-defined power law involving resonant frequencies (atomic and molecular, especially the common body molecules H2O, O2, CO2, CH3, and all of the atoms in CHNOPS). The power law of course is calculated as effective received power, which falls off with at least the square of distance from the transmitter. Animal tissues do not make good resonant cavities nor GHz-range antennas, which is why hundreds of watts are required for cooking in a microwave oven, and microwave ovens are small in order to keep the distance between transmitter and animal tissue small (avoiding the inverse square law).
Ok, let's consider UV light. Harmful doses (cataracts!) are on the order of 50 watts per square metre. Serious sunburn takes on the order of 100 W/m^2. This requires being fairly close to a transmitter that emits hundreds of watts worth of energy. How close does one have to be to a transmitter that emits a couple of milliwatts? LEDs often emit way more optical power that. Do they burn you when you touch them? How about if you leave your finger on one a long time?
Don't worry, your sperm aren't likely to be in a position to fertilize anything between now and the time you die, anyway.
1) Magnatrons typically operate at >600W into a cavity, not the 1W open-air patterns that WiFi devices operate at.
2) Microwaves are dangerous because they cause hydrogen to oscillate, which heats up wet things. The much shorter wifi and longer cell phone radio waves do not interact readily with flesh -- they pass through it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Secondary Obligatory Citation...
/ Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65.pdf
/ Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65c.pdf
Transmitters of less than 7 W are generally excluded from the acceptable exposure limit guidelines, because they are not generally capable of whole body heating, even though certain handheld devices might produce localized effects that exceed the limits. These low-power and portable device are usually rated by "Specific Absorption Rate (SAR)". I think Wi-Fi devices should probably fall into this category, especially since notebook computers can easily be within the 20 cm proximity limit.
Also check out OET Bulletin 65, "Evaluating Compliance With FCC Guidelines for Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields":
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology
and Supplement C to same:
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology
I always put on my tin foil hat before turning on my wireless.
(Disclaimer: This is an edited repost from this comment here: #14784373
Before people go about shouting 'crackpots' again:
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.
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 connection to the cell network for communication.
On it goes:
My father was a 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 the swedish TCO norms.
I'm not saying that people using Wireless are going to quickly die a painfull death. There are a ton of carcinogenics around us that are often far more dangerous that elektro-smog (as it is called in germany), but effects are there, can be measured and it's absolutely not unlikely that they can have a long-term effect on our health.
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 connectivity without a tradeoff. Anyone who believes that is a crackpot himself.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And from this I can correlate that the reason I have 5 keys for which I have no idea what use, there must be the existence of as yet undiscovered "white holes".
Tertiary Obligatory Citation...
/ Documents/bulletins/oet63/oet63rev.pdf
and, Part 15 Spread Spectrum Transmitters in the 2.4GHz bands are limited to 1 W Output Power...
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology
(see table beginning page 7, specifically pages 20 and 21)
There is: Yeah, all those climatologists (the overwhelming majority, that is) are in fact Euro-agents out to trash the American economy!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Now's the perfect time to go after WiFi since they've gotten everyone scared to death about "global warming" and how it's going to kill everyone in ten years. No matter that they're finding evidence of silver mines and grain fields under receding glaciers, showing that at one time it was much warmer and humans made it through somehow. Why should WiFi be any different? What's the famous saying; tell a lie long enough and loud enough and the people will believe it.
Do the friggin study :
1)Get a few dozen lab rats (baby rats if you RTFA and are still worried),
2)Put them near a wi-fi base station for a few months
3)Dissect and observe if tumors have formed
4)Repeat as necessary, with other organisms if you wish (perhaps the uninformed media wh**es?)
Now tell me: where in that list is there ANY room for a bunch of moronic talking heads on an alarmist docudrama to offer their OPINION? Farking incompetent buncha loonies! Bah ...
Rants aside, people really need to grow up and get over this knee-jerk reaction they have with "radiation". In case it hasn't been said already, EVERYTHING emits radiation. Fancy names like gamma rays, xrays, alpha, beta, etc etc (ad nauseum) are just names that were given to things BEFORE we figured out the physical principles that governed them. Someone needs to construct an equivalent of the dihydrogen-monoxide parody for radiation methinks :P.
Anyway, I found a very nice website for laypeople that explains the behavior of water exposed to different parts of the EM spectrum (water is a good prototypical substance as it is so ubiquitous in our body): http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/vibrat.html.
A special focus on the microwave region (1mm to 30cm wavelengths) can also be linked from that page. A few seconds of Googling found the following articles:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061212/080748.s html - A year ow wi-fi is equivalent to 20 minutes on a cell phone :P.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/he alth/features/article665419.ece - The original article. Notable quote:
IMO, the most comprehensive study was done recently by a Danish team: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061205/170444.s html and this is what came out of it:
Especially note the lines I have highlighted in bold.
Here's the original story for the Danish study in the Guardian: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/20 06/12/07/mobile_phones_dont_trigger_cancer_says_st udy.html
And just to assure the tinfoil pholks :P,
so, patterning a series of packets a certain way could cause more harm than regular traffic over wifi? denial-of-health attack?
Some things to read before you break open your piggy bank and invest in lead clothing ;^) ;^)
You can run, but you can't hide...
Interesting that this rather weak story, submitted by an anonymous reader, appears one week after the same programme is involved in a highly publicized and heated argument with the Church of Scientology.
Can you say "fair game"?
Seriously, dude. You're on /., when do you really expect to use your 'reproductive organs'.
Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation'
Well, it is radiation.
along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations
CTHULHU FHTAGN!!!
CTHULHU FHTAGN!!!
CTHULHU FHTAGN!!!
I'm not saying that WiFi is dangerous, but as a precedent people have often generally underestimated some dangers with emerging technologies and we should never discount such a thing could happen.
RF is a technology which predates all of the "technologies" you mentioned. It's understood.
There are no health effects, except at very high exposure levels- the kind found in TV/radio transmission equipment. Hundreds of watts or more, in close proximity.
Your microwave oven puts out about 1500W, versus around 100mW. Unless your microwave's shielding is more than 99.993% effective, your microwave is putting out just as much (or more) juice than your laptop.
Please help metamoderate.
Next thing you know the BBC will air a programme tracing the history of the global warming movement exposing it for the modern Communist neo-religious cult that it is. Oh wait...
Watching the earlier abomb tests were alright also? Or some pesticides were ok to play in the area after they were sprayed? Or that some food additives were ok too? Or building materials too? Then cell phones and wifi must be the perfect non side-affect technology then.
...otherwise you'd be able to see brains through them.
[TMB]
Radiation was a big problem even in olden times -- I wouldn't be surprised if lawsuits start popping up about this nowadays as well.
Please, fix yourself.
When I worked on a defense project that was RF related, I heard the rumor that RF engineers had a higher percentage of female offspring than the average. Anyone know of any truth to this?
A quick back-o-the envelope calculation suggested that only about 23 femtowatts are emitted in the 2.4 GHz band used by wifi. It'd take about 4 billion light bulbs to match a single 100 mW access point.
Of course, this ignores the remains 59.999... W of "radiation" the light bulb emits. I'm sure the anti-device ninnies will also fail to notice the millions of Amateur Radio operators exposed to much higher power radiation over almost a century at many frequencies, including the ones in question, without being at measurably greater risk of well... anything than the rest of the population.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
While non-ionizing radiation can be harmful,wi-fi is much lower impact then radio/sattelite and TV stations broadcasts.
Vibrating and heating molecules of e.g.
water could alter alot of chemical reactions in the human body.The effect will be most pronounced in regions closer to the source.
And about sunlight - We are adapted to live under it over periods of thousands of years.(And i don't think cavemen needed sunscreen,unlike
the weaklings we become)
Whats more? Your computer is the closest source of EM emissions and
you're probably exposed to it all day.
The metal panels do not stop all radiation.
I believe you're mistaken... \. is the Microsoft version, and THAT is indeed full of FUD...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
I'm prepared to bet that, in the averabe British household, there is more 'radiation' from BBC TV and radio transmitters than from WiFi. This is a totally bogus story and the BBC should be ashamed of itself.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
That is the problem with the modern society. Nobody understands sciences let along technology (but a few), but everyone can talk. Media allows everyone to speak, look at the afternoon / evening TV program. But, rarely there is anything worth the transmission energy or the paper. In my opinion, we should turn of the TV station air broadcasting and outlow rainbow press. This would have a bigger 'health effect' than not turning on wifi everywhere.
Radiation from TV stations >> Radiation from mobile phones/masts >> Radiation from wifi
Smaller cells -> less power
But can someone PLEASE explain to me why it's called "wifi"? "Wireless Fidelity" makes absolutely no sense, as "fidelity" simply means "accuracy" -- hence a "lo-fi" recording reproduces the sound with low accuracy, and a "hi-fi" recording reproduces it with high accuracy. "Fidelity" is also irrespective of the medium through which the transmission or recording is made. What is with this term?
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
It is bad for you - like anything else really.
Armaggedon is imminent. Take Melatonin.
[-------------------- \95%]
Nope, I refuse to use the "/." moniker for the site "http://slashdot.org/", preferring instead to use "\." in order to truly reflect how it leans so far to the left. "_." might be more appropriate, but that would be confusing...
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
The Truth about Wifi Routers
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips