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BBC Kicked out of School Over Wi-Fi Scaremongering
h2g2bob writes "Ben Goldacre reports that the BBC Panorama team, while scaremongering over the dangers of Wi-fi, were told to leave the school because even the kids could see it was dumb: 'When the children saw Alasdair's Powerwatch website, and the excellent picture of the insulating mesh beekeeper hat that he sells (£27) to protect your head from excess microwave exposure, they were astonished and outraged. Panorama were calmly expelled from the school.' Should we be pleased that the kids can out-think TV producers?"
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You mean children might actually be able to differentiate truth from fiction? But that's unpossible, how can their schools control them then?
*Sigh*
I've seen similar situations -- namely when some high school students saw Bowling for Columbine. Teacher couldn't believe they might actually be able to see flaws in the reasoning...
normally is an icon of good journalism, I see a tendency worldwide that scaremongering for the sake of getting more viewers takes more and more over. Call it how you will but Michael Moore basically brought this excellent into perspective in bowling for columbine.
This scaremongering is one of the causes why people are more concerned over a handful of dead people in the western world per year caused by terrorism than thousands and thousands of people dead caused by traffic. I personally think this scaremongering is a misuse of free speach and the problem is, if a system or right is misused too much in it will end up dead...
...the UK version of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? will be a big hit.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Oddly enough, in the U.S., the TV producers have capitalized on their, and a large part of the rest of the world's, own ineptitude.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Those kids are alright. They were skeptical of something that was total baloney. Granted, it may have been obvious drivel, but the fact that they spoke up at all indicates that they will at least speak their minds.
Somebody forward this to Jack Thompson!!! His claim that children cannot differentiate reality and fiction from video games is now null and void!!
That hat seems to me like it'd make a nice tinfoil hat alternative.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
We should be pleased from the standpoint that these kids could clearly see bullshit for what it is. TV news & documentary producers no longer care about accuracy, so long as they can scare their audience and get them worked up over imagined fears.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
Am I the only one who misread that as the "BBC Paranoia team" after reading the headline?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would be too. £27 for beekeeper hat when tinfoil one is free. Damn scammers.
What makes me pleased about reading this article, is that the school protected it's pupils from the producers pseudo-science, and didn't allow them to continue. Hopefully this will mean in the future these children will know to be weary of sensationalist TV shows & films.
:)
I hope all schools are instilling the same sort of thinking (looking for scientific method) in their pupils, it might result to a smarter tomorrow
People don't want to listen to information. Information is like school, and school was boring, right? People want to be entertained, at best they can be convinced to sit through some spectacular show that gives them a few tidbits of "information" between the explosions and stunts.
I can see it in our TV program. About 20 years ago, we had talk shows (no, not the Springer kind. Talk shows where experts discussed controversal topics. And with discussed I don't mean "support the official opinion and nod heads", but real discussion), we had news that deserved the name (with reporters that did dig deeper, and didn't only bring up dirt but real information), and we had entertainment above the pie-in-the-face level.
Then we got private TV and the quality of our public stations went where the viewers are: Basement level.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bowling for Columbine: a film scaremongering about scaremongering!
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
"Look up the relevant Mark Twain quote about school boards."
I went to public school - can you look that up for me???
Uh, did anybody read the article? I don't find anything in it about the kids detecting the BS. It was the science teacher who realized that the Panorma crew was pulling a scam and threw them out. Kudos to him, but this episode doesn't tell us anything about the ability of the kids to detect nonsense.
What do you mean doesn't work? I wear mine all the time and I still haven't gotten any excess microwave radiation in my head. Also, no bee stings.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
>I also wonder why they put up huge fences, and warning signs around transmission towers?
So people won't climb them and fall off, or steal the copper ground wires. Lawyers are much more dangerous than the electromagnetic radiation from those towers.
>I'm not keeping my mobile phone near to my reproductive organs any longer than necessary.
It's probably your brain you want to watch out for...it doesn't transmit when it's on your belt (only for 5 seconds every 10 minutes). It's full on when you're holding it up to your ear.
>I wouldn't dismiss the health effects just yet. Give it a generation with high intensity signals and see how we are going.
I agree with you there.
Michael Moore? I think you give the man too much credit! What about William Randolph Hearst, whose scaremongering successfully helped start a war, and for whom the term "Yellow Journalism" was coined? I agree that it's a significant problem, but it's hardly a new or recent phenomenon. (Though I suppose an argument can be made for a primarily American origin, which makes it sad to see the BBC succumbing.)
This is the same BBC Panorama that sent one poor bastard out alone to do a report on Scientology. Maybe it's the same person, and they made him crack.
The Internet is a series of tubes. If you want to send a bigger file, you need a bigger tube or it will get stuck. When you try to download a large file, the wireless access point automatically creates a large tube, which leads right to where you are sitting. I will leave the dangers of this to your imagination.
While I still think that the TV Licence is a great way to pay for my TV, and can often produce splendid telly (Life In The Undergrowth, The Day Today, Doctor Who, What The Victorians Did For Us to name but a few), the dragging down of the once-great Corporation to the level of the lowest commercial channels (yes, Reality TV - I'm also talking about you) brings a mournful tear to my eye.
Britain used to make really good documentary shows, too - Dispatches, anyone? Q.E.D.? Channel 4's Equinox, I seem to recall, could also be counted on for a refreshing brain-jiggle. You wouldn't catch 'em making anything like that anymore, of course - not when there's slaggy morons to build into role models.
And if they produce a "Deal Or No Deal"-aping enormobrowed-yahoos-receive-unearned-prizes celebration of dimwittedness, I'm fairly certain my head will explode. (Man Alive, I sound old.)
"Knowledge, sir, should be free to all!"
~Harcourt Fenton Mudd
No, I don't mean in your own setting, but in a double-blind one with actual scientists. If she could prove that, it might well be interesting.
As for me, I can't detect wifi, but I can hear very high frequencies, and you might be surprised by some of the annoying electronic gear that gives them off. Now *that* can sure cause a headache, but it's just sound, not radio.
Also, does she get like this around microwaves, too? There are more things to detect than radio, y'know, and if she was really sensitive to radio waves, I'd expect her to have gone batty long ago given all the broadcasts. So I'm not the least bit convinced that you've isolated the actual problem, sorry.
Or are you genuinely comparing reportage of the verifiable doubling of corn prices because of US bioethanol policy and resultant riots in Mexico, the verifiable destruction of rainforest to grow palm oil and soy beans for fuel feedstocks and the verifiable release of methane from rotting vegetation, submerged below hydroelectric reservoirs with the speculative ramblings of a journo with no statistic evidence that 2.4Ghz spectrum microwave emissions cause anything other than mild localized tissue heating?
Whatever might be causing their symptoms, it's apparently NOT electromagnetic waves. See this for details. It may be a very real symptom, but you should be more careful when making claims about WHAT caused it and you need a proper scientific study to rule out any other causes.
Until then, I'm going to have to go with all the published studies showing that, whatever might cause people to feel "EM sensitive", it's not actually EM that's causing it.
I also wonder why they put up huge fences, and warning signs around transmission towers?
it's a matter of the power level. the most powerful consumer wi-fi access point I've seen puts out 500 milliwatts. the local FM radio station puts out about 100,000 Megawatts. that's a scale difference of 2,000,000,000,000 to 1.
that's the difference between 1 milliliter of water and 80 Olympic swimming pools.
i find it quite plausible that a big transmission tower would pack enough energy to cause adverse effects, but a wi-fi access point? i doubt it.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
it's a matter of the power level. the most powerful consumer wi-fi access point I've seen puts out 500 milliwatts. the local FM radio station puts out about 100,000 Megawatts.
I would assume that you actually mean 100K WATTS because at 100,000 Megawatts you should be able to pick that station up on the other side of the planet.
As for the 100K WATTS, that is reasonable, ONE of the local stations here broadcasts at approximately that and has roughly a 3 state radius ( wisconsin upper michigan and minnesota, and parts of upper illinois)
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
What does religion have to do with it ?? and while it really has no bearing on this .. No I am not religious.
.. but they can. just because you cant does not mean that they cant.
My point was that there are things that people can sense. it may not make sense
how skeptical one should be as a default is left up to the person. If someone was to tell me they drove a car at 90 mph on the highway , I would tend to trust that they have. if they said they have driven at 250 mph on the same highway I would tend to not.
Being able to simply sense that a radio wave is present is not outside my realm of believability. If he was to say that she could tell if the access point was using wap vs wep , I would tend to discount that. It has nothing to do with religion.
is being able to detect radio waves really that unbelievable ? its simply a form of electromagnetic radiation. your eyes have eloved to detect a small range of the same type of radiation, what we call visible light. Why is it such a stretch to believe that some people could detect different frequency's of the same type of emission ?
Think about it this way. its the same thing as if you were blind , and someone told you that they could see things.It would be rational to be sceptical about that as a default ? Or if you were deaf. Or even if you were color blind. Would you be skeptical about someone that said they could see different colors?
_shrug_
one problem with that , its not 10k years. Humans have know about radio for only a few hundred. But thats not even the point here.
I think summarily dismissing it would be a very naive and arrogant thing to do.The idea is not as far fetched as you may think. EM sensitivity has been proven in the animal kingdom , Think homing pigeons and there internal compass.Which means that nature, as a whole , knows how to detect an electromagnetic signal outside of the normal visible light range. Why would it be such a far stretch to think that the human animal could not develop that sense ? either by design or a mutation.
She very well may be a crackpot in a tin foil hat.
However , If the chick claims that she can sense a wifi access point , and anecdotal reports support it. Then it warrents further study.
We know almost nothing about how the human brain works. Even with the recent mapping of our dna , we still have no idea what most of it does. Why cant some part of that be something that was able to detect EM of some sort. Which has been activated in some way in her and has become resonant at the frequency that the wifi access point is transmitting at ?
Thats all I am saying.
To say "it sounds crazy so it must be" , is just stupid.
Poser? Posing as what? Or was he simply posing a question you are offended by?
Interestingly, you are right; he should read a book or two. There have been several publications by many people performing hard science which do indeed cite EVENTS which demonstrate peculiar biological effects which suggest that there is a great deal more about the relationship between EM and human biology than most people are aware of. The book which stands out in particular is Robert O. Becker's work.
-FL