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BBC Rules That Wi-Fi Radiation Findings Were Wrong
Stony Stevenson writes "A Panorama programme claiming that Wi-Fi creates three times as much radiation as mobile phone masts was 'misleading', an official BBC complaints ruling has found. The team involved in the research came under fire from the school where the 'investigations' were held for scaremongering, but now the BBC has come out with an official ruling. 'The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers (one of whom was introduced as a former cancer specialist) who seconded his concerns.'"
You insensitive cloud!
Is anybody else suprised by this? To be honest, I think it's just just a farce. Yeah, sure the situation could have been better implemented but at least we know we're safe!
For their clinbdown on global warming/climate change/whatever they call it today.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
This, and the shocking secret that most parents don't realize will kill their child! Up at 11. Tune in!
A broadcast station issuing a ruling. Sir William the scientist. I'll think I'll get a pint at the pub, govnr', then to the loo and then pop home on the lorry, chap.
The benefits outweigh the costs whether it's true or not. I am also partial to Diet Coke.
So this article in tandem with this one, has given me hope. For I have a dream that one day all of our children will be able to sit down at the radioactive table of brotherhood. They will be able to enjoy the pleasures of uranium chip flavored ice cream and sleep on beds made of the finest plutonium. I welcome the day when all of our children will have the opportunity to be exposed to the now safer than ever blessing of radiation. I have a dream that one day the alarmist fear mongering about radiation poisoning and nuclear fallout will be over and out children can reap the benefits.
I got a catholic block.
The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William
Peter Griffin: We'll move to England, huh? Worst they got there is, you know, drive-by... arguments...
[Meanwhile, in England]
Englishman: I say, Jeremy, isn't that Reginald B. Stifworth, the young upstart chap who's been touting the merits of a united European commonwealth?
Jeremy: Why yes, I daresay it is.
Englishman: Oh, let's get him.
[They drive up]
Englishman: Oh Reginald... I disagree.
[drives off]
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I am sick and tired of hearing voodoo science scaremongers. So here we go.
As far as possible interactions with the human body go, the 900 MHz to 1900 MHz spectrum is roughly the same. Both WiFi and cell phones use bursts of transmissions with approximately the same spectral characteristics. So we can simplify the problem and focus only on intensity.
A cell phone that is far from the nearest tower can transmit up to one watt. A typical home router transmits 100 mW (one tenth of a cell phone). A very powerful cell tower transmits 1000 W. However, signal intensity per surface unit decreases as the square of the distance. So if you are 100 meters (300 feet, one-half furlong for our US friends) from a 1-kW cell tower, you get the same exposure as if you are one metter (0.005 furlong, 3 ft) from a wifi router. And of course, all of this is dwarfed by the intensity of signal you get a few centimeters away from a 1-W cell phone.
So test cell phones. If they don't fry your brain, forget about wifi routers and towers, their effect is negligeable next to a cell phone's signal flux. And cell phones were innocented by several studies.
Attention journalists: When you cover technology, either learn the basics of what you're talking about or go back to freelancing for people rags.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
salad soup secks in your butt!
Who in the UK can be surprised by this?
It's been obvious that the BBC's standards have been gradually eroding for about 20 years. It probably hasn't reached bottom yet. Biased tabloid journalism, and product placement to get round the no advertising rules, are the daily norm, not the exception nowadays.
Focus groups lead to mediocrity and bias. A similar thing is happening to the UK in many other areas too. If you have an IQ over 95 you're a statistical outlier, and are no longer catered to by corportations, government or the media in the UK.
If the BBC shows a rerun of Sesame Street that claims that 1 + 1 = 2, do they have to give equal time to mathematicians who claim that it isn't? (Where would they find them?)
If the program was wrong, it wasn't wrong because they had the wrong number of scientists on each side.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
my skin can finally breathe.
dear UK, Educate your population seriously you rag on Americans being stupid while having an even less educated population yourselves. The only reason the BBC gets away with scaremongering nonsense is because there are many among you that don't know any better. The only way to stop selecting for idiotic deivel is to have a fairly knowledgeable population that understands basic concepts in science like the scientific method for example. That is all
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I've noticed a slow decline in panorama's technological and socio-political programs (pretty much everything). Dispatches, and that program on unreported news on More4 (the name of which escapes me) are farbetter and less "pimped". It's not just mistakes I have a problem with, it's the tabloid attitude the show's taken to; frighteningly reminiscent of Fox News.
I love my BBC but when I have to step back and become objective, not because of the topic, but because of the way information is inappropriately portrayed, I'm a little sad inside.
Matt
Speaking of scaremongering, have a look at this MS ad that was on Slashdot.
My WiFi antennas aren't an inch from my head. I don't think there is any doubt that hand held analogue cell phones, when they used often, are associated with tumors. I don't know if this finding is also true for digital phones. In any city people are awash with RF energy from a multitude of sources. Most of the sources are not a couple of inches from the person's brain.
According to the BBC complaints ruling "two viewers complained". Assuming that one of them was Prof. Repacholi, I must be the other. But then again, I'm probably Spartacus as well.
Since this report was published Panorama was broadcast as usual on Monday night. There was no trailing "we got the wifi program badly wrong" apology, so I've complained again about that - we'll see what happens.
It's worth mentioning that the BBC is going through a sustained period of navel-gazing at the moment, ever since the Hutton Report. Among the items for consideration have been such earth-shattering topics such as the name of the Blue Peter cat http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/09/it_fair_knocks_your_socks.html and whether two pieces of film about an unelected German woman had been reversed between the programme and the trail http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7079070.stm. In among this, ensuring basic scientific accuracy in a flagship current-affairs program clearly isn't very important.
They where trying to build a chemical factory and some people where scared of it.
Both the MP and his civil servent had no idea if it was safe of not because they didn't know any science.
"Minister I have a classical eduction. I don't know any science."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Scaremongering? - You mean researchers are capable of this?
....
Lemme guess - there was an "overwhelming consensus" that WIFI was gonna cook all of our children's brains
That never happens - right?
Scientist and researchers never exaggerate or manipulate results in order to further a hidden agenda - right?
I'm so disillusioned right now
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
How am I supposed to get mutant powers from radioactive wifi if it's harmless! I'd rant more but I have to go swim in the Hudson River's toxic waste.
~Vexed and loving it!
Notice how they refer to it as 'radiation', because radiation is clearly a *bad thing*. It killed all those people in Hiroshima didn't it? Nasty.
Well, never mind that 1W of radiation coming out of your phone or Wifi router. There's maybe 100W coming out of your light bulbs (or less if you have Al Gore-compliant lightbulbs). And what's more, that radiation doesn't pass straight through you, a lot of it is intercepted by the body! I think we need a campaign to stop radiation in the 400nm to 700nm wavelength range from infecting our children! Ban it now! That, and Dihydrogen Monoxide...
Bad Science has lots of info on this and other science quackery.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
IS PART OF THE the bott0ms buut by fundamental
No, there is NO statistically significant evidence suggesting a correlation between cell phones and tumors. There has been NO scientific study to suggest that, only idiotic scaremongering, which is what this article is about. Not only is there no empirical evidence, but there is no known basis for it in physics/biology/chemistry since microwaves are NON IONIZING RADIATION. That means that they have NO EFFECT on matter other than to heat it up if you bombard it with enough. It's no different than standing in front of a fireplace and absorbing the longer wavelength infra red spectrum.
I'm sure that, in a not-so-distant future, it will be as dangerous to walk in the streets of a wireless city than it is to put yourself in the microwave for 30 minutes. There will be corpses all over the sidewalks, and homes will be built with a lead insulating layer to protect us from the OH-SO-DANGEROUS WI-FI radiations.
But oh, anyway, isn't lead toxic too? Think I heard about that...
In french, we call them "Peurologues", or "Fear-o-logists" in english...
It remains that three times negligible remains negligible.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" applies to all claims, including those that handily advance socialist causes.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Idiot. What makes you think scientists were behind this? Reporters were behind this. They have monetary reasons for scaremongering. What hidden agendas can you even think up that might prompt scientists to falsify results?
One sure sign of a crackpot is that he takes every chance he can get to insult and demean the scientific establishment. That shit won't fly here. It does not make you seem smart or wise in anyone's eyes. It just points out to all the smart folks here that you are an anti-intellectual dolt.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Being an American the only news I ever hear from across the pond is from the BBC, is that all you folks have over there? I know the notion seems kind of silly, but why is that the only 'network' I hear about? From reading wikipedia the network sounds like PBS/NPR we have over here. Could someone please clarify my American ignorance?
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
If the enviro-collectivists win, this will usher in a decline of your way of life and you wont be sitting in your comfortable cube/office posting on slashsdot, you'll be wondering how to eat.
Then you will wonder why in the world did you sign up for this and decades will pass, nothing will change, a few warm winters and a few cold ones in your lifes memory bank, as it has been will continue to be, no dire calamties or earht shattering events, man made anyway other than the ones you allow.
The parent post is correct, the anti-GW troll off topic posts are more frequent and thats because, besides leftists and liberals social policies the biggest threat to our way walk amongst us.
So forgive me for buying into it sometimes but it is a looming threat (GW legislation to subdue our economy) that has not diminished.
I'm actually lying in bed, sucking down nyquil, and watching LOTR.
So, don't taze me, bro!
(Oh, global warming, imagination, figment of, one each...)
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Says you! I can see fire, I can't see cell phone waves. They must be dangerous, they work like magic!
I think that's a lot of the problem... people haven't figured out that cell phones and wireless transmissions AREN'T magic. Hell, I didn't even get into wave physics until my second year in college, and that was at an engineering school... what chance does a liberal arts major or high-school dropout have of understanding it?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Your maths seem correct, but one can be exposed only to the phone during convrsation while we can be exposed to wifi and tower 24/7. What about the accumulation?
That is because in your case you chose to not to consider the anecdotal evidence, which is abundant. Of course the telecommunications industry is not likely to fund a comprehensive statistical study, or any study that shows that cell phones are dangerous if used almost constantly. I can hear you, you don't have to shout.
It was decided during the development of typography, pre-internet, by typesetters, editors, and designers.
Double spaces between sentences are for monospaced fonts, like typewriters or courier font families. Variable-width fonts like the one you're probably using to read this don't need two spaces, largely because the eye groups words more easily. E.g.: typesetting in books uses singe spaces between sentences. Old newspapers are more variable.
Maybe you're confusing Usenet with the Internet, or email (txt=monosp) with the web (usually varable-width).
All part of the rules of font usage and interacting with the design of your expressive tools. Literacy now extends into minor forms of publishing and email daily for most of us, such as this thread, so we have to learn them to break them. FWIW.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I'm shocked. Just shocked. No one saw this at the time.
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
A ruling is an opinion, its not fact or necessarily backed by science.
Only trust links from domains you can trust.
Point proven, I think.
3 x 0 = 0 would be an example of three times non-existant remains non-existant
Just because something is considered negligible doesn't mean, that after compounding it, it won't be consequential. It just depends upon what your tolerance is.
YMMV. Nutrasweet gives me 6 hour migraine-like headaches in the smallest quantities. Getting my tongue wet with DC is too much. My diet drink is water. It's an acquired taste.
-- Stephen.
"learning how to reason, apply logic, and learn new things independently"
You don't learn to do that by sitting in a classroom.
If you talk to someone about global warming, intelligent design, horrible management practices, whatever, you'll find that someone with credentials has written articles, books, etc., that pass the most horrific crud as fact. When journalists site this crud, their own credibility eventually suffers, but there will be a faithful following notwithstanding. Unfortunately, figuring out what is good and what is bad requires passing the Turing Test, which is hard work. You can't just go with the majority opinion. Aristotle said that the Sun goes around the Earth, and basically everyone said that was true for 1,500 years. Can everyone be wrong?
-- Stephen.
Saying loudly, firmly and often that studies don't exist doesn't make it so. Just because they don't make the front page and because you haven't read them doesn't make them not exist.
In any case, the question of whether or not EM radiation ionizes tissue is a bugaboo designed to misdirect people's attention. The first two places I heard this obvious fact touted was within literature promoted by the Telecoms themselves, and before them, the U.S. Airforce which was trying to quash lawsuits with regard to their radar operations and people getting sick. The point is that there are recognized mechanisms through which brain chemistry and cellular behavior is affected by low power, nom-ionizing EM. For example. . .
60 htz wall socket power in conjunction with the Earth's magnetic field resonates with the Lithium ion, exciting it and causing it to move on a vector. This is based on the principle of cyclotronic resonance. Your blood stream has a natural lithium content and it plays a role in the balancing of your brain activities. When artificially excited, lithium ions cross the blood brain barrier more readily and brain chemistry is altered. Many anti-depressant drugs use lithium as their active ingredient, the logic being that increasing the amount of lithium in the blood raises the number of blood brain barrier crossing instances under normal conditions. When specifically energized, however, the natural quantity can have a medicinal effect. That's one way in which the brain is directly affected by non-ionizing EM. There are other ways.
I read a series of studies which demonstrated that cancer cells in vitro divide and grow many times faster when exposed to certain wavelengths of low power EM as compared to control samples. Everybody has cells going cancerous in their bodies, but a healthy person's immune system is able to deal with this. It's when those cells get a foothold that problems occur. I had to buy a book to read about these studies. You never see this stuff on TV. --All we get are scare mongering stories on the BBC which are, I am certain, designed to be shot down strawman style just like that dumb 'fake moon landing' thing.
-FL
That's just a small cross section of the findings. I found one article that said, "Results from present studies on use of mobile phones for > or =10 years give a consistent pattern of increased risk for acoustic neuroma and glioma."(Occup Environ Med. 2007 Sep;64(9):626-32.) But that's just one study based on 10 cases of neuroma, and directly contradicted by another major study. (Am J Epidemiol. 2004 Feb 1;159(3):277-83). The balance of evidence suggests that cell phones are entirely safe to use.
I'm still not getting one though.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Most of the immediate fatalitites in Hiroshima were caused by the intial blast and its direct effects, (building collapse, fire..)
From Wikipedia, (so must be true, eh?)
"directly killing an estimated 70,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000".
Although, also note:
"Since then, thousands more have died from injuries or illness attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs."
So yes, radiation from a nucler bomb is a bad thing, but in the real world you still have a greater chance of being killed by your car than by your mobile phone or wifi.
No it hasn't. Lithium in the body is normally under the "trace" level. Unless you're on meds.
In fact Lithium is highly toxic, and the therapeutic margin (doses at which it can be used in meds without causing the toxic effect) is pretty narrow.
That's why it is forbidden in product that will be consumed by humans.
Also I have some doubt about 30-to-60T and 60Hz being the correct parameters needed, and I have also serious doubt the 60Hz AC current found in houses generates a strong enough emission to have an impact on lithium. But I'll give you the benefit of doubt.
WTF ? Lithium - as a ion - is charged, whereas the blood-brain barrier is hydrophobic. Moving the ion around won't make it cross the barrier, it would just get stuck against it and refuse to move further (the size orders aren't the same : the lithium would have to cross a width several order of magnitude it's own radius. And path has defavorable properties on its whole length).
:
What you need is either
- changing the properties of the barrier (for an example see how electric fields are used to transfer transgenes inside bio-engineered cells. It's not used because it makes the genes move (like in a electrophoresis gel) but because it makes the properties of the cell surface change and it becomes transiently permeable to the gene. Similarly ultrasounds are used in needle-less injectors to make the skin permeable to the drug)
or
- special transporter (that what may be the case with lithium, because it mimics closely enough Sodium, and may sometimes be using the same channels).
In fact the "get stuck against the barrier instead of forcibily crossing it" effect is used in some medical NMR image techniques like tractography (imagery of nervous fibres inside the brain). To explain it in a simple way : you make the water vibrate along a specific direction, if there's room for the water to move, you'll get a signal, if the water encounters a barrier, you get none. Thus you can know if the fibres are oriented in the same direction (because water can move along them) or not (because water can't easily cross their borders). Do it for a lot of different directions and you can get a nice map of the overall fibers directions in the whole brain.
There's no water leakage produced by this method with water forcibly crossing the nervous cell membrane (for that you would need to change their surface properties, or change the amount of water channels on the surface like killing-white-cells do).
FYI, your confusing with mania & bipolar drugs, which may be based on lithium.
Depression drugs are mostly organic compounds that interfere the metabolism of monoamines (mostly serotonin in most recent product like fluoxetine/Prozac, or mostly dopamine and nor-adrenaline in other drugs).
No. Although, not all the details of the Lithium effect are known in details, :
the logic of lithium is putting in a substance that was never meant to be here in the first place and thus can interfere by several mean
- concurrence with sodium : it may replace it in some circumstance, but not be processed in the same way by all ionic pumps. Most of the toxicity also comes because of Lithium replacing Sodium.
OR MAYBE
- interfere with the expression of some genes.
OR EITHER
- interfere with the function of some enzymes.
There's almos
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
URL obscures shocksite redirect.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
> it will be melted (and possibly under quite high pressure) in the middle, but still cold on the outside.
Microwaves work by exciting water molecules. Ice has them locked into place. This is why you get a hot core in frozen stuff when you put it in a microwave regardless of how focussed the microwaves are. once it's thawed, microwaves heat from the outside in.
ah, wouldn't infrared be shorter wavelength?
Maybe they're sitting near a mobile phone mast?
..
Oh, wait
Insert
I think the fact the US test 1030 nuclear bombs from 1945-1992 is likely a far greater threat to our health.
That over 16 nuclear explosions per year or one every 22 days. More than all the other nations of the world combined.
Humans are made to withstand low energy radiation pretty well, and the amount we receive isn't a constant as the earth's shielding goes through cycles in it's ability to filter out radition, creating spikes of solar radition, which we should be in right now. Eventually the magnetic field of earth will flip poles and eventually even fail as the core of the planet slows down/cools.
However, high energy particles are an entirely different thing and between nuclear tests and the hosts of chemicals we allow in the air, food and drinking water I think we shouldn't have to ponder long why cancer rates are going UP. Death's may go down, but only because we can sure many more types of cancer now. It's still a great burden on your body and VERY expensive. We've been using high watt radio/TV transmission for decades upon decades without people complaining plus all the military communication frequencies.
I can't see why you single out wifi. Cell phones are obviously a much much greater risk device since they are so close to your body and HEAD. When was the last time you cuddled up to your WIFI access point ? You probably get more radiation from your faulty microwave or old television unless you sleep next to your AP or wireless card.
Oh and what about cordless phones. I assume we can safely say more people own cordless phones than wireless networks.
Sorry, I may have snapped out a little bit too violently.
:
I'm just sometimes exasperated because of people who have read some random crackpot theory on the net, and thus refuse to use any other form of medicine than the corresponding snake-oil. And automatically buy the argument that "scientific establishment refuse to admit it because it's new, think of Galileo !" or other theories about "repressed scientific evidence !", etc. And then completely shut off and refuse to listen to your explanation about why the new "thoery" seems wrong, given the fact it contradicts a lot of previous observations and would completely fail to explain a lot of technology that are commonly used and to work, whereas the "establishment"'s theory models fit nicely the observed data and do give an explanation about how what we use di function. That's why those theory are currently used, because they "work", not because some wise bearded guy said them.
I don't refute your arguments about cyclotron. It's a well understood technology and used in several modern apparatuses (Fourier-Transform cyclotronic resonance mass spectrometers, to give an example).
The problem was the whole chapter about lithium
- The required medicinal level are several order of magnitude higher than the very low level that might be found in the brain (and those low level may more likely be due to pollution than to a minimal level required by body function). ( ppm vs. ~ 1 M )
- There's a big mix-up between bipolar disorders and depression. They are different class of sickness reacting to different type of drugs.
- A charged substance cannot go thru a much more thicker hydrophobic barrier just because it vibrating in that direction. Specially because that would it require to cross a long path of defavorable condition. ( pm radius vs. m thickness)
- Lithium mimics sodium - that is the commonly accepted explanation of its toxicity. It can thus traverse the blood-brain barrier using the same channels. There's no need of "pushing it in" to get it into the brain.
- An effective dose of lithium is close to a toxic one ( ~1M vs ~1M too). In an uncontrolled experiment if lithium manifests its psychiatric effet, you would expect some toxic effects too, none were reported by the study cited in your article.
- Psychiatric modelisation in animals is very complicated. Depression is a specially tricky one. Inferring medical effect of a substance based on animal behaviour is not something obvious. Thus the whole "the rats seemed to be calmer, thats what anti-depression drugs do, therefore we proved that lithium done it because it's a bipolar-drug. Thus the EM emission influenced lithium" is a HUGE jump on conclusion.
The problem with this cyclotron model is that it contradicts a lot of the current knowledge and evidence about lithium. There's a lot of stuff that currently works and is explained by current theories that the new one fails to explain.
Also the study cited jumped on conclusion by interpreting vague behavioural change in rats. For what matters the exact same effect could be obtained with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS - the same technique used to shut off brain region on the last article you cite) which is an entirely different beast. Or something completely different.
The source cited are all old : around 20 years. That's a long time for science. During this time, a lot of other data and theories may have come forward and could contradict the various proposed hypothesis. Our knowledge about Lithium has changed as had numerous other information we have now. Always take old scientific information with a grain of salt : the knowledge my have advance and some models proven to be wrong in the light of data obtained since then.
About the paper about effect of cell-phone-type radiation : at the end of the abstract the authors admit that the emission they used were different (stronger and longer) than actual cell phone. With only this paper we may not draw definite conclusion
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Oh well, if that did not appear to the readers, that their wifi signal disappears after a few walls, or 100ms of open space, while their cell phone works miles away from the towers then they are, hmmmmmm not thinking (/polite) ?
Have you wondered how your cheap wireless phone worked 100m from your house and your $$$ wifi signal disappears in the garden?
It's Friday afternoon at work and I'm bored.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it