Slashdot Mirror
Ontario School Bans Wi-Fi
St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school in Meaford, Ont. is the latest Canadian school to decide to save its students from the harmful effects of Wi-Fi by banning it. Schools from universities on down have a history of banning Wi-Fi in Ontario. As usual, health officials and know-it-all scientists have called the move ridiculous. Health Canada has released a statement saying, "Wi-Fi is the second most prevalent form of wireless technology next to cell phones. It is widely used across Canada in schools, offices, coffee shops, personal dwellings, as well as countless other locations. Health Canada continues to reassure Canadians that the radiofrequency energy emitted from Wi-Fi equipment is extremely low and is not associated with any health problems."
People refuse to do things that their doctors say are safe!
For our next story people insist that the things doctors say are bad for you are actually the best things to do ever!
This may, in fact, be a rational decision by the school's administration. While the health dangers due to wifi may not be real, the (often irrational) fear that some people (e.g. parents) have of wifi is, unfortunately, very real. If enough people are sufficiently afraid, and their fear is causing a great deal of difficulty, banning wifi may be the most straightforward solution, especially if wifi isn't mission-critical for that particular school.
What's even more ridiculous is the loaded wording of the summary.
I think he was being sarcastic...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Well, we should not simply block the sun. We should switch it off.
* It runs on nuclear (fusion) power.
* It generates radioactivity.
* It is responsible for many cases of skin cancer.
* It is the power source for hurricanes, which cause lots of damage.
* Its radiation plays a major role in the chemical processes which cause the ozone hole.
* It is already known that one day it will destroy the Earth.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
As usual, Health Canada gets it wrong.
It's not that the signal is low energy, it's that the radiation is not at a frequency that can do any damage.
They could boost the power to the point where it boiled the water in your cells. That's what it would take to do damage, because the wavelength is too long to break chemical bonds. That's the neat thing about quantum mechanics; if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
This is because the average person is an uneducated half-wit, who can be scaremongered by cranks and crooks (look at the whole MMR vaccine-autism "controversy").
If people are that concerned about radiation, then I suggest they move into salt mines and pray to whatever deity they hold dearest that neutrinos do indeed only interact weakly with other matter.
Fucking stupid rubes. What a pack of retards.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Canadian government is saying "Whoa, seriously, people, wi-fi won't kill you."
It's the crazy admin folk in charge of these specific schools that are making the rest of us look bad.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That's okay, but this quote is WAY better:
"A group of Ontario parents dubbed the Simcoe County Safe School Committee believes Wi-Fi transmitters in schools may be responsible for a host of symptoms their kids show -- from headaches to an inability to concentrate -- all of which disappear on weekends."
In grade eight my mother noticed that I tended to be sick on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Rather than blaming the t-ness of those days, she correctly deduced that those were the days I had health class with the evil principal.
I wonder how many of those kids have wifi at home?
While the health argument is nonsense, there are a lot of very good reasons to ban wifi in public schools. If the school doesn't have a laptop policy then the students probably shouldn't use them, too much to go wrong, both on a support end and on the student effectively using the tools side of things. I went to both public and highschool in ontario, admittedly, quite a few years ago, but there wasn't really any time except maybe lunch that we would have had anywhere suitable to want a wifi connection anyway. You were either in class, and supposed to be paying attention to the front of the room, or on your way home. And if you actually needed internet access for something legitimate, well there were lots of computers around you had access to. Installing and running a wifi network if it doesn't fit with how the school operates seems unnecessary.
This school in question only goes to grade 6 it looks like. I sort of think that 10-11 year olds probably shouldn't have laptops at school, or smartphones or any of the other modern wifi connected gadgets which sap attention and productivity from the rest of us. They aren't really ready for that responsibility, both in value of stuff or in time management. Highschool might be different, but in public school you get a couple of 15 minute breaks, and some time at lunch, otherwise you aren't supposed to be there. In grade six they're still learning to measure angles with protractors and learning to guess the meanings of words they don't know (source: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/grade6.html) . Looking up angle on wikipedia and finding formal definitions using trig functions seems like it's probably going to do more harm than good. Even if you want to argue a grade 6 kid might be ok with a laptop, grade 4 and 5 are pretty young to be using wireless devices on their own initiative.
On top of all that you get into issues of what has access to the network, and how do you enforce that policy, and if you're going to provide access how do you make it fair for students without the financial means to get laptops etc.
Like I say, in a school that only goes to grade 6 it's a bit different than the usual primary schools that go to grade 8 or a highschool or the like. 8 and 9 year old kids are still learning to write on lined paper, they aren't really ready for constant internet access, and by the time they are, they aren't at this school anyway.
I can see it now, parents suing for past 'damage' caused by wifi.
Part of the problem with that is that everybody seems to want to start with the position that "this is safe unless you can irrefutably prove otherwise", and they go ahead and load everything up with chemicals/whatever and assume it's safe. Which does lead to stuff that you might expect to be dangerous being used until someone can prove it is dangerous. Pharma companies do it all the time, and, have been proven to have lied about risks they knew were there. Think Thalidamide, for instance.
I don't always trust people when they say "oh, sure, this radioactive corn with spiders-silk genes must be perfectly healthy there's no proof to the contrary". The companies introducing these things want us to believe that their chemicals are safe, but it's all discovered after-the-fact.
Assuming everything is safe generally leads to companies pursuing profit with absolutely no regard for if their product is safe. Then they get the rules changed so they're not actually required to tell you about what's actually in it because it hasn't yet been proven to be a possible risk. I wouldn't trust Monsanto on any claims they make about product safety, and I think that to a certain extent, companies should be doing more testing before they release it to the market.
You can go ahead and eat the experimental green goo -- personally, I'd rather they had to put it on the label so I could choose, instead of just saying that it hasn't been proven harmful. It's too damned late by the time they 'discover' that a something we've never tested is, in fact, dangerous.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Anti-scientific 'ban everything' movements are the flipside of the pro-CO^2 believers. People who think they intuitively know more than those who study that field in particular who have research to back up their claims.
It's a failing of our education system that more people don't understand science, the concept. You don't need to understand all the branches of science. You just need to know that 'my kid complains of headaches at school' does not mean you can pin the blame on WiFi without any further tests.
This was probably caused by the same idiots that are trying to push non fluoridated water on us (http://www.waterloowatch.com/). Ontario for some reason seems inundated with quacks and people that think they know whats best for us recently regardless of their education.
Don't tell them the rock is radioactive.
OK /. help me match the list of irrational beliefs with the county.
Canadians think RF affects the body in a non-thermal way, which is hilarious.
South Koreans believe in fan death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
(North Koreans don't have the electricity to run the fans...)
USA has all kinds of irrational beliefs vaguely revolving around religion, abstinence education works, creation science etc.
Any other "funny" ones?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I think you are missing the part where if the fusion reaction at the center stopped the sun would immediately start collapsing.
I don't see a problem with a lack of wifi in schools (with an exception for College/University, and only in designated areas), but not because of any supposed medical reasons.
What reason would any grade-school kid need wifi access for, anyways? What device would a grade school kid have that would even have use for wifi? A laptop? Why would a grade school kid have one? Even if they did, what use would the make of it in school (on a regular enough basis to warrant a wifi network)? A wifi enabled cell phone? You don't need wifi to make a call or send a text, and the phone should be off during class anyways.
No. The sun does not have sufficient mass to overcome degeneracy pressure and collapse into a black hole.
No. The sun does not have sufficient mass to overcome degeneracy pressure and collapse into a black hole.
And even if it did, the resulting black hole would be the same mass as the sun, so the Earth would maintain orbit. People tend to think black holes are cosmic vacuum cleaners and just grab anything and everything; they're not.
Since there's been studies where these "electrosensitives" were placed in Faraday cages, but told they weren't in one, still had symptoms, and when they were placed in places they were told blocked signals, but didn't, and still "got better," yeah, I think that it's okay to think people like that are full of shit.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
iBurst Microwave tower in Craigavon link
Step 1: iBurst erects broadband microwave tower in community.
Step 2: Community forms a 'Task Force' for hearings on health complaints "several rash cases were presented in person and by photo... Headaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns, especially with some of the children". Residents give testimony that symptoms only subside when they leave the area of the tower, and symptoms return when they return to their homes around the tower.
Step 3: iBurst attends meeting and listens to documented health complaints with great interest, and responds Oh by the way, we turned the tower off more than 6 weeks ago. Idiots.
Find the witch! Burn the witch!
Find the witch! Burn the witch!
Burn the witch! Burn the witch! Burn the witch!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Actually, there's these things called "physics" and "biology". When you understand them, you are able to demonstrate that "electrosensitives" are full of shit.
Or should I get just as much consideration for a theory that orange light causes cancer? The effect is below what we can measure with our current methodology, but it exists! We must ban all orange!
I'm not saying that wi-fi is harmless. I am, however, saying that using it is less risky than using antibacterial hand cleanser. That stuff is loaded with various pthalates (known endocrine disrupters and suspected teratogens) that are known to be absorbed across the skin.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I still haven't seen any mentions of wifi allergies that actually passed a double blind test (heck, even a single blind test), but I have seen large numbers of reports in scientific and medical publications where they failed the tests. So I'm really amazed at the horrible symptoms people can generate to plague themselves when they think something else is to blame.
But that's close to the hole. At the distance of Earth, a black hole with the same mass and angular momentum as the sun would have the same gravitational effects as the sun. The region where those massive distortions would happen is inside the volume which currently is occupied by the sun.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.