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?
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.
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
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.
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.