Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Wednesday 22 November 2006, 1:39 PM
School WiFi panic provokes debate
So there seem to be two camps on the radiation/WiFi debate : those who want to deploy and use the technology and those who have concerns over the possible health effects.
I have to admit that I come across many more people in the former camp in my work as an IT journalist, but I was pleasantly surprised when Graham Phillips aka topazg weighed in with his findings.
You can read his post for yourself, but in a nutshell he says he has found significant voltage levels in tests in a room full of WiFi users, and he draws the similarity between WiFi and cellular radio waves.
While WiFi access points use much lower power, they are much closer to the schoolchildren than cellular base stations are, he argues.
Samtheman1k has also been posting again, arguing that it is impossible to evade 2.4GHz (and similar wavelength) radio waves.
I have to say I agree with that, as the rollout of hotspot and outdoor municipal WiFi (and eventually Wimax) covers ever greater physical areas.
If one of my earlier points seemed a little flippant, then I do apologise, but I think we really do have a problem deploying this technology - which should at the end of the day make us more productive - when small groups of poorly-informed parents using gut reactions to selected media reports try to destroy those prospects for us.
Democracy is not at work.
PreviousComments on this post
Hi Richard,
Sorry to jump into this entry as well! I totally agree that over-sensationalism of the issue helps nobody, and that the reaction of "no effect" is the natural one to prevent unnecessary panic where it isn't due.
My main concern is that, as you and Samtheman1k have said, the rollout of these technologies as rapidly becoming extremely widespread. It won't be long before epidemiological work cannot be sensibly carried out as there simply won't be an "unexposed" group for the controls.
In much the same way that the recent Interphone studies have ignored DECT cordless phones from their confounding factors (therefore leaving people in their control group exposed similarly to their mobile phone users group), the effect this has on the study is to dilute any result that may have been present.
I agree that it is difficult to draw the correct balance between increased productivity and technological concerns (often taken out of reasonable proportion) - hopefully it is sensible debate such as we appear to have had here that will help such arguments produce the best decisions!
Best Regards,
- Graham
