Well, I got it up even if, with 10 minutes to go, I don't have time to go through and check it for spelling, coherency, logic, etc. I call that the "TV Science Approach".
I'm not sure if any of you saw the episode of
Panorama on BBC 1, which I mentioned yesterday and the day before. If you had (or even if you hadn't and had simply noticed the
various articles about it that showed up in various places), you'd know that it was about fears and concerns over "radiation" emitted by Wi-Fi technology and how it's going to kill all your children, etcetera, etcetera.
Before I continue, I'd like to point out just how loosely the term "radiation" is used in the program. It's used to refer to any signal coming from a Wi-Fi source and mobile phones and is never accompanied by words such as "electromagnetic" or replaced with something like "radio waves". Because in TV land, radiation is always something dangerous and always glows green. Even when the deadly phlebotinum radiation doesn't come into contact with humans, it creates things like Godzilla. Do you want Godzilla created in your child's classroom? Do you want your kids eaten by Godzilla?!
Do you?!?!!Of course, anyone with a basic knowledge of science or physics can tell you that the term "radiation" covers a very broad spectrum of things, including the electromagnetic spectrum of things, which also includes harmless visible light, not to mention infrared and all the TV and radio waves which are filling the air around you.
Panorama isn't technically wrong with it's description of radiation being given off by Wi-Fi, but you can't help but feel that they're hardly taking a balanced view of the debate.
This also comes through in their choice of experts. Of about 5 scientists who appeared throughout the course of the programme, only 1 was supportive of Wi-Fi and several were political figures who were known for making cases against Wi-Fi. I'm not saying that these people shouldn't have been represented, I'm just suggesting that it would have been better if they'd consulted more scientists who take the same view as the World Health Organisation and say that it isn't a problem. It also didn't help their credibility that they went out of there way to find an expert that they could describe as eccentric and imply was merely an industry puppet.
Constant comparisons were drawn between Wi-Fi signals and mobile phone signals, though the show never really drew a line between emissions by phones themselves and the emissions of masts. Constant reference was made to "similar type[s] of radiation" and the "same sort of radiation" at "similar levels". They discovered 3 times the "level" of radiation about 1 metre away from a Wi-Fi enabled laptop than they did standing 100 metres away from a mobile phone mast. They attempt to justify this by saying that this is "at the point at which the beam was at greatest intensity where it hit the ground". I'm not sure exactly what they mean by that, but at neither attempt was their any repetition of the "experiment", nor was any accounting for background radiation and other factors taken into account.
Perhaps it was done off screen, though they have a deliberate shot of the presenter and the tester coming straight into a classroom and taking the reading immediately. While it doesn't necessarily prove their results wrong, this lack of basic experimental control (and I mean
basic, my 11 (maybe 12, I can't remember) year old sister would know enough from her Science class to do a better experiment than that) and procedure, combined with their vague description of "levels" (no specific units were given and the only readout was a nondescript wave form on a surprisingly camera friendly hand-held screen) lends serious doubt to the credibility and reliability of their tests.
Let's not think scientifically here (not that they were anyway, but you get my point) and just apply a little common sense. A Wi-Fi router such as you might get in a school or home has a very small range, on in the tens of metres, and that's not accounting for walls and other obstructions. A mobile phone mast can send a signal over 50km or more, if on flat ground. Even in poor terrain it has a range hundreds, almost thousands, of times greater than a normal wireless network. And don't forget that a mobile phone has to transmit that distance back again.
Certainly, the transmitters in a citywide network will be more powerful than that, but each of them still only covers a few square kilometres, or else there would be no need for distributed nodes. So how can it be possible that Wi-Fi is 3 times more powerful than a mobile phone mast?
Later, they go to a town with a system of Wi-Fi nodes which provide free coverage to the city. The presenter walks around with a simple radiation monitor in his hand, with no shown calibration of any kind and and unknown scale, and notes that it goes "into the red there" while near a small market stall and, later, a node.
Once they're done making a mockery of the scientific process, they move on to a more specific case, one of a woman who believes she has a condition called "electrohypersensitivity". What this means is that when she's around strong "radiation" (presumably radio waves at the relatively narrow frequencies at which mobile phones and Wi-Fi devices operate) she gets headaches, miscellaneous pains and various other vague symptoms. What I find most interesting about this is not that
Panorama simply accepts this woman's claims as fact, but that this woman, despite her presumably constant pain,
chooses to live next to a mobile phone mast.
This would be somewhat like a man who breaks his leg and refuses to give up on training for the London Marathon. Bloody stupid.
Panorama "investigates" these claims in their own unique, balanced way by travelling to Sweden, the only country in the world that recognises EHS as a disability. In Sweden, we are introduced to a group of people who have taken advantage of grants from their government to have their homes coated in anti-radiation paint, and my own research shows that this can go far further, with the inclusion of shielded cabling and other special provisions, all at the expense of the Swedish taxpayer.
Panorama says that up to 3% of the Swedish population is believed to suffer from this condition and, applying that figure to the UK's population, concludes that there are 2 million EHF sufferers in the UK. 2 million, huh? That's an awful lot of people to be suffering from a condition which yields precisely 1110 results on Google, about half of which seem to be other explanations for the symptoms, ranging from fungi infections to simple psychosomatic causes. Or, to put it less tactfully, they're all imagining it.
The show then turns to one of their experts who has recently conducted a study on believed EHF sufferers. I'm not about to question their expert's credentials or the validity of his experiments, but the
Panorama team interpret the limited data in a very interesting way. It's pointed out that the results of the study have not yet been released but that they've managed to get the results of their pet EHF "sufferer".
Apparently, she could tell whether a transmitter, outputting the type of radiation she believed herself to be sensitive to, was on or off two thirds of the time. It may just be the sceptic in me, but I am distrustful of two kinds of numbers reported in the media: simple fractions and anything exactly divisible by ten. I believe that, given their views as shown in the rest of the show, the journalists here would be far more inclined to round up rather than down.
But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that their EHFer got it right two thirds of the time, or 67% (being kind and rounding up). That sounds like a lot until you realise that, because the radiation could only be on or off, simple probability suggests that she could get it right 50% of the time just by guessing. From this single, inconclusive result,
Panorama's crack team concludes that they had been right all along in their assertion that Wi-Fi was dangerous. It looks to me like a (carefully chosen?) statistical fluke, scientifically meaningless without further results and context.
Just a few further points before I conclude. You may well have noticed that most of the reports about
Panorama's "study" describe the episode as an investigation into the effects of Wi-Fi networks in schools but, even from my brief summary above, you can see that the program spent an awful lot of time wandering around cities, travelling to Sweden and talking about mobile phones. Not to mention their quibbles over government guidelines which might just be based on incorrect data (and even if the guidelines were to be revised, there's no indication given that Wi-Fi and mobile phone technology would breach any new limits) and there constant reference to studies done on mobile phone technology (which one of their own experts admits have been largely inconclusive, when taken as a whole).
It strikes me that the whole "your children are in huge Godzilla-related danger" angle that was played up in the press was no more than a headline grabbing tagline to summarise this twisted little mess.
They also seem to have a rather poor grasp of the technology they are investigating, suggesting that Wi-Fi internet access makes no use of modems. While the user on a wireless network may not have to use a modem directly at their computer, any connection to the internet requires a modem somewhere along the line (see what I did there?).
Maybe that little error could be forgiven but one of their more political experts made a statement, supported by the show, that I could not believe. He said that Wi-Fi was different to mobile phones because you could choose to have a mobile phone but not whether you were in a hotspot or not. He reasoned that this is why something should be done about wireless networks without necessarily encroaching on people's beloved mobiles.
But, I thought even as he said it, surely you are far more likely to be in an area covered by a mobile phone mast that you are to be in a Wi-Fi hotspot? As evidenced by a
recent call from the top of Mount Everest, you really can't escape that kind of "radiation".
I could go on and on about sensationalism, poor logic, terrible science, unbelievable bias, lack of detail, lack of common sense and a dozen other inconsistencies and errors in the show but I won't. It's just another example of the level to which television and the media have sunk in a world where success is dictated by ratings and statistics as questionable as those used in the show. Science is abused by scaremongers to get the facts and the reaction they want and results are twisted or falsified by those that do not understand them in order to further their own agenda.
The worst thing about all this is not that this kind of garbage gets on television. While we may not have the choice of avoiding the television signals flying around us, we can simply switch to another channel when garbage like this comes on.
No, the most tragic thing here is just how many people will believe this nonsense. Who won't question it. I have no qualifications or expertise in this field but with nothing other than my mind, my notepad and the odd Google search, I've found
Panorama's argument to be so full of holes that it's practically a net. And yet, people see the show on TV, read about it in newspapers and on websites equally desperate for an attention grabbing headline (one I saw went so far as to say that there were fears over "computers" in classrooms with no mention of wireless networks until you clicked the link and read the article) and they believe what they are told.
Because of the falsehoods spread by this show and the scaremongers that make it and swarm to its "evidence", money will be wasted investigating spurious diseases, parents will panic and force schools to rob their pupils of easy access to the internet, costing more money and wasting time having wired networks fitted. Just 2 days after the program's airing and it's
already begun. People will worry every time they see a marvel of technology and that's not just silly, it's sad.
Labels: alasdair, essay, rant
