Appeals to authority are not a substitute for argument. Please don’t dismiss people’s ideas because you believe they have less ‘scientific pedigree’ than those who you defend. After all, you know nothing of many of the people on here’s experience with EMF radiation and research.

I’ll remind you of the Royal Society’s motto:

‘Nullius in verba’

‘On the word of no-one’

If you have a scientific argument to make then please make it.

Regardless of qualifications, I can’t help noticing that Alasdair Philips has been involved in EMF research, including chairing a number of international scientific conferences and being on more recent UK stakeholder government groups. Ben Goldacre however appears to have had no input into EMF science ever, as far as I can see.

Powerwatch (presumably Alasdair) has now put a full response to this commentary: www.powerwatch.org.uk/news/20070529_panorama_extra.asp,
and it seems rather better reasoned than the rant by Ben on here.

I am interested as to why so many people, with such little apparent understanding of EMF science, seem to claim to be such experts in the field that they can criticise both Sir William Stewart and Alasdair Philips, both of whom I suspect have more experience in knowledge in these fields than everyone on here (including myself obviously) put together.

Get a grip people and let those that know what they are talking about sort things out without ignorant layperson interference.

‘Misleader of the Year’ is a brilliantly understated title – A full 12 points to Sweden

I gather that technology exists to determine a phone’s location quite well, and I propose that in any location where people object to phone radiation, there should be no cellphone service allowed – not necessarily no signal, but no calls to be made or received. Too bad if you’re just driving through, but that’s the tragedy of the commons for you. Probably you can get it down to individual houses. And see how they like that.

Newswatch Video

He states:

“I have read the comments expressed about the Panorama WiFi programme and, though often entertaining, I do think much of it is unfair criticism of a programme with a very straight forward thesis. The head of the HPA, who is a well-respected and influential scientist calls for a review of WiFi technology in schools because he feels it is being rolled out too rapidly….isnt that worth reporting?”

Yet the HPA’s own website states:

“On the basis of current scientific information WiFi equipment satisfies international guidelines. There is no consistent evidence of health effects from RF exposures below guideline levels and therefore no reason why schools and others should not use WiFi equipment.”

news.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=33517

Perhaps the story, if there is one, is why there is such a difference of opinion between Sir William Stewart and the organisation which he is currently head of?

The BBC press department were clearly in full swing prior to the airing of this programme as was seen from the amount of press and online activity since. However the PR campaign was as misleading and one-sided as the programme itself, presenting no new information and delivered in a classic tabloid style designed to increase viewing figures by generating fear in the general public.

Perhaps a better programme might have been an investigation into the digital divide where nearly 1.5 million school age learners in the UK have no access to the Internet at home?

The transmitter only needs to be on when it has something to send. So it is either on or off. Most of the time off. Which is better than being on all the time.

So the signal is pulsed but so what, it means there is less energy emitted.

As the other posters have indicated the radiation is so weak there is no scope for meaningful heating.

Now the UV from the LEDs on the detector thingy that is another question!

It all comes down to people like to have a boegyman. If they do not they will look around until they find one.

Na mate, it ain’t. Nice to see the BBC still (kind of) self-regulates its own bullshit. Just a pity they didn’t show this quite nicely done rebuttal at the same high-exposure time slot as Panorama went out….

If you could *see* WiFi, it would be a rather dim light at a specific colour – a few Gigs – which occasionally, rapidly, changed colour minutely by an imperceptible few megahertz.

I don’t know if there’s something I’m missing completely, but this all sounds such utter bollocks it’s hard to believe it’s happening. Even if WiFi’s puny radio signal were somehow at some undiscovered deadly flesh-eating frequency, the power involved is so fucking minute it wouldn’t harm a fly. I don’t know how many milliwatts the average WiFi card emits, but in lightbulb or LED terms it’s probably imperceptible.

CD

The underlying recommendation of the PP seems to be, as usually expressed, ‘do absolutely buggerall, lest it harm the chill-drenn’

This whole thing reminds me of an anecdote from the days when London homes were first wired up with electricity to replace gas lighting. The neonate Tech Support department received a call from a lady who’d had a lightbulb installed above her bed, complaining that she could feel ‘electrik fluid’ dripping onto her feet at night.

CD

uanr.com/wifiscans/

Some chap managed to get himself a Wifi spectral analyser for the princely sum of $11. It does appear to give power results in arbitrary units. As well as wifi devices he analyses his microwave and cordless phone.

The PULSING point does appear to be another red herring, as geeb points out. I seem to remember wifi works by pulsing the carrier frequency of around 2.4GHZ and doing something very cunning with frequency hopping, but if you do a Fourier analysis on a pulsed 2.4GHz signal then you just find that your pulsed signal is the sum of a bunch of continuous signals of different frequencies. I think I’m right in saying that these frequencies will all be lower than the carrier frequency.

[sarcasm]I suppose the big danger is that instead of one nasty radiation electrosmog wavy death beam, we have to cope with a whole pile of them[/sarcasm]

I have to say the BBC has suffered a “brand contamination event” in my view. Should I really be believing anything they broadcast?

“Leading bioelectromagnetics research investigating possible adverse health effects of microwaves strongly indicates that low levels of pulsing microwave signals affect and stress our essential life processes. Our bodies are remarkably good at coping with occasional ‘attacks’, but often fail when under the stress of constant low level ‘irritation’.

The often cited arguments about ionising (= can break a covalent chemical bond) and non-ionising (= too weak to break a covalent bond) are fundamentally flawed. Firstly, during the ‘dance’ of cellular DNA replication most critical bonds are formed by hydrogen or Van-der-Waal forces that are hundreds of times weaker than covalent bonds. Secondly, there are a number of cell trans-membrane protein signalling mechanisms that are affected by pulsing microwaves, at signal powers vastly below ionising levels, that lead to gene expression relating to cell stress responses and cell growth regulation that are likely to affect cancer incidence and treatment outcomes.”

And indeed there is some evidence that pulsed microwaves can have some odd effects:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

However, the rather novel idea of a radio wave that transmits signals by varying its strength reminded me of something…

…hmm, there’s a carrier wave and it’s modulated…

Put simply, what Powerwatch is worried about is the oldest radio technology of them all: amplitude modulation.

Which in turn led to a head slapping moment about the devices Powerwatch flog on emfields.org, such as the MW1 Electrosmog Detector. Might that be, by any chance, a radio? Whip the choke off your £9.99 Dixons portable and it’ll have the same effect

This is odd, though. What on earth is “pulsing radiation” and why is it so much worse than regular radiation?

Is it some special term I’m not familiar with? I think it means exactly what it says – electromagnetic radiation that is emitted in regular bursts, rather than a constant stream.

Like a lightbulb running off a 50Hz mains supply, then…