What should you say to a parent scared of Wi-Fi?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/21/parent-scared-wifi

by CaptainMorgan • 17 years ago

24 45 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

dazzawazza• 17 years ago

Anyone who has ever been to a school meeting where there are a large number of parents will realise that some adults are scared of the universe and everything it contains.

turning_point• 17 years ago

This situation can hopefully be improved by educating parents about reality.

tomjen2• 17 years ago

Properly, but then the parents would have attended the school in the first place.

bsaunder2• 17 years ago

Some people seem to actively replace reality with their own notions. It continually baffles me. I can only suspect that I do the same thing.

Zaak• 17 years ago

Some fears can be solved by educating ignorance. Other fears however, are due to untreated anxiety disorders, and need medical help.

gaius• 17 years ago

You know, recently in the UK, there was a case where the authorities said a woman was too stupid to have children:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/scotland...

This law should be applied in this case.

danw• 17 years ago

"Schools need wireless networks; the pupils need a device (handheld computer, or laptop) each, which they have access to whenever it is needed"

Why do we need one laptop per child in a school? Computers are useful tools but hardly central to learning.

travisp• 17 years ago

I've observed some of these classrooms where every child is using a laptop. About the only benefit is the occasional need to carry less books on their back -- the rest just provides a neat factor and gives the kids an increased familiarity with technology. Education isn't suffering from a lack of laptops and technology.

bsaunder2• 17 years ago

I think you are undervaluing "increased familiarity with technology".

I think the school systems are missing out on the transformational capability inherent in the use of technology. It's like using airplanes to drive around the country without ever leaving the ground. Until they transform the process of education, it's just typing instead of writing.

StrawberryFrog• 17 years ago

Quite telling is the data point (not a very accurate data point, but the only one around), that the radiation from wi-fi was below detectable levels, but the child's night-light was not. If wi-fi is fearsome, is it fearsome compared to what?

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

It's fearsome compared to not-wifi. :(

thaumaturgy3• 17 years ago

Wi-Fi is technological magic, and some people are afraid of that.

Also: unfortunately, a lot of the approaches here aimed at educating people about wifi won't work. Not that the approaches are wrong -- they're the best approach -- but they still won't work in too many cases, because people sense that they have no reason to trust you, and if you're trying to change their opinion, it's only because you're trying to push your own agenda forward at the expense of their health.

People in that mindset then treat facts as scary things that confuse them, so they avoid them altogether.

I live in an area with a higher-than-average ratio of such people, and we also happen to have a fairly thriving tech community. The wifi "debate" comes up often, there have been town meetings about it, it's interfered with city-wide wifi rollouts, etc.

ulf2• 17 years ago

A killer argument in those cases (though not always applicable) is to ask the people if they are smoking. If so, they do not have any reason to be afraid of any environmental influence, since smoking will definitely kill them first.

yummyfajitas5• 17 years ago

I've made similar comparative harm arguments on a number of occasions. For example: the higher fat content in the organic milk [1] will kill you long before trace amounts of evil scary chemicals in inorganic milk will.

Strangely, arguments like that never seem to convince anyone. Anyone susceptible to the power of reason is already convinced.

[1] 1%/2%/3% milk has a wide range of acceptable values. I.e., 3% means "between 2.8% and 3.5%" or something like that. Organic milk is always at the top of the range, which makes it taste better. (It's also pasteurized at a lower temperature.)

ulf2• 17 years ago

I drink organic milk myself, never having considered milk that deadly. I think most people consume only a minor part of their fat through milk, dont they?

scott_s4• 17 years ago

Fat is not a poison. Your body needs it.

chollida12• 17 years ago

You'd have to drink a tonne of milk for this argument to hold. Steroids in non organic milk, and more so in beef, on the other hand are a much larger threat.

the_real_r2d2• 17 years ago

Well, that could backfire. I would imagine that the parents complaining about the WiFi radiations are very probable to be non-smokers.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

This will almost certainly backfire.

Fears like this one are all about the power of suggestion. They are irrational. Don't try to deploy rational arguments against an irrational person. [1]

In this case, bringing up smoking is a big mistake, because now you're subtly training people to associate WiFi with something that (a) is now known to be deadly; (b) is the subject of extensive public health campaigns, taxes, legal sanctions, etc., and (c) was widely thought to be okay for decades, was even advertised by doctors as good for your throat. [2]

It's all about the subtext. Go buy some copies of the local tabloids and study their technique. If you put a picture of a fluffy bunny next to a photo of a barking dog, a photo of an angry cop, a photo of a weeping parent holding a dying child, and a blaring headline ("RABID RABBIT RAMPAGE"), you can get people to be deathly afraid of fluffy bunnies. Pavlov and Skinner were too simplistic, but they were not 100% wrong.

So don't try to argue that WiFi is "much safer than these terribly dangerous things that you do every day". Don't mention dangerous things. Emphasize the evidence for safety, talk about the very low powers involved, talk about the kinship between microwaves and radio waves [3] and emphasize that these waves have been used for communications for decades without a problem. Then talk about the advantages.

[1] Lesson two: Every human is irrational to some degree.

[2] Or by people in white coats, anyway. Though I'm sure many of them were real doctors. Lesson three: Being a doctor is neither a hallmark of rationality nor a proof against avarice.

[3] But stop short of mentioning gamma rays in this context, because everyone knows they can cause you to become the Incredible Hulk.

cool-RR2• 17 years ago

I don't understand why everyone is so sure that Wi-Fi is not dangerous.

I know a few things about Physics and radiation, and I know Wi-Fi is supposed to be in the same frequency as wireless phones and microwaves, but still I would prefer not to be too close to a wireless router (Although of course, in this time and age I often have to put this concern aside and spend a lot of time close to routers anyway.)

Firstly, research about radiation, and generally research regarding health matters, is always vague and ambivalent, probably because of the big commercial interests involved.

Secondly, the fact that wireless routers "operate in 2.4GHz like wireless phones" does not calm me. How do you know they transmit only in this range? How do you know it's exactly the frequency that matters? Maybe it's some combination of frequency, amplitude, and something else? How do you know wireless phones aren't dangerous in the first place?

I've worked enough with technical things to know that eventually, you can't really know with certainty whether something will work. (Or in this case, whether something will not harm your health.) Sometimes everything makes sense, but you're still getting a different result.

If this helps you accept my point, I think Knuth's quotation is relevant: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

borism5• 17 years ago

Indeed.

The problem is, so often, that both proponents and opposers of something, whether it is Health Effects of EM Radiation or Global Warming, either approach those problems with unscientific religiosity, or take some narrow scientific evidence that exists to further their view and discard any criticism.

For our own survival we need more and better research in those issues, not the kind of political and religious pissing contests that we mostly have now.

jerf2• 17 years ago

"For our own survival we need more and better research in those issues,"

Knee-jerk calling for more research is just a way of cloaking ignorance in a lab coat. The research has been done: http://www.wi-fi.org/files/wfa_wi-fi_health_faq.pdf

(Yeah, I noticed the source, but all the studies have come up the same way and they had a decent summarization of the issues, so why not?)

The research is uniformly negative. Additionally, there is no plausible physical mechanism that might cause damage. New evidence can always change the most likely outcome, but right now the evidence is so overwhelming that it's not worth pursuing this research any further over other things more likely to produce some sort of interesting result, and the onus is firmly on those who claim it's harmful to prove it.

(Incidentally, that's been done too, a blind test of people claiming to be sensitive to WiFi, in a room with a WiFi device rigged to have blinkenlights independent of the actual WiFi signal. Complainants failed to identify when the signal was on.)

hegemonicon• 17 years ago

The amount of energy put out by Wi-Fi is absolutely dwarfed by the radio, television, and cell phone EM signals that we are swamped in at all times. And none of them put out enough energy to do anything but raise our temperature an immeasurably small amount.

See here: http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/09/wifi_and_radiat...

cool-RR2• 17 years ago

Some people say that, some people say the opposite. How can I know which are right?

borism5• 17 years ago

Do you sit right next to radio/TV transmitter day and night?

Does you cell phone use always-on connection?

thaumaturgy3• 17 years ago

Well, this is called argument-from-ignorance; as others have pointed out, science is pretty bad at proving negatives. So, no, there are no guarantees.

So what we do is we compile the information that we do have, and we try to study effects, establish correlations, and then -- if we're somewhat lucky -- we can reach a conclusion about causation. In the case of the question, "is X dangerous", mostly all we can do is rate it on a relative scale compared to other common things.

(I might get some of the following wrong, but hopefully only in detail. The gist should be correct.)

We know for example that most of the causes of, let's call it spontaneous illness -- tumors and certain diseases and the like -- in healthy adults is the result of damage to nuclear DNA. We also know that most such damaged cells, or cells that are the result of damage during recombination, are attacked and consumed by a person's own immune system. Most of the rest are never viable to begin with -- think of it as a computer program with a serious bug -- and many of the remaining don't produce any viable damaged cells during mitosis.

But, still, we should be cautious about things that do damage to DNA. So, what kinds of radiation do damage to DNA? Well, ionizing radiation does, and as far as we know, it's the only kind that does.

Factors like amplitude, total power, and phase are actually well understood. Scientists shy away from saying with absolute certainty that a particular wavelength is non-ionizing, because they have to take into account other factors, like total power involved. However, microwave radiation -- the 2.4 ghz part of the electromagnetic spectrum -- is pretty safely in the non-ionizing range.

Now, at sufficient power levels, microwaves might cause some minor amount of radiation damage to tissue, but it would have to be an enormous amount of power. Home wifi routers measure their radiation output in milliwatts. You're more susceptible to greater doses of radiation from standing too close to your microwave, and you could probably do that your entire life with no adverse effect.

(In case you're curious: microwaves heat things due to frequency resonance in molecules; i.e., they get certain kinds of molecules -- those containing water -- really excited without stripping their electrons. See also http://www.gallawa.com/microtech/howcook.html)

And all of this is of course aside from the numerous studies which have failed to produce any evidence so far of actual physiological sensitivity to cell phones and wifi and the like -- we're just visiting theory here.

So, how dangerous is it comparatively then?

You are at far more specific danger from walking around outside in the sunshine for just a few minutes than you are from wifi, in terms of ionizing radiation. Although much of the ultraviolet spectrum is non-ionizing, some of it is not, and a small portion of the heat from the sun is ionizing radiation.

And this is where the inconsistency in wifi paranoia comes out, because if you're really, truly that concerned about very very small amounts of radiation, then you shouldn't be venturing around outside wearing anything less than full clothing.

borism5• 17 years ago

You're right but you miss the point about how people generally perceive danger - that is mainly in emotional, not rational way.

As you point out, science is bad at proving negatives. It is also very good at introducing new unknowns. Combine those two, and you may understand why sometimes people get so emotionally distressed about some new use of science.

And if you develop this thought even further, then you may find that healthy level of skepticism about some new technology is actually not so irrational, considering many unknowns it opens up.

yummyfajitas5• 17 years ago

We know plenty about it. The mechanism for causing cancer is ionizing radiation. The ionization rate for radiation is proportional to (I'll ignore boring constants) Amplitude^N, where N is the least integer such that N omega > - E_0.

Here, E_0 is the energy of the bond the radiation breaks, and omega is the frequency of the radiation. Amplitude is small (you'll be thermally cooked long before Amplitude > 1), so the ionization rate is a small number to the power of large N.

It's virtually unmeasurable for small amplitude and large N. Typically to measure ionization in the microwave regime, one needs to use a microwave resonating cavity.

(I have a paper doing some rigorous math on this topic. The paper itself is not so interesting, but the references might be useful to you. Many of them go into the basic physics of radiation interacting with matter. http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/pubs/dipole_delta.pdf )

Oranj• 17 years ago

Introducing foil hats as part of the uniform should calm the parents.

What should you say to a parent scared of Wi-Fi?

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