Wi-fi madness
I caught the end of a really dreadful Panorama programme on the supposed ‘dangers of Wi-Fi’ yesterday, and was glad that I hadn’t seen the rest, because I might have put my own health in danger by lobbing a heavy object through the screen of my TV. After a bit of calmer reflection later on, I wondered if I’d got an unbalanced view of the show by only watching the end. Perhaps they had presented the scientific evidence in a thorough and balanced way at the beginning, and it only degenerated into doom-laden narration and sinister, pulsing Wi-Fi router graphics at the end?
Judging by the write-up on The Register, the whole thing was uniformly bad. They managed to compare the radiation level tens of centimetres from a laptop with that hundreds of metres from a mobile phone mast, all without mentioning the inverse-square power law. ‘Evidence’ was talked about without giving any details of the methodology used, whether the studies were performed double-blind, or whether the levels of exposure used in animal studies were in any way comparable to normal exposure levels in humans.
People are bad enough at understanding and making decisions about risk and probability without presenting a one-sided account like this, unsupported by evidence. How many of those who protest that Wi-Fi in schools is harming their children drive their kids around in cars or let them play in the sun without sunscreen?
I’m tempted to use a recording of the programme as a teaching aid for my students. Their task would be to identify every instance they can find of scientific inaccuracies, distortions or subtle manipulations of the viewer, perhaps with a small prize for the person finding the most errors. At least then this Panorama programme would have some educational merit.
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In public, scientific evidence is almost never presented in a balanced manner, it is a;most always presented by someone with an axe to grind, or who is in need of having a research budget topped up. Good scientific news hardly ever gets presented at all, because, to the outside observer, it seems that whomever has the most money, and shouts the loudest about gloom and doom attracts biggest grants. The "big" diseases, like aids, attract a disproportionate amount of input compared with far more widespread problems in Africa like blindness.
Britain currently has a huge problem with Macular Degeneration in the elderly, thousands go blind as the NHS seems to have taken a decision not to treat it if they can get away with it; but as it isn't an emotive, high profile disease like breast cancer, little appears done in the way of research.
Money for pure, non-sexy, research must be almost impossible to obtain in the atmosphere of a modern university as they turn their staff into "Profit Centres", and devote their resources to increasing foreign student numbers to boost the cash flow.
by Jonathan Briggs @ 22/05/2007 7:54 pm • Permalink •
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I totally agree, but perhaps it has something else of educational value. Any school which has banned wi-fi on the basis of this programme has a physics teacher who cannot explain the inverse square law and should thus be avoided.
Ben Goldacre's latest piece at badscience.net points out the difference in the treatment of the two experts who were involved: one had (proper) questions asked about his involvement with industry, and acquitted himself fairly well. The other expert, Alasdair Phillips, was not asked similar questions about his income from the sale/rental of 'electrosmog' detectors and EMF 'screening' products. Presumably this is 'good technology'.
by Michael Houghton @ 22/05/2007 8:26 pm • Permalink •
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I believe that the EM field around, say a powerline, declines as the inverse of the distance, and not as the inverse square. A powerline is an continuous line source, and the inverse square drop-off assumes a point source. Comments from electrical engineers or physicists?
by B Schmidt @ 23/05/2007 3:56 am • Permalink •
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Hi from a sometime lurker!
I sat through the whole of this program and was muttering the whole time. I'm always astonished when a show like Panorama manages to be so one-sided for an ostensibly neutral programme. And yes, as always the scientific reporting was unclear, confounding many issues (frequency vs power, effects on cells vs effects on cognitive function, as well as those discussed by others) and compounding them into a single emotion-packed hour.
Good to see Ben Goldacre has written about this.
by simbean @ 23/05/2007 8:22 am • Permalink •
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For those of us who are not physics teachers, what is the inverse square law - in simple terms?
Nice radishes by the way! Nice thing about growing your own: veg looks real and different- not like some tame version of an ideal.
by Ger @ 23/05/2007 11:11 am • Permalink •
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I think that would be really nice, because we (students) understand everything much better when we can "touch" it
by Al @ 23/05/2007 1:40 pm • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: True (particularly about 'unsexy' scientific and medical research), but that's no excuse for a national public broadcaster not to present both/all sides of the argument, in my view.
Michael Houghton: Perhaps the physics teacher did explain it and was shouted down by a headteacher worried about law suits, and parents who listen to the Daily Mail rather than reasoned argument? Ben Goldacre's coverage is very good. Just the word 'elctrosmog' is biased. We don't talk about sunshine in that way, even though it's pervasive radiation (which, in this case, we actually know has harmful effects on health at high levels).
B Schmidt: I'm not a physicist, but I would have thought that a source like a mobile phone mast or a wireless access point or node is more like a point source than a line source, but I'd be interested to know the answer.
simbean: Welcome! I've seen the whole thing on Google Video now (linked from Ben's article), and it really is bad. If I had tried to measure the levels of something critical in an A-level physics (or chemistry or biology) lesson by holding the equipment in a very inconstant and unmeasured position (not to mention taking only one reading, no multiple sampling and taking the mean, etc, etc.), I would have got a telling off and a C 'must be more precise'. Sheesh.
Ger: As previously mentioned, IANAPE (I Am Not A Physicist Either), but from dim recollection from school physics, backed up by looking it up to check, the inverse-square law states that the intensity of a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. In other words, the intensity declines very quickly with distance. There's a nice explanation on Wikipedia, and some diagrams here, which make much more sense to me.
Al: Hope that helps. Where physics is involved, I always like a diagram or graph rather than an equation. Equations scare me a bit.
by bsag @ 23/05/2007 5:32 pm • Permalink •
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I think for this particular mockery of an informational programme, a more interesting excercise for your students might be to find instances of scientific truth and evidence, rather than lack thereof.
by Tim Lucas @ 24/05/2007 1:24 pm • Permalink •
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This might interest you
http://www.badscience.net/?p=415
See in particular response no 12, about the "misleader of the year 2004".
by ThoughtBadger @ 24/05/2007 2:42 pm • Permalink •
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Tim Lucas: It would be more of a challenge, but there are so few instances of scientific truth and evidence in it that there would be very little for them to go on. Plus, it's more fun to find the howlers
ThoughtBadger: That's priceless. The further revelations about Olle Johansson are pretty damning. And I love the bit at the bottom of the 'Misleader of the Year award': "There is no monetary reward associated with the award "Misleader of the Year". You just get the glory
by bsag @ 25/05/2007 5:31 pm • Permalink •
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I have recently started a website (www.wifirisks.com) about wireless networks and whether they present risks to human health. I have not yet formed a settled opinion myself, and with vested interests on both sides of the debate I think we should all maintain a degree of scepticism.
However, it does seem that an increasing number of people are attributing symptoms (rightly or wrongly) to wi-fi and other EMF sources. The science in the Panorama report may have been presented badly, but that in itself underlines the need for more rigorous research in this area.
by Owen Boswarva @ 02/06/2007 3:09 pm • Permalink •
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