BBC Rules That Wi-Fi Radiation Findings Were Wrong 210
Stony Stevenson writes "A Panorama programme claiming that Wi-Fi creates three times as much radiation as mobile phone masts was 'misleading', an official BBC complaints ruling has found. The team involved in the research came under fire from the school where the 'investigations' were held for scaremongering, but now the BBC has come out with an official ruling. 'The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers (one of whom was introduced as a former cancer specialist) who seconded his concerns.'"
OT: Panarama is getting pretty bad (Score:3, Informative)
I love my BBC but when I have to step back and become objective, not because of the topic, but because of the way information is inappropriately portrayed, I'm a little sad inside.
Matt
Re:Of course they were wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
Don't follow parent's links.
Re:Can't these people do maths?! (Score:4, Informative)
[1] For a good demo of this, put a lump of refrigerated butter in the microwave for 30 seconds without the plate spinning. When you take it out, it will be melted (and possibly under quite high pressure) in the middle, but still cold on the outside. Note that this will only work with microwaves where the food is rotated, not those where the magnetron moves.
Re:Programme? (Score:3, Informative)
You get a program on a computer, a programme on TV.. english is funny like that.
Re:I have a dream! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Unscientific bunk (Score:4, Informative)
I think that's a lot of the problem... people haven't figured out that cell phones and wireless transmissions AREN'T magic. Hell, I didn't even get into wave physics until my second year in college, and that was at an engineering school... what chance does a liberal arts major or high-school dropout have of understanding it?
Re:Is BBC it for TV in the UK? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is the BBC used to offer alot of quality shows and things like Panorama and Eqinox (channel 4) used to be great for those intereting in technical things. Unfortunatly the BBC seems to be slowly deciding to cater to the lowest common denominator, so shows like Panarama have turned into complete rubbish and it seems every new BBC documentary has to repeat itself every ten minutes with flashy graphics. Its not that people want this. Heck recently the BBC editors blog asked what things he should think about when he went off to meet other TV producers at some conference. The 600/700 replies all asked for the BBC to go back to producing challenging and inteligent shows and to get rid of stupid reality tv shows.
The BBC isn't the only channel we get in the UK but it tends to be the best with the most varied tv and inteligent, when you've got the BBC producing the Planet Earth documentary compared to Channel 4's chantelle's throwing a tantrum in the recent big brother, or some old woman killing someone in corrie on ITV what do you think is going to get reported.
BTW the TV channels over here keep being hit by various scandals (From the Blue Peter people choosing anouther rabbits name and not the one people voted for, to various phone in competitions being rigged.)
Re:Is BBC it for TV in the UK? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/terrestrial/epg/ [digitalspy.co.uk]
The first five of those are available analogue (which is currently being phased out); everything is available on a series of digital multiplexes which may or may not be available depending on where you live. If you follow the website links from the Digitalspy page you should be able to get to "who owns what", but in brief the BBC is publicly owned and licence-fee supported, ITV is a standalone company, ad-supported, Channel 4 is publicly owned, ad-supported and Five is owned by RTL.
The largest satellite operator is Sky TV:
http://www.sky.com/portal/site/skycom/tvguide [sky.com]
(mostly owned by News Corp)
The largest cable operator is Virgin Media
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/service.do?id=1 [virginmedia.com]
(standalone company)
Re:Can't these people do maths?! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is BBC it for TV in the UK? (Score:3, Informative)
When TV got started in the UK, there was the BBC and only the BBC and it was good. This is also the source of the TV tax in the UK. Where as in the US, we had CBS, NBC and ABC. PBS in the US was not established until 1969. In the UK, it was THE station at the beginning. Another difference, the BBC gets most (all?) of it's funding from the TV tax. The PBS stations get over 85% of it's funding from donations. There are other networks now, but the BBC is equivalent to combining ABC/NBC/CBS all into one.
Any other questions?
Re:I have a dream! (Score:2, Informative)
This is due to the photoelectric effect [wikipedia.org] which, simply put, means that if an incoming photon has an energy higher than a specific value, (called the material's work function [wikipedia.org]), it will give an electron in that material enough energy to break free and disappear off elsewhere. The material then gains a small positive charge - in other words, it becomes ionised.
Of course EM radiation in the sort of bands that WiFi uses has nowhere near enough energy to do that to most materials. So yes, it's nothing to worry about and yes, I guess I'm just being pedantic. Oh well
Re:Can't these people do maths?! (Score:3, Informative)
As a ham radio operator I have to point out that RF radiation exposure limits are a function of frequency and time, and the higher the frequency you deal with the less time you should be exposed to it!
Some helpful stuff on that for the concerned:
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet65/oet65b.pdf [fcc.gov]
http://n5xu.ece.utexas.edu/rfsafety/ [utexas.edu]
Re:Can't these people do maths?! (Score:3, Informative)
Um, not anywhere on planet earth. Typical output power from the final amplifier stage of an 800MHz cell amplifier is nowhere above 25-30w at the very most. 1900MHz CDMA cells average between 4w and 15w max output at those frequencies. If you can provide data on any cell tower with final amplifier output in even the 100W range let-alone 1000W, I'd love to see it.
"However, signal intensity per surface unit decreases as the square of the distance. So if you are 100 meters (300 feet, one-half furlong for our US friends) from a 1-kW cell tower, you get the same exposure as if you are one metter (0.005 furlong, 3 ft) from a wifi router. And of course, all of this is dwarfed by the intensity of signal you get a few centimeters away from a 1-W cell phone."
There haven't been any 1w cell phones manufactured in the US for many years. 600mW and lower has been the standard for quite some time.