There is no WiFi allergy: newspapers misreport PR as science
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
As far as I'm concerned the jury is out on this one, but one important thing to remember is that the nervous system is essentially an electrical aparatus using very low powerlevels so interference would be expected by default rather than the opposite.
We're sensitive to exposure by sunlight, we're sensitive to hard radiation, it is not too much a stretch of the imagination that we're sensitive to HF too.
For much interesting reading about one positive sensitivity:
There are all kinds of wonderfully and terribly potent effects that mysteriously disappear in the harsh light of double-blind testing. That's because they are chimeras in the dark. The fault lies with the darkness, not the light.
If more evidence comes along in the future, I'll change my mind, but right now the evidence is of a kind with water dowsing.
If 1 out of 100,000 people would really suffer from this it would take a major test to figure out who those people are, especially if - like almost every other radiation sensitivity - the effect is cumulative rather than instantaneous.
Let's make an analogy with sunshine:
A person is asked to determine whether sunlight is on a small section of their arm or not. After several guesses we determine that they can't determine this with a probability higher than what you'd arrive at if you guessed.
We can then conclude that 'light sensitivity' is nonsense. But absense of light over longer periods of presense of too much light will definitely have an effect.
If being sensitive to HF is cumulative then we need a completely different test regime than to simply ask people if they can sense a wifi transmitter is on or off.
You'd have to test over periods of days or even weeks.
A less biased and more useful statement would have been "there have been enough studies done on this to show that wifi 'sensitivity' is unlikely to exist". If that was the case I'd like to know.
A scientist goes into the experiment with an open mind, and is ever mindful of the possibility of future evidence causing the most likely hypothesis to change, but is not obligated to keep their mind so open that they never decide anything, even after the evidence is gathered and the peer review is done.
I think you are criticizing me based on the belief that there were no experiments done, and since that is not true, you would agree your criticism is invalid. If that is not true and you still think these experiments are not adequate, and "science" still has some sort of obligation to continue investigation, I would say, what would discharge that obligation? By which I mean, give me a concrete, immobile standard for what it would take to convince you before the fact that the investigation has been done, regardless of the outcome, not after the experiments. As I referenced in another message, you can always move the goalposts, but this is a sign of weakness in a position, not the strength some people seem to take it to be.
The link that you finally provided has some useful information. To me it reads that suggest mixed results but mostly favouring no effect. If I where a betting person I'd say maybe there is a 10% chance that the effect does exist in some form based on my reading of that information. Maybe your interpretation of the probabilities implied by the studies is different to mine. But it leads me to agree with the conclusions of the authors of the meta study that "more research into this phenomenon is required".
I say it's an extraordinary claim because if it were true, it would imply fundamental changes in our understanding of how our bodies work, most people suffer no ill-effects, and I previously knew that double-blind studies could not corroborate the claims.
By definition, any claim that changes our understanding of anything is extraordinary, and it requires supporting evidence.
Signal propagation in neurons is not by electrical conduction, in the wire sense, i believe that this would actually be incredibly slow for the conductivities / currents involved. Rather signals are transmitted by an active chemical process where potassium ions are pulled into and out of the axon in serquence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential.
I'm not sure that this has a direct implication for any kind of interference effect, but just wanted to point out that nerves don't really work like metal wires so how external fields effect the internal currents is not trivial. Also skin-depth/screening is going to play a big role in stopping most of the external radiation.
Also, the tests administered which disproved the so-called "wifi allergy" failed to account for the possibility that the effects take time to develop. I could disprove cat allergies easily using the same method, provided the exposure time was less than the time needed for symptoms to set in.
They used the self-reported time for symptoms to develop from the sufferers themselves. It's not actually science's job to exhaustively test the state space here, since that's not possible. Consequently, there's always another goalpost that science didn't hit (no, wait, it's only 64-bit WEP encryption!)... but it's not logical to thus conclude that the problem is the science. When the goalposts are getting shuffled around the field, the logical conclusion is that the problem most likely lies on the side moving the goalposts, not the side that keeps hitting the goals.
Maybe there's a real problem that is actually something else, though at the moment, "psychosomatic symptoms", Luddite-ism, and superstition seems to cover the observed phenomena pretty well. Like I said in another message, if more data comes in I'll examine it, but right now there is no reason to believe there's any reason to believe that such data will be forthcoming.
(Following up on my first paragraph: This is why "more study is needed" is an information-free statement. There's always more state space to examine; the question is, is there any reason to believe there's anything interesting there? There's so many interesting things that studying things extremely likely to be uninteresting is a waste of time. The exceptions that you might think are leaping to mind, like "Well how will we ever discover anything new if we never try new things?", are not exceptions. Things we have no idea about are interesting. Things that we have a very good idea are going to be uninteresting are what I'm talking about.)
What is know is that electromagnetic energy can and does effect the human body, it is just a question of what thresholds we are talking about. It would stand to reason that some people are effected at different levels than others for various reasons. (Hydration, PH balance, even height could be a factor when talking about specific wavelengths).
All that is to say, the wifi thing may very well be bollocks, but I still would love to see more rigorous research done.
Then, when you're done, compare E to the
+2 NAD+ + 2 ADP + 2 Pi -> + 2 NADH + 2 H+ + 2 ATP + 2 H2O
(simple glycolysis reaction and synthesis of NADH and ATP).
Hint: The amount of ionizing energy of a 5GHz signal is noise in the amount of energy created by normal biological processes. Ars is careful not to say "it can't happen," but I'm going to come out and say -- it can't happen.
What I'm trying to demonstrate is how certainty can vanish when faced with actual consequences.
The implication being that while it's possible, if it were true it would require fundamental changes in our understanding. This is so unlikely to be incalculable.
So in your alternative world of logical meaning what does "it can't happen" equate to anyway? Does it simply mean less than 50% probability or what? If you aren't prepared to put an actual mathematical meaning to probabilistic statements then they are worthless. I certainly am and I am prepared to back them up with cash. What about you? Do your statements mean anything or are they just worthless oratory?
At the start of my thermal physics class, my professor spent a lecture to define what a thermal physicist means when they say "never." We spent time calculating things like the likelihood of Hamlet emerging from 6 billion monkeys banging on keyboards for 13 billions years. This sort of understanding is important when talking about entropy and the laws of thermal dynamics.
For example, a thermal physicist would be comfortable saying all of the molecules in a room will never spontaneously exist on only one side of that room. With simplifying assumptions, we can calculate the probability of that happening. While it's non-zero, it's so infinitesimal that physicists are comfortable saying "never", and we have the second law of thermodynamics.
Your insistence on putting a dollar number on my confidence is strange, since even in your case it's rhetorical. No one is asking you to put money up, nor does the infrastructure or even rules exist for how to handle it. Further, my entire point was to demonstrate that certainty in science is impossible. All we have is confidence in something.
Yes but if you can't define what confidence is what does it mean? When I studied physics we learned to provide confidence intervals for each measurement and subsequent calculation so every variable was of the form X +/- Y. From memory the confidence was a specific number of deviations from the mean. That meant something. Saying 'roughly X' doesn't.
All the examples you provided are so improbable that 'never' is of course appropriate in most contexts. But what do you think 'it can't happen' means in a case like the existence of a phenomena like EM-sensitivity?
10% probability, 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%, 0.001%?
None of these are at all appropriate to describe as 'it can't happen' in this context. I think that in your heart of hearts you know that chances of EM-sensitivity existing could well be better than 1%.
> No one is asking you to put money up, nor does the infrastructure or even rules exist for how to handle it.
Check out http://longbets.org . Otherwise I'd settle for a proof of ID from whomever wants to take the bet and a public and signed statement to the effect that they'll pay up if the conditions are met within a certain time period. I'm pretty sure this type of bet is legal in most jurisdictions.
I've just described a method for quantifying probability. How hard is this to understand? Neither really exist. The measure of X is some exact amount just as a clearly defined proposition is either true or false.
You can actually simplify the confidence interval case to a boolean proposition (e.g. is X greater than 7).
For example, I am confident that special relativity is correct and that the speed of light is the unreachable-ceiling for the speed of matter with mass. A century's worth of observations and experiments support this. However, trying to quantify that subjective confidence is meaningless.
However the main point is that probabilities are required for decision making. Whether you like it or not, any statement must be interpreted probabilistically to be incorporated into decision making. You need to multiply the probability by the risk/reward differential to have basis to work things out. You do this internally without realising it. 'What are the chances that this movie will be good versus the cost of going to see it'. Exaggerated statements can hurt people's decision making capabilities. That is why I oppose them.
You need to replace the Booleans in some of your mental constructs with fractions.
But in order to come up with that number, I had to assume my experiment was correct. I very well could have had a systematic error in the experiment such as misusing my ruler, accidentally holding the rope such as to artificially shorten it, or completely misunderstood the concept of length. My confidence that my experiment is correct is both independent of the confidence interval I reported, and not quantifiable.
Is there a certain class of proposition that is too complicated to be called objectively true? Are all medical theories, for example, simply subjective and have no real meaning in terms of predicting likely future outcomes?
Any statement or theory that does not have predictive power is meaningless. Predictive implies probability. Probability implies odds. Put up or shut up up.