Let’s be rational about SAR ratings
It seems like the blogosphere and news media is eating up the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) ten best and worst cell phones when it comes to “radiation”. After reading the usual responses from readers, it seems like a lot of people are needlessly concerned about the EWG’s cherry picked report when they should be listening to the American Cancer Society.
Welcome to the failure of the news media.
“We’re All Gonna Die” sells. “We might tingle a bit” doesn’t.
@nucrash
I think unfortunately, it’s deeper than this. People are genuinely concerned about this because they don’t really get science. They don’t understand what these SAR values mean or that it isn’t nearly as high in actual practice. Like I said, even if SAR levels were set to 0.16 watts/kg or 0.016 watts/kg instead of 1.6 watts/kg, people will still be worried about the “worst 10″ list which opens the gates for ambulance chasers.
A good piece from Ars about ‘junk science.’
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/09/universities-band-together-to-aggregate-research-news.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
Looks like as the blogosphere takes hold, we are going to have more ill-informed than informed. The real problem with this is that the ill-informed have an equal voice and more numbers to be heard.
The biggest question is though, and you have asked this before, “What do people want out of this?” If this was a corporate push, I could see the push for more texting plans. If this were an environmental push, how is anyone to get money out of it? I could even see the head set industry pushing this from a distance.
Are we trying to blanket our selves with cell phone towers to help out our weaker phones, or are we trying to have stronger phones so we don’t have to blanket ourselves with cell phone towers? Either way, I don’t see an overall drop in radiation. I personally think that if the individual cell phone user has more power, then they can be held accountable for said designated radiation so we don’t have to work about “killing” everyone else. I would consider this akin to smoking vs chewing.
Let me restate, I know that Cell phones don’t kill people and that this is complete and total junk science. Much like a friend of mine who correlated the sale of ice cream to an increase in violent crime, I don’t buy that Cell phones are responsible for higher instances of neglected children. I think that parents spending too much time on their cell phones and not spending time with their children are responsible for rowdy children. As for the cancer instances that aren’t happening on larger samples but happening in smaller samples, I have no clue.