On 5/18/11 6:42 AM, Rob Atkinson wrote:
> Realize that these people may not be rational and are only interested
> in confirmation of what they already believe.
>
Very much..
Also.. based on recent experience with a local power line issue, while
people talk EMI, the issue is almost always really aesthetic, but that's
not very tangible and objective (no accounting for taste in art, what is
beauty, and all that). "Radiation" at least is objectively dangerous in
some forms, and once you start down the path of trying to explain
different kinds of radiation, etc. it gets tricky. After all they are
willing to hold a 2 watt transmitter next to their head.
And you're often faced with "proving a negative"
You can point to all the government reports (e.g. from FCC OET Bulletin
65), and they'll say "but the govt is in the pocket of big business. I
remember the plutonium tests"
You can point to the IEEE/ANSI C95.1 standard (hundreds of pages) and
they'll say "but that's too much to read, and it's not relevant, because
I know of one case where there was a problem"
The ARRL website has (or used to have, I haven't looked since the
website redesign) a nice write up talking about the epidemiology issues.
Getting back to the proving a negative.. there's a lack of general
understanding about risks and such (John Allen Paulos wrote a book
called Innumeracy which discusses it).
Some years ago, I was involved in an analysis of strong EM fields in a
public display application. I eventually gave up, because they wanted a
*guarantee* that there would be *no* effects now and any time in the
future. As opposed to "compliance with international standards by a
factor of 10-100". I couldn't take the risk that sometime 10 years from
now, someone shows up with a tumor (just like 30% of the population in
general) and an attorney, and claims that my analysis, shielding design,
or measurements were faulty. The revenue from the job was a tiny
fraction of what it would cost to get the insurance. The insurance
company clearly wasn't all that well informed about the real risks
either.. or, now that I think about it, perhaps they were *very* well
informed about the lack of understanding of the general population, and
so they thought the probability of such a lawsuit, which we would
successfully be able to defend at some non-zero cost, was high enough.
I think they either went with a bigger firm (who had the
assets/clout/team of lawyers on standby) or decided to go bare, and use
the usual entertainment industry strategy of creating a separate
corporate entity with no assets to absorb the liability. Once the show
is done, there's nothing and nobody left to sue.
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