11 ms·

Why isn't it tested at 2mm if that is the standard useage? Why rely on a model? 20,000 phones are being sold an hour. Why not buy 200 phone's off 200 shelves

Why isn't it tested at 2mm if that is the standard useage? Why rely on a model? 20,000 phones are being sold an hour. Why not buy 200 phone's off 200 shelves and test them comprehensively at 0 mm, 1mm, 2mm, 3mm ..... The cost to volume sold is completely negligible and it is useful consumer information as 3 percent of the population is electrosensitive. An estimated 30 million people suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue) in the world and the average diagnosis takes seven years. Chronic health conditions are increasing exponentially. Healthy people aren't sensitive to environmental stimuli but unhealthy people are and the number of chronically unhealthy people grows by the day as livers strain under the stressors and weakening of modernity. Turn your wifi off in your house at night and see if you sleep any better. Pretty simple anecdotal experiment. A house without the wifi on or excess electrical componentry on has a nicer feel. We did not evolve with this electromagnetic radiation and the cost of testing is negilible given the global population's growing exposure to it and something interesting may fall out of the research. The risk of Apple having to make slight design modifications if research raises an issue is not a huge concern of mine. One hours phone sales should cover it and then they could further differentiate their products and raise prices. How many electrical engineering schools are there in the world? Sounds like a great way for a university to get their staff free Iphones with a research grant.

mopsi 7y ago
> Turn your wifi off in your house at night and see if you sleep any better. This needs to be a blind test, e.g. you track your sleep quality over a longer period of time while a script turns wifi off on random nights.
- JshWright 7y ago
  Does scientific rigor really seem like something the parent comment is concerned with?
- gus_massa 7y ago
  And you cover the green leds with tape mask, or get version with an accurate fake blinking patterns.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    My ISP supplied router has an option to turn the lights off, which is great as otherwise it illuminates the whole hallway. I don't get why electronics makers think their product needs to have such bright lights.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
      Simple. The engineers are working on the product during the day in well-lit spaces. Since the lights are always on, it never occurs to anyone that the LEDs might be too bright at night.
      - Shikadi 7y ago
        Alternatively, engineers point it out, and product managers don't listen
    - deftnerd 7y ago
      In a bright environment, a bright LED is useful. Instead they should also have a light sensor used to determine the ambient light level, and then adjust the status LED display accordingly. My Samsung TV does this with its "powered on" light. Of course, that adds to the BOM and manufacturers love shaving off fractions of a penny. Asking them to add an extra 50 cents of parts for something consumers don't think about prior to purchase is a lost cause.
      - im3w1l 7y ago
        Old LEDs are fine in both bright and dark environments, too-bright LEDs are a recent (5y? 10y?) thing. I wonder if LCD could be even nicer... I don't think I've ever seen single-pixel LCD status indicator.
        Marsymars 7y ago
        > I don't think I've ever seen single-pixel LCD status indicator. I approximate that by using a pin to poke a hole in the electrical or gaffer tape that I use to cover the lights.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  And make sure that phones aren't getting messages and bleeping during the night when wifi is on.
- meekstro 7y ago
  You could just try it. Turn off the electrical stuff before you go to bed but hey everyone has freedom of choice.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Placebos work. If that's what you want, cool. If you want to figure out if RF affects sleep, that's cool too, but you'll need to double blind the experiment. Because placebos work.
    - meekstro 7y ago
      Yes but so does human intuition and its a heck of a lot faster. A healthy person can endure a toxic environment. An unhealthy person becomes more unhealthy from increased toxicity. I’m not saying electromagnetic radiation makes a healthy person unwell i’m saying it delays or worsens recovery of some unhealthy people and there are million different subsets of unhealthy people so which subset are you going to run the double blind placebo on before you decide reduce electromagnetic radiation while you sleep. It’s a simple experiment anyone can try. Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment as per research which eliminates electromagnetic radiation from the equation. I think its a zeitgeber in subsets sick people but there’s no profit in researching that so the only tools you have are existing research, intuition, self observation and logic. People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial. Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression. Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost is the smartest thing someone can do with the available evidence.
      - jjoonathan 7y ago
        Placebos in truth's clothing are toxins of human society. Please verify placebo vs truth before spreading, k? Thanks. > Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment Or two weeks away from the grind reduces stress. Or getting away from artificial lights/schedules reduces stress. Or it selects for people+times with less stressed. Or more healthy. Or higher SES. Or you're getting away from pollution. Or you need temperature variation to feel healthy. Or any two of those. Or three! Many plausible explanatory factors compete with RF, and you'd have to control for them in order to point the finger at RF. That's not impossible, and not even particularly difficult, but it does mean that you can't go on a camping trip, get better sleep, and then use that as proof that RF was to blame for your insomnia. > People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial. The double blind trial is how you establish whether or not something is a placebo. > Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression. You need to blind you studies whether or not you have a plausible mechanistic explanation. You don't need a plausible mechanistic explanation to blind your studies. > Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case Which one(s)? > reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost Foregoing the advantages of technology is not zero cost. If you mean that turning your router off at night is zero cost, go ahead! I don't take issue with that. I do take issue with spreading unblinded anecdata, because whether or not RF-induced-insomnia is real, RF-anxiety-induced-insomnia is definitely real, and anecdata like your own definetly spread it. If RF-induced-insomnia is real, that's for the best, but if what you experienced was a placebo (and I'd bet a substantial sum of money that it was), then unblinded anecdata literally are the problem. And that's not cool. In the privacy of your own home: do what works and ignore the haters! In society: please apply good experimental technique before causing anxiety in others. It's only polite.
- notjtrig 7y ago
  When I was mining bitcoin I discovered graphics cards under load mess with my sleep, I would wake up feeling like I was very sick if I slept in the same room as a rig.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Noise, heat or blinking LEDs should be your first suspicions. Maybe transformer whine, with low quality power supplies. EM noise should be very low down your list of plausible causes.
bananabreakfast 7y ago
Electrosensitivity is not a thing. It's a disorder made up by hypochondriacs. If you said 3 percent of the population are hypochondriacs then I would believe you.
- meekstro 7y ago
  Electrosensitivity is denied by intelligent healthy people who have never dealt with unexplainable fatigue relying on statistics and body system diagnosis that is inadequate for explaining chronic complex health conditions. They're all just whinging man. Not one of them ever hoped it was all in their head and they could think their way out of it. Hacker News is a perfect subset of people lacking the perspective to consider exploring the possibility that electrosensitivity is a thing that occurs with declining health. Why so much negativity about researching something so ubiquitous? Let's discuss inverse power laws and quadratic functions, maybe we can build a machine learning model with our deficient statistics instead of taking two hundred phones out of two billion and testing their electromagnetic radiation at multiple distances and angles so we actually have a reliable model.
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    > Why so much negativity about researching something so ubiquitous? There's nothing wrong with researching electrosensitivity to see if it's real, and to what extent. Heck, I've designed studies to test it (never carried out). The problem is not researching it, yet continuing to insist that it is the reason for people's "unexplainable" chronic pain / fatigue when there's currently zero non-anecdotal evidence for it.
    - meekstro 7y ago
      I communicated poorly I accept that but I never insisted it was the reason for unexplainable chronic pain/fatigue. ER amplifies explainable fatigue in some situations hence complaints from three percent of the population. My pure guess is that there's zero non-anecdotal evidence because it is difficult to study a subset of people dismissed as hypochondriacs and it is definitely not profitable. I'm going to look at the research and I really hope I have to eat my words so I can relax more around my Iphone and laptop but I know from personal hard fought experience while extremely fatigued that minimising ER exposure was helpful. I'm glad to hear there's a gap in the literature and it will be fun figuring out why or that I'm completely wrong on this. Chronically fatigued people do not have the energy spare to even contemplate critiquing er exposure research and only Five percent make a recovery. It's a gauntlet and I ran it with the research I could absorb while fatigued, pre diagnosis dietary knowledge, intuition and curiosity. The ubiquitous comment was meant in relation to the ER emissions of Iphones which is trivial to study directly rather than relying on models making predictions from what is tested 5 mm out. Test at 1mm 2mm 3mm ... there's no need to model er emission of something as high volume as an Iphone. The research can be done directly for research's sake independently of any health concerns. Sorry about that confusion. Surely one electrical engineering school somewhere in the world can make a rig so that we aren't relying on controversial math to accurately determine the magnitude and type of radiation emitted from electrical devices. A series of concentric boxes or globes with sensors going three meters out at sensible intervals would eliminate the need for any modelling and a personal emf sensor industry which seems a rort.

mopsi 7y ago

> Turn your wifi off in your house at night and see if you sleep any better. This needs to be a blind test, e.g. you track your sleep quality over a longer period of time while a script turns wifi off on random nights.

JshWright 7y ago
Does scientific rigor really seem like something the parent comment is concerned with?
gus_massa 7y ago
And you cover the green leds with tape mask, or get version with an accurate fake blinking patterns.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  My ISP supplied router has an option to turn the lights off, which is great as otherwise it illuminates the whole hallway. I don't get why electronics makers think their product needs to have such bright lights.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
    Simple. The engineers are working on the product during the day in well-lit spaces. Since the lights are always on, it never occurs to anyone that the LEDs might be too bright at night.
    - Shikadi 7y ago
      Alternatively, engineers point it out, and product managers don't listen
  - deftnerd 7y ago
    In a bright environment, a bright LED is useful. Instead they should also have a light sensor used to determine the ambient light level, and then adjust the status LED display accordingly. My Samsung TV does this with its "powered on" light. Of course, that adds to the BOM and manufacturers love shaving off fractions of a penny. Asking them to add an extra 50 cents of parts for something consumers don't think about prior to purchase is a lost cause.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      Old LEDs are fine in both bright and dark environments, too-bright LEDs are a recent (5y? 10y?) thing. I wonder if LCD could be even nicer... I don't think I've ever seen single-pixel LCD status indicator.
      - Marsymars 7y ago
        > I don't think I've ever seen single-pixel LCD status indicator. I approximate that by using a pin to poke a hole in the electrical or gaffer tape that I use to cover the lights.
wizzwizz4 7y ago
And make sure that phones aren't getting messages and bleeping during the night when wifi is on.
meekstro 7y ago
You could just try it. Turn off the electrical stuff before you go to bed but hey everyone has freedom of choice.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Placebos work. If that's what you want, cool. If you want to figure out if RF affects sleep, that's cool too, but you'll need to double blind the experiment. Because placebos work.
  - meekstro 7y ago
    Yes but so does human intuition and its a heck of a lot faster. A healthy person can endure a toxic environment. An unhealthy person becomes more unhealthy from increased toxicity. I’m not saying electromagnetic radiation makes a healthy person unwell i’m saying it delays or worsens recovery of some unhealthy people and there are million different subsets of unhealthy people so which subset are you going to run the double blind placebo on before you decide reduce electromagnetic radiation while you sleep. It’s a simple experiment anyone can try. Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment as per research which eliminates electromagnetic radiation from the equation. I think its a zeitgeber in subsets sick people but there’s no profit in researching that so the only tools you have are existing research, intuition, self observation and logic. People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial. Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression. Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost is the smartest thing someone can do with the available evidence.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      Placebos in truth's clothing are toxins of human society. Please verify placebo vs truth before spreading, k? Thanks. > Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment Or two weeks away from the grind reduces stress. Or getting away from artificial lights/schedules reduces stress. Or it selects for people+times with less stressed. Or more healthy. Or higher SES. Or you're getting away from pollution. Or you need temperature variation to feel healthy. Or any two of those. Or three! Many plausible explanatory factors compete with RF, and you'd have to control for them in order to point the finger at RF. That's not impossible, and not even particularly difficult, but it does mean that you can't go on a camping trip, get better sleep, and then use that as proof that RF was to blame for your insomnia. > People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial. The double blind trial is how you establish whether or not something is a placebo. > Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression. You need to blind you studies whether or not you have a plausible mechanistic explanation. You don't need a plausible mechanistic explanation to blind your studies. > Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case Which one(s)? > reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost Foregoing the advantages of technology is not zero cost. If you mean that turning your router off at night is zero cost, go ahead! I don't take issue with that. I do take issue with spreading unblinded anecdata, because whether or not RF-induced-insomnia is real, RF-anxiety-induced-insomnia is definitely real, and anecdata like your own definetly spread it. If RF-induced-insomnia is real, that's for the best, but if what you experienced was a placebo (and I'd bet a substantial sum of money that it was), then unblinded anecdata literally are the problem. And that's not cool. In the privacy of your own home: do what works and ignore the haters! In society: please apply good experimental technique before causing anxiety in others. It's only polite.
notjtrig 7y ago
When I was mining bitcoin I discovered graphics cards under load mess with my sleep, I would wake up feeling like I was very sick if I slept in the same room as a rig.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Noise, heat or blinking LEDs should be your first suspicions. Maybe transformer whine, with low quality power supplies. EM noise should be very low down your list of plausible causes.

bananabreakfast 7y ago

Electrosensitivity is not a thing. It's a disorder made up by hypochondriacs. If you said 3 percent of the population are hypochondriacs then I would believe you.

meekstro 7y ago
Electrosensitivity is denied by intelligent healthy people who have never dealt with unexplainable fatigue relying on statistics and body system diagnosis that is inadequate for explaining chronic complex health conditions. They're all just whinging man. Not one of them ever hoped it was all in their head and they could think their way out of it. Hacker News is a perfect subset of people lacking the perspective to consider exploring the possibility that electrosensitivity is a thing that occurs with declining health. Why so much negativity about researching something so ubiquitous? Let's discuss inverse power laws and quadratic functions, maybe we can build a machine learning model with our deficient statistics instead of taking two hundred phones out of two billion and testing their electromagnetic radiation at multiple distances and angles so we actually have a reliable model.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  > Why so much negativity about researching something so ubiquitous? There's nothing wrong with researching electrosensitivity to see if it's real, and to what extent. Heck, I've designed studies to test it (never carried out). The problem is not researching it, yet continuing to insist that it is the reason for people's "unexplainable" chronic pain / fatigue when there's currently zero non-anecdotal evidence for it.
  - meekstro 7y ago
    I communicated poorly I accept that but I never insisted it was the reason for unexplainable chronic pain/fatigue. ER amplifies explainable fatigue in some situations hence complaints from three percent of the population. My pure guess is that there's zero non-anecdotal evidence because it is difficult to study a subset of people dismissed as hypochondriacs and it is definitely not profitable. I'm going to look at the research and I really hope I have to eat my words so I can relax more around my Iphone and laptop but I know from personal hard fought experience while extremely fatigued that minimising ER exposure was helpful. I'm glad to hear there's a gap in the literature and it will be fun figuring out why or that I'm completely wrong on this. Chronically fatigued people do not have the energy spare to even contemplate critiquing er exposure research and only Five percent make a recovery. It's a gauntlet and I ran it with the research I could absorb while fatigued, pre diagnosis dietary knowledge, intuition and curiosity. The ubiquitous comment was meant in relation to the ER emissions of Iphones which is trivial to study directly rather than relying on models making predictions from what is tested 5 mm out. Test at 1mm 2mm 3mm ... there's no need to model er emission of something as high volume as an Iphone. The research can be done directly for research's sake independently of any health concerns. Sorry about that confusion. Surely one electrical engineering school somewhere in the world can make a rig so that we aren't relying on controversial math to accurately determine the magnitude and type of radiation emitted from electrical devices. A series of concentric boxes or globes with sensors going three meters out at sensible intervals would eliminate the need for any modelling and a personal emf sensor industry which seems a rort.