Do mobile towers pose a health risk? There are some people who think so, but I am increasingly of the opinion that many have been victims of a campaign of misinformation and embarrassing bad science.

At community meeting last night, a group cited the response given to a question at a press conference given by the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization as proof that the organization included towers in their warnings about RF.

Here is what was actually said in the press conference (starting at the 12:50 mark on the official MP3 rebroadcast):

Jeff Waters (Australian Broadcasting Company): There hasn’t been any mention so far as far as I’ve heard, and please correct me if I’m wrong, of mobile telephone towers and their effects on human health. Given the classification that you have given this, should we conclude that mobile telephone towers are also included in the possible risk?

Dr Jonathan Samet (University of Southern California): The working group did consider the various studies that have been carried out on population groups exposed to radio frequency electromagnetic fields from such towers; we judged that body of evidence itself, because of various methodological limitations, as uninformative for the overall classification. The designation of Group 2B is “radio frequency electromagnetic fields” that is unspecified as to source, so the Group 2B classification would have broad applicability to sources with this type of emissions.

Dr Robert Baan (IARC): I would like to add that typical exposures from roof-top or tower-mounted mobile phone base stations, and I cite from the new monograph, are lower by more than 5 orders of magnitude compared to regular GSM handsets so that would mean that the use of a mobile telephone, the exposure to this type of radiation is much, much higher than what you receive from the base station on the roof top.

But that is not how that same interaction had been previously portrayed to the group that opposes towers for health reasons. These people thought that they had viewed an accurate portrayal of the press conference in a YouTube video:

Jeff Waters (Australian Broadcasting Company): There hasn’t been any mention so far as far as I’ve heard, and please correct me if I’m wrong, of mobile telephone towers and their effects on human health. Given the classification that you have given this, should we conclude that mobile telephone towers are also included in the possible risk?

Dr Jonathan Samet (shown in the caption as affiliated with University of California): The designation of Group 2B is “radio frequency electromagnetic fields” that is unspecified as to source, so the Group 2B classification would have broad applicability to sources with this type of emissions. [Noise and interference effects added to the end]

Dr Baan’s important comments didn’t exist as far as the anti-tower advocates are concerned. And of course, the lobbyist cut out the introductory sentence that refers to the bad science (“methodological limitations”) producing a “body of evidence” that is “uninformative for the overall classification.”

I think the edit that is being distributed is shamefully misleading. Exposure to Radio Frequency emissions from towers are more than 5 orders of magnitude lower than the emissions from devices – that is more than 100,000 times less. Towers aren’t the source of health concerns.

I repeat my assertion from last week:

Despite the emotions whipped up by neighbours and purveyors of junk science, the towers are not the issue. If you are concerned about being exposed to RF energy from mobile services, then it seems to me that you would want to limit to output required by the devices. These are the transmitters that are closest to you, whether you own a device or not. The radios in these devices adjust power based on the strength of the signal from the tower. So, my logic goes that if you want the phone to dial down the power, make sure that it has access to 5 bars of network signal. The logical progression is that we need more towers in order to reduce exposure to RF energy.

Tell your local municipal councillor that you want more towers – attractive ones, or camouflaged towers – to reduce your exposure to RF energy and improve your mobile service.

With a number of provinces creating their own consumer protection laws, in April the CRTC responded to a number of industry and consumer groups that were calling for the Commission to develop a national code for the mobile wireless industry.

The challenge was that the CRTC had already determined that this was a sector that was sufficiently competitive to warrant forbearance for regulation. In other words, coupled with the Policy Direction from cabinet a few years ago, the CRTC first needed to assess whether market conditions had changed sufficiently to warrant intervening in the marketplace.

Earlier today, the CRTC issued two documents:

• Telecom Decision CRTC 2012-556, its decision on the market conditions; and,
• Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2012-557, launching a consultation on a national code of conduct for the mobile wireless industry.

In its decision on the state of the market, the CRTC decided that it will continue to forbear from regulating retail mobile wireless voice and data services prices and indicated that it does not intend to “interfere in the competitiveness” of the market.

However, to ensure that consumers are able to participate in the competitive market in an informed and effective manner, and to fulfill the policy objectives of the Telecommunications Act, the Commission finds it necessary to develop a mandatory code to address the clarity and content of mobile wireless service contracts and related issues (the Wireless Code).

So the CRTC will avoid stepping into pricing issues directly, however, it appears that the Commission is sensitive to consumers being faced with sticker shock when bills arrive. Among the areas to be reviewed in the coming consultation is a section on clarity of pricing:

a provision that addresses clarity of advertised prices of services included in a contract, such as monthly and one-time charges for mobile wireless services, including optional services, devices, data and roaming, and any associated fees.

The CRTC has also asked parties to comment on enforcement of the code:

18. The Commission specifically calls for comments, with supporting rationale, on the following:

• Who should enforce the Wireless Code (e.g. the Commission, the CCTS, or other)?
• What mechanisms should be used to ensure compliance with the Wireless Code?
• What recourse and remedies should be available to consumers if their service provider does not comply with provisions in the Wireless Code (e.g. liquidated damages clause)?
• What mechanisms should be used to promote the Wireless Code among consumers?
• When should the Wireless Code be implemented?

How will the provinces respond to the CRTC consultation? How will the Wireless Code interact with provincial laws that are already on the books or under consideration by various legislatures?

The CRTC’s consultation key dates include a November 20, 2012 deadline for detailed written submissions and an oral hearing phase starting on January 28, 2013.

Is digital technology in the classroom really helping students learn better?

The Ontario government’s 2012 white paper on education, “Strengthening Ontario’s Centres of Creativity, Innovation and Knowledge”:

Technology does more than just accelerate access to data. It can also enable new ways for students to learn from and interact with faculty and each other. Rather than faculty “transmitting” lecture data to students sitting in a hall, digital delivery of course content can free faculty in traditional institutions to engage in direct dialogue and mentorship with students. Technology is driving worldwide changes in education, and it is important that Ontario recognize and respond to these changes so that credentials from Ontario [post-secondary education] institutions hold their high value.

I might be slightly less skeptical of Ontario’s commitment to having technology “accelerate access to data” had its white paper not been released in a format that locked access to copy and paste sections. There is an interesting opinion piece in the Sunday Toronto Star, by UWO professor Doug Mann, a professor in the sociology department and in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario who wrote: Let’s unplug the digital classroom.

Professors muse that the classroom must “evolve or die” to become more “fun and engaging” for the modern student.

Such views are misinformed at best, crude propaganda for Apple and Microsoft at worst. The use of digital technology in higher education has promoted ignorance, not knowledge, and severely degraded basic reading, writing and thinking skills. It’s time to hit the off button.

One problem with the most enthusiastic futurists is that too many of them haven’t spent any time in the classroom in the last decade. If they had, they’d realize that digital technology is already omnipresent there, used by both students and professors. Almost all undergraduate students in North America are addicted to texting on their smartphones and checking their Facebook pages on an hourly basis. Almost all professors use computers, projectors, Power Point presentations and the Internet as part of their lectures. Calling for more digital technology in education today is like calling for more white people in the Republican party.

He provides an important opposing viewpoint.

Yes, one student in 10 actually uses them to look up relevant facts and issues, but the other nine are using classroom Wi-Fi to check their Facebook pages, email or celebrity websites. Portable computers combine all four of the general functions of digital technology: information delivery, peer communication, entertainment and procrastination. Cellphones concentrate on the last three functions and have no pedagogical purpose.

He says we should turn off Wi-Fi in classrooms and treat mobile phones like cigarettes: do your texting and update your online status outside or in designated lounges. Mann says that distance-education courses are cheap knock-offs of the real thing.

Digital technologies can be great delivery devices. But what they too often deliver has nothing to do with education.

Discuss.

In the US, its late-November Thanksgiving weekend signals the start of a final month of shopping before Christmas.

But I always have to explain to my American friends and family that Canadian Thanksgiving takes place in early October, because frankly, we don’t usually have lots to be thankful for by the end of November.

Today, as Canadians prepare for our Thanksgiving holiday, I saw a press release from Nokia and Rogers Major signaling the start of the mobile wireless holiday season sales drive.

“The Nokia Lumia 920 is coming exclusively to Rogers in time for the holidays“. Featuring Windows Phone 8, the press release also highlights enhancements to its industry leading mapping software (even Apple Chief Tim Cook recommended Nokia Maps). Nokia City Lens is the latest addition to the Nokia location suite, providing a kind of augmented reality experience to enhance Nokia Maps. Nokia Drive and Nokia Transit have also been upgraded.

The device includes Carl Zeiss optics and advances in Nokia PureView imaging to take in five times more light than competing smartphones without using flash,  also compensates for hand movement while the photo is being taken.

This is the flagship Windows Phone 8 device, as indicated by a poll of Microsoft employees who voted 7:1 for the Lumia 920 over competing HTC devices.

With Blackberry sitting on the sidelines for the holiday crush, how will Windows Phone perform against Android and iPhone this year?

Are you upgrading or equipping your kids this holiday season? What are you planning to buy?

With Google planning to build an urban fibre optic network in Kansas City, all sorts of commentators are looking at ways to achieve similar outcomes for the other 99.9% of North Americans.

Susan Crawford had a piece in Wired on Tuesday that offers a proposal: We Can’t All Be in Google’s Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth Race. If you read the article fast enough, it makes for an entertaining read, but its conclusions are predicated on a number of questionable premises and assertions.  Check out this opening:

Even though America is in a “global bandwidth race” and our “nation’s future economic security is tied to frictionless and speedy access to information,” according to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s latest speech – we don’t have a plan for winning that race.

And our current incumbent providers are not going to help. They’re not going to be the ones rolling out the fiber-to-the-home networks that could provide this speedy access to information. Why? They have no incentive to do so. Because they never enter one another’s territories, they don’t face the competition that might spur such expansion.

Instead, incumbent internet access providers such as Comcast and Time Warner (for wired access) and AT&T and Verizon (for complementary wireless access) are in “harvesting” mode. They’re raising average revenue per user through special pricing for planned “specialized services” and usage-based billing, which allows the incumbents to constrain demand. The ecosystem these companies have built is never under stress, because consumers do their best to avoid heavy charges for using more data than they’re supposed to.

The errors abound. Here are just three of the more obvious problems:

• No “plan for winning that race”? I guess if you ignore the FCC’s National Broadband Plan and spectrum auction incentive plans discussed in the same speech referred to in the opening sentence. Canadians would love to be as far along in national policy planning.
• “Our current incumbent providers are not going to help… rolling out the fiber-to-the-home networks”? I guess if you ignore the tens of billions of dollars bet by Verizon on FiOS FTTH. According to the FTTH Council, 9 million North American households now have FTTH connections.
• “The ecosystem these companies have built is never under stress”? Well that is news to any of us who have experienced dropped calls on our mobile phones or slowdowns on wired connections.

I agree with a couple lines in the article:

While the Google Fiber plan provides a valuable model, other communities that want to ensure their residents get fiber to the home shouldn’t have to wait.

We need policies that lower the barriers to entry for competitors.

Yes, we do need policies that lower the barriers to entry for competitors. But we also need for these policies to create the right incentives for all competitors to continue to invest.

The policies proposed are simply not supportable, unless, like the author, you conveniently choose to breeze by the facts.  Take a look at how the author tries to build support for heavy government intervention and structural separation:

If you’re in the network services business, you can’t also be selling apps. This required “structural separation” prevents the country’s telecom companies from discriminating against competitive services (think AT&T blocking FaceTime).

Whoa! We suddenly jumped from the author talking about FTTH to wireless networks. Let’s pause to parse what would be meant by this leap. AT&T, in this example, is “in the network services business”. The author says that they shouldn’t be selling apps. What app are we talking about that AT&T sells in competition with Facetime? Voice services. Is the author really suggesting that mobile carriers should not be allowed to offer voice? Is this really a business model that any country has tried to impose?

What kinds of policies are needed to help cities attract FTTH and investment in advanced infrastructure?

Let’s take a look the incentives and concessions granted by the cities to Google. According to the Wall Street Journal, these include: free office space, free power, free land for fibre huts and close to a 50% discount on pole attachment rental rates. In addition, there was no obligation imposed on Google to roll-out its services universally, enabling the company to pre-market and pre-sell, with installations taking place after sufficient demand has already been committed. City government workers will be involved in the public education and marketing plan. AT&T and Time-Warner Cable are reported to have asked for similar concessions.

Contrast the approach by Kansas City to entice Google investment in fibre with many other municipalities. We have had a number of cases in Canada where cities erect legal and financial roadblocks to hamper the deployment of advanced communications infrastructure. The level of cooperation between Kansas City and Google should be a model for how municipal governments and carriers can cooperatively plan and incent investment.

Canada’s national digital strategy should be released in the next month or so.

How will we plan for Canadian leadership in the global digital economy? How do we create the right environment to stimulate universal access to advanced infrastructure? How will we encourage universal adoption and digital literacy?