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Electrical Noise Causing Physiological Stress?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Mar 29, 2006 04:23 AM
from the human-potatoes-in-a-microwave dept.
from the human-potatoes-in-a-microwave dept.
el johnno writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting on possible physiological problems caused by so-called 'dirty electricity.' Poor power quality caused by electrical feedback and harmonics from consumer electronics are cited as a possible cause of various 'physiological stress' problems. While previous research in this area looked for connections between EM fields and cancer, some research is now looking into possible connections to fatigue, headaches, depression, and other symptoms. From the article: 'If electricity were flowing in a constant way, most people's bodies would likely adapt, but with all the interference from modern devices, the resulting fields are too variable for people to get used to.'"
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another reason to call in sick (Score:5, Funny)
Re:another reason to call in sick (Score:2)
Re:another reason to call in sick (Score:3, Interesting)
Bring back DC!! Oh, they are! [slashdot.org]
Voltages and frequencies (and the US is 120, not 1 (Score:3, Informative)
Europe used to be 220 except the UK which was 240, now they are all moving to 230 (which is bad news for the UK - as higher voltage
Re:Ignorance and/or fraud (Score:3, Funny)
Electricity (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Electricity (Score:5, Funny)
Electric fields cause fiscal irresponsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Electric fields cause fiscal irresponsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The guy probably never existed in the first place. The company that sells $1,000 placebo black boxes probably does, though.
Re:Electric fields cause fiscal irresponsibility (Score:5, Informative)
If this was true anyone working in a UPS environment would be a sick nutter. Just take an oscilloscope and see the crap some "branded" dual conversion models spit out.
Re:Electric fields cause fiscal irresponsibility (Score:4, Funny)
Haven't met many sysadmins, have you?
Re:Electric fields cause fiscal irresponsibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Electric fields cause fiscal irresponsibility (Score:3, Insightful)
To even report this show a total lack of creditabilty. "I just spent a thousand dollars on these things and I feel so much better".
Please check these references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_blind [wikipedia.org]
ht [wikipedia.org]
I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
It's a plot by the Edison company to bring back DC power!
Luckily I'm wearing my AFDB.
Obligatory citing... (Score:2, Funny)
I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpre
Same with WiFi and cell phones (Score:2, Interesting)
Before you laugh, I've had one job where there
Re:Same with WiFi and cell phones (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Same with WiFi and cell phones (Score:4, Informative)
Not least of which is the Sun; Earth's number one source of electromagnetic waves in every frequency. What's important here is that unlike solar radiation, which is largely random noise, man made EM radiation is generally ordered and harmonic. Overwhelmingly, most RF signals come from time harmonic sources.
Our brains and bodies are chaotic systems. Ordered signals are bad for them. Apparently epilepsy is a sudden bought of order in the brain. It's entirely possible that some people, or in deed all people to a degree, are sensitive to any resonances in their body with time harmonic signals.
Engineers sometimes scoff that EM radiation is at such a low level that it cannot harm anyone. But engineers very often make the mistake of not accounting for resonance [wikipedia.org]
Re:Same with WiFi and cell phones (Score:2)
Re:Same with WiFi and cell phones (Score:5, Insightful)
This gives two possibilities:
1) Your symptoms are psychosomatic. Which doesn't mean they don't exist, but there's no physical link between EM radiation and your symptoms, so there's no physical solution possible.
2) You are an exception and genuinely *are* sensitive to EM radiation. In which case you should be contacting the various researchers into this, bcos you may be able to provide the evidence that so far is lacking. You can't guarantee that government would do anything about it, but you might get your symptoms recognised as a genuine medical condition.
I suggest you get your friends to help with experiments. A good initial test would be to have one of your friends turn his wireless network on or off when you come round, and keep notes of the state in a diary. When you come to the door, if you're sensitive then you should be able to notice the wireless network signal, so write down in your diary what you think its state is. Then you compare notes after a month or so. That'll give you some feedback about how your symptoms relate to things. Obviously this might be prone to interference from PCs or TVs on at the same time, but it's a start.
I'm not going to prejudge your specific case. All I can offer is the existing evidence, which says that so far no-one's been found who can do this. As a natural sceptic, I'd personally go with the evidence until someone shows otherwise, but we've got to give people every opportunity to disprove the existing evidence, otherwise it becomes faith-based not evidence-based, and we all know where that bullshit lands you.
Grab.
Re:Same with WiFi and cell phones (Score:2)
By knowing whether it's turned on or not, it's likely they'll subconsciously send this information to the subject. This might take the form of repeated questions
Call this science? (Score:5, Insightful)
Call this science? what a load of bollocks. This is what you get when you need to print a newspaper every day.
EM stress - simpler explanation (Score:2)
See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n e ws/2006/03/23/nsick23.xml&sSheet=/news/2 [telegraph.co.uk]
Only if our body perceive the field (Score:2)
Subsonics/Supersonics (Score:4, Interesting)
This would probably be the opposite of the effect many try to achieve by adding "soothing" environmental sounds (like water from those little water fountain things)... unpleasant noise, even noise that doesn't consciously register, may cause behavioral, mood, or personality alterations.
I know that I find myself rather irritated when I hear the whine of a monitor or TV (bad capacitors). Many people can't hear the sound at all without it being pointed out, but it is something that drives me crazy. In the case of devices that have been ready to go due to caps, I myself may not hear anything but at times I could swear I *felt* the damn thing going...
Re:Subsonics/Supersonics (Score:3, Informative)
CRT tubes generally give off a frequency of about 17Khz (from memory
, someone correct me if I'm out which can usually be heard by people
under 3
Re:Subsonics/Supersonics (Score:2)
Re:Subsonics/Supersonics (Score:5, Informative)
Then the question is: what is the difference in a construction between a computer CRT and a television CRT that causes the former to be relatively silent? I always assumed that it is the deflector coils that are driven at the hsync frequency. Those coils are big and actually driven at that kind of frequency.
So to dissolve this dispute, I just did an experiment. With a good microphone, I recorded my TV set and then I looked at the waveform in Audacity. I counted 79+/-0.2 oscillations over 5051 microseconds, which gives an acoustic frequency of 15640 +/- 40 Hz for this PAL television. The PAL standard is 625 lines at 50 Hz, factor 2 interleaved, so the hsync frequency is 625*50/2 = 15625 Hz. This is within the margin of error equal to the observed acoustic frequency, which provides strong support for the hypothesis of the horizontal deflection coils causing the high-pitched tone.
For comparison, NTSC is 525 lines at 60/2 Hz, which gives 15750 Hz.
Note that I used an electret microphone which is not sensitive to the magnetic field emitted by the deflection coils.
Here's another theory... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's another theory... (Score:2, Funny)
No, DON'T think about it!!
Different effects in different countries? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mind you, maybe it's just the annoying hum of transformers that's getting everyone down. I know I hate alarm clocks which hum - I once had to create an isolation platform out of an old face-cloth, a book and some cut squash-balls to minimise the annoying hum from an old alarm I had (whilst I was a very poor student). Mind you, I eventually sorted that problem out by blowing it up by connecting a 90wpc stereo amplifier to its speaker (don't ask - it was an experiment, ok?) and fried the lot
John
Re:Different effects in different countries? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I suspect you're on to something with transformer hum. Or, more specifically, general low-level noise. My story:
After some fairly major work-related stress, I found I just couldn't sleep properly. Tried the usual things - traditional & non-traditional drugs, meditation, etc - nothing worked for long. But I noticed on some nights I slept much better than others. After a few months I noticed the nights I slept better were the nights when the computers, 2 and 3 rooms away from my bedroom (with closed doors between me and them), were turned off.
Note that these machines are all built to be low-noise - Antec Sonata cases, large low-speed thermostat controlled fans, Zalman heatsinks, low-noise PSUs, etc. They're quiet - in normal use, sitting in front of them, they're barely audible. I definitely couldn't consciously hear them from my bedroom, even in the dead of night. But there was a definite correlation between whether they were on or off, and my sleep quality. Not (consciously) psychosomatic either - remember, it was only after I noticed variations in my sleep quality that I found it correlated to whether they were turned on or off.
Since then, I turn off everything that makes noise, no matter how low level. Computers (unless they're processing something), PVR (unless it's recording something), printer, computer speakers - basically everything that doesn't need to run overnight. I've noticed a definite improvement in my sleep quality (and general stress levels too). Yes, I'm prepared to accept that this part of it could be psychosomatic. But, if it helps me sleep better, I don't give a damn...
So, from my little ad-hoc experiment, I'm quite prepared to believe that continuous low-level noise - or possibly even EM fields - at subconscious levels can have a detrimental affect.
Call me a hypersensitive freak, call me self-deluding, call me a fringe-dwelling tree-hugging anti-technology neo-luddite. I don't care. I'll be sleeping well tonight...
Its all in the mind (Score:5, Insightful)
enviroment really harmed people then as soon as a bolt of lightning
went off in a nearby storm all these "victims" should keel over and
die given the amount of EM power a single bolt puts out. But you
never hear someone saying "storms make me ill" (unless they got a direct
hit of course!). Far more trendy to make out they're some victim of
modern techno society so they can either kids themselves its someone
elses fault they're ill (and nothing to do with hypocondria or some
other mental condition) or so that they can jump on the compensation
bandwagon.
It's when (Score:5, Funny)
two words (Score:2, Funny)
Four words needed here: (Score:3, Insightful)
Blind
Controlled
Trial
Hardly surprising (Score:2)
Slashdot and Pseudoscience (Score:3, Insightful)
Put stories like this in the comedy section, where they belong.
Psuedoscience (Score:3, Interesting)
1) I lived in a place that had really crazy electrical wiring. As in, about every month or so all three lightbulbs on our cieling fan would all blow out at the same time. If I kept my CRT near one wall, the pattern would make the swimming noises you sometimes see if you put an electric fan near a TV. It made me too nauseous to use it for any extended period of time. Solution? Moved my damn computer to another wall (actually in front of a glass wall -- no EMF interference there).
2) Some fluorescent lights drive me batty. Many lights flicker at double the frequency of the power supply (60hz x 2 = 120hz), which is bloody human noticeable, regardless of how many scientists cast doubt on this. Come to my karate class, wave your hand in front of you, and you'll see multiple images of your hand. Or sometimes no intervening images at all on a punch if you throw it fast enough, which probably makes you look a lot faster than you really are. If you had a "dirty" power supply, I could see it perhaps making a difference to fluorescent lights that are tied to the cycle of the power supply.
Re:Psuedoscience (Score:4, Interesting)
She's been blind on one eye since childhood. She first started getting symptoms (mostly nausea and fatigue) after a few months of working with the first PCs at her work, text editing on monochrome displays. She's never been diagnosed with any real, known medical condition.
She's currently afraid of about anything more high-tech than a stereo. Which is kind of annoying for me, because I believe she really has some kind of medical condition. Getting tired or getting headaches from working with a monitor with refresh rate less than 70hz is familiar to many of us. Reacting the same way to fluorescent lights isn't too far fetched.
Mumbo Jumbo Ahoy! (Score:3, Interesting)
our day to day lives, but that we cannot influence.
(One common thread in all these alternative therapies - at the end of the chain, you have someone raking in the bucks.)
This world needs a little more rational thinking. Either that, or some good homeopathic remedies for gullibility.
Electromagnetic field no, but just noise, yes. (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH, he may be honest but barking at wrong tree. When electric power is down, it is not surprising to feel a relief.
Now, there, I am probably not the only one who can say that prolonged exposure to various electric equipment produced, barely audible, sounds (especially high pitch, although hum too) make me feel some of the alleged symptoms. Right now, I hear quite loudly my and/or my coworkers CRT monitor(s) (high voltage transformer ferrite core - magnetostrictive material) and it gives me very unpleasent feeling in my neck. Similar goes for cooling fans hum. And, last but not least, most (cheap) capacitors' dielectrics are piezoelectric materials, so it may happen that some of the HF noise that came from mains "beats" with circuit-generated noise and result is sometimes in audible range.
In last century (give or take a half of century) the noise signature has changed greatly. We have not adapted to that. It seems that authorities (lawmakers) are not aware of magnitude of stress that is imposed on us by noise which is not high in loudness, but just constant and unpleasent/annoying.
Better understanding of the noise phenomenon, better design of electric (electronic) equipment and better health standards should make things bareable. Before anyone invests grands into mains filtering, they should consider good antiphones (both earplugs and earshells), better acoustic insulation for equipment suspected of producing noise and as much time spending outdoors, as far from "funny" sounds as possible.
Basic problems with this concept: intensity (Score:4, Informative)
- If it were true you'd expect stronger fields to make a bigger effect than miniscule ones.
- Therefore driving past a 500,000 watt radio or TV transmitting antenna should cause much much much greater symptoms than a 0.0000001 watt emissions from "dirty power". No such effect.
- People that are exposed to high EM fields, such as airport workers, tower light replacers, cell site testers, plasma physicists, industrial RF welders, TV technicians, walkie-talkie testers, they should all be really sick. Like 100,000 time ssicker than the average Joe or Jane Doe. They're not.
- At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
- EM fields includes light, particularly sunlight. Sunlight hits you with almost 1,000 watts per square meter, many powers of ten greater than any other EM field, and most people think sunlight feels *good*, not bad.
Too many basic objections to this idea. Move on.Paging Robert Heinlein (Score:4, Interesting)
Waldo himself was an MD patient so weak that he built himself a satellite to live in so that he could move about under his own power in microgravity. He also diagnosed the problem, created a solution, and rolled up some bucks, so there's Heinlein in a nutshell.
Heinlein wasn't trying to predict anything, but to hit a target at sixty years, now that's good.
I've got the solution! (Score:3, Interesting)
I garantee that my solution is based on the same rigorous scientific research, and same theoretical underpinnings as the "science" in the linked article!
But seriously though, between some people wanting to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools, to people complaining about "bad vibes" coming from their toaster, to the unreasonable fear of nuclear technology, to the unreasonable fear of GM foods, to people wanting to ban research on stem cells, and the whole advent of all kinds of crazy "alternative medical treatments" like inner body massage, or yogurt enemas, or "color therapy" or whatever... the newfound popularity of fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Islam. the proliferation of TV psychics.
Doesn't it seem like the public is become completly anti-science and anti-rationality nowadays? People are believing in all kinds of crap that wouldn't pass the laugh test 20 years ago, and now people take this stuff seriously? And it doesn't seem to be any one political group, or religion, or country - I could understand if it was just one group of ludites or reactionaries doing it - but it seems universal! What the hell is going on?
Re:So... (Score:2)
Re:Poor article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:EMFs (Score:3, Informative)
No it isn't (Score:4, Informative)
So, since it's more than obvious (huh? What is "more" than obvious?) you should have no trouble providing the peer reviewed research.
The fact that you've assumed something is more than obvious, despite a dearth of supporting research, calls your motives into question.
"The fact that experiments may not show true correlation for specific frequencies does not disprove the problems."
Really? I thought that's exactly what they showed. Silly me.
How can we take you seriously when you dismiss the research you don't like and drawn a conclusion you do like (based on NO research) all in the same post.
Re:High pitched sounds? (Score:3, Interesting)
That is EM radiation, but not something that's affecting you. The shielding in computer audio is usually non-existant. In the tight spac