Re:
Questions For Engineer
As a qualified expert and RF consultant, before the auto accident,
I
performed many of these for municipalities. They would send
all of the
submittals to me - everything that was submitted with the application
including the propagation charts and drive test data. I have
my own
engineer so the client got a delux work product for their money
(yes we
were very expensive). Understand not everyone who works for
a
municipality is to be distrusted. Every one of the municipalities
that
contacted me really did want the truth. We always gave them
a best
case/worst case and best alternative. It's a little disturbing
that you
will not have a chance to see the engineering consultant face
to face.
It is always best to look at the whole proposal and then
look at the
proposed location. I have not seen any of these materials
in Radi's
case, but I will offer a few questions.
First, you want to know if the engineer is NARTE certified.
You want to
clearly define the area that the facility is being proposed
to serve.
Ask about the system specifics (how many radios, how much
power per
face, what frequencies will be used etc.).
You also want all of the specifics on the set-up antenna.
Ask if it
isn't true that there is a way that they can back that power
down a bit
and still have more radios.
Ask if it isn't true that there really is no such thing as
seamless service.
Ask if the transmissions will come into your yard/home/body
even though
you will not be subscribing to the service.
Ask if he knows of any studies that show that people exposed
to these
exact system specifics will not be at risk.
Ask what can be done if you do not wish to take that risk
(shielding).
Ask for a copy of the proposed (not yet adopted) safety guidelines
which
lists the studies that are being taken into consideration.
Let us know what happens.
Message from Kathy Hawk
Mast
meeting to tackle fears
Opposition to the siting of new police communication masts
in Cornwall
is to be addressed at a public meeting. Devon and Cornwall
Police is
holding a discussion in St Ives on Wednesday night in an attempt
to
answer objections to the positioning of the Tetra mast system.
Protests have been held across the county, including Bossiney
in north
Cornwall, because residents fear the masts emit harmful radiation.
Masts are to be installed to improve radio links for the emergency
services as part of a £3bn network funded by the government.
The officer in charge of the scheme in Cornwall, Chief Inspector
Dennis
Calver, said the meeting would help residents understand the
changing
needs of the police. "I think it is important we try
to help the public
understand our desperate need, as a police service, for a
new
communications system so we can do the job better in the communities
that we serve. "We don't like being in conflict with
the public and
sometimes there is misinformation and misunderstanding,"
he said.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/cornwall/2944772.stm
Published: 2003/05/28 15:42:41 GMT
© BBC MMIII
Informant: Robert Riedlinger
Some
fear loss of privacy as science pries into brain
By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff, 5/1/2003
sing magnetic resonance imaging machines that detect the
ebb and flow of
brain activity, researchers have become so good at peering
into the
workings of the human mind that their work is raising a new
and deeply
personal ethical concern: brain privacy.
One study of white students found that although they expressed
no
conscious racism, the seat of fear in their brains still fired
up more
when they looked at unfamiliar black faces than at unfamiliar
white
faces. Another recent imaging study reported that certain
parts of the
brain work harder when a person is lying than when telling
the truth,
raising the prospect of a brain-based lie detector.
A marketing research company is already starting to use the
machines to
gauge consumers' unconscious preferences by looking at the
pattern of
brain activity as they respond to products or messages. Though
brain
scientists are nowhere near reading minds, their mounting
success at
mapping brains is sparking a discussion that echoes recent
debate about
preserving the privacy of people's genes. The issues of brain
privacy,
however, hold the potential for even more heat, say scientists
and
ethicists who are beginning to address them.
"Everybody's worried about genetic privacy, but brain
privacy is
actually much more interesting," said Steven E. Hyman,
Harvard
University's provost and a neuroscientist.
The need for discussing brain privacy is urgent, said Arthur
L. Caplan,
director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.
"If
you were to ask me what the ethical hot potato of this coming
century
is, I'd say it's new knowledge of the brain, its structure,
and
function." Most people feel a much greater sense of privacy
about their
brains than their genes, Caplan and other ethicists say. Genes
play
critical but complex roles in what people become, while "your
brain is
more associated with you," Caplan said.
Brain-scanning is too new and imperfect to have engendered
real-life
tales of invasion of brain privacy, but controversy is easy
to imagine.
What if a court, a potential employer, or a suspicious spouse
wants to
scan an individual's brain for telltale signs of something
she would
prefer not be known or something the individual may not even
know about himself?
What if scans could be used to check a soldier for homosexuality?
Or a
potential parolee for lingering violent impulses? Or a would-be
employee
for a susceptibility to major depression?
Such questions are part of neuroethics, as the field is called
by many
participants in the fast-growing discussion of ethical implications
of
the explosion of knowledge about the brain.
A handful of neuroethics conferences have been in the United
States in
the last year or two. Emory University is holding a faculty
seminar on
neuroethics in mid-May. The American Association for the Advancement
of
Science plans a meeting on the legal implications of neuroscience
in September.
If the brain privacy debate follows the model of genetic
privacy --
which focused on concerns that genetic information could be
abused by
employers, insurers, and others -- it will lead to the proposal
of new
laws. It could also influence ethical guidelines for the operators
of
brain-scanning machines and help bring public opinion to bear
on
scientists and policy makers.
So far, the discussion is full of caveats. The automobile-sized
MRI
scanners needed to image brain activity are too expensive,
generally $2
million or $3 million, and need too much expertise to be used
by
nonscientists, say researchers. Also, existing rules about
experimenting
on humans protect subjects from coercion.
Functional MRI -- the hottest of current brain-monitoring
techniques,
though far from the only one -- uses magnetism to peer into
brain tissue
just like any medical MRI. But it also picks up jumps in oxygen
use that
signal added activity in particular spots, illuminating them
in the
resulting images.
Though fMRI is broadly accepted as a valid way to track brain
function,
it is still relatively new, and many of the exciting findings
about
which areas of the brain ''light up'' during certain activities
have
rolled out only in the last couple of years and are far from
established. As the technology has improved in speed and accuracy,
functional MRI studies have been growing, and many of their
findings are striking.
Consider a Yale experiment published in 2000 that appeared
to detect
unconscious racism in white students. The students reported
no conscious
racism, but when they were scanned, the amygdala, which generates
and
registers fear and is also associated with emotional learning,
lit up
more when students were shown unfamiliar black faces than
unfamiliar
white faces. They showed no amygdala response to familiar
black faces.
''You can see that as an indicant of the kinds of things that
might be
unearthed about people,'' said Michael S. Gazzaniga director
of the
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College, who
is working
on a book about neuroethics. ''That's an issue.''
Work published last year by Dr. Daniel D. Langleben, assistant
profess
of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, indicated
that certain
areas of the brain show more activation when people lie. His
group is
now trying to see whether they can use the technique to produce
an
effective lie detector, one that would far outperform the
deeply
imperfect polygraph.
Mind-reading is decades away, Langleben said, but ''if you
ask your
questions properly, lots of questions that are in the realm
of
mind-reading probably can be answered using existing neuroscience
and
functional imaging techniques.''
If a truly accurate lie detector could be developed, Caplan
warns,
current privacy guarantees might not provide enough protection
against
scanning requests from courts, the government, the military,
or employers.
Other imaging work has turned up results that could prove
clinically
useful, including visible hallmarks of depression and signs
of learning
disabilities. But those findings, too, raise questions.
Scanning could prove a boon to psychiatrists and mental patients,
by
helping sort out diagnoses and by leading researchers toward
developing
better treatments. But what if someone with no symptoms is
diagnosed as
having a tendency toward mental illness because of a brain
profile?
Other questions abound. ''Brain scientists have recently
identified the
cerebral area involved in intention, the region responsible
when
thoughts are converted into actions,'' Bruce H. Hinrichs,
professor of
psychology at Century College in Minnesota, wrote in the magazine
The
Humanist.
''Perhaps child molesters and other criminals in the future
will wear
headgear that will monitor that brain region in order to determine
when
their intentions will be carried out,'' Hinrichs wrote. ''Would
this be
a reasonable method of crime prevention or a human rights
violation?''
He also identified the ''insidious threat'' that corporations
could try
to worm their way into consumers' minds.
But brain-based marketing research has already begun. BrightHouse
Institute for Thought Sciences, an Atlanta company, announced
last
summer that it was starting to apply MRI scanning to the task
of
determining people's likes and dislikes, providing what it
called
''unprecedented insight'' into consumers' minds and seeking
to
understand ''the true drivers of consumer behavior.'' Clint
Kilts,
professor of psychiatry at Emory University Medical School
and
scientific director at BrightHouse Institute, said he had
been surprised
at the level of concern people expressed about the prospect
that
marketers could be trying to get inside their heads. ''We're
just an
observational science,'' he said. ''We expose subjects to
certain
stimuli, but we don't have the ability to change their perception
of
that stimulus.''
Caplan predicted that the first time neuroethics becomes
a real-life
issue will be in the courtroom. Some lawyers have already
tried to use
brain scans to absolve their clients of responsibility, he
said.
There are also questions of employment: For example, what
if scanning
became a condition of employment, like drug testing?
Such a scenario is many years away, but knowledge, often
imperfect
knowledge, of the use of brain scanners is spreading fast,
and that,
too, creates the potential for abuse. Within a few years,
Caplan
predicted, there will even be a television show that sensationalizes
scanning, with a name like ''Is Your Brain Bad?''
Carey Goldberg can be reached at goldberg@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 5/1/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
Powell was under pressure to use shaky intelligence on Iraq:
report
Fri May 30, 8:42 PM ET
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/121/nation/
Some_fear_loss_of_privacy_as_science_pries_into_brain+.shtml
Informant: Harlan Girard
A
question about height
Dear Fellows:
Hope all are doing fine. I would like to express my gratitude
to those
who have been providing us with information. Your assistance
is greatly
appreciated.
I would like to ask a few questions:
1) Do you know how short the buildings on which base-station
antennas
would be installed can be according to FCC laws? For instance
can
antennas be installed on buildings that are only 30-35 feet?
2) Is there a relation or a table that links the minimum height
of
antennas to the amount of power they emit?
Thank you,
Radi
O.T.
Some very important themes:
Powell
was under pressure to use shaky intelligence on Iraq: report
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Secretary of State Colin Powel was under
persistent pressure from the Pentagon and White House to include
questionable intelligence in his report on Iraq's weapons
of mass
destruction he delivered at the United Nations last February,
a US
weekly reported.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030531/
wl_mideast_afp/us_iraq_powell&cid=1514&ncid=1480
Informant: BuzzFlash.com
Pentagon
Eyes Massive Covert Attack on Iran
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=734
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=733
The
Project for the New American Century
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm
Informant: Heather L. Tarrant
SELECTIVE
INTELLIGENCE
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030512fa_fact
Informant: Heather L. Tarrant
IRAQ
BODY COUNT
The Week of Funerals
IN the past week 10 U.S. soldiers have died and 18 have been
seriously injured.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
Informant: Heather L. Tarrant
Restore
Security and Support Democracy in Iraq
http://epic-usa.org/epicevents/iraqforum2003.php
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