* Re: Questions For Engineer - Mast meeting to tackle fears - Some fear loss of privacy as science pries into brain - A question about height - OT themes (3/6/03)

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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