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Driving Away Teens With High Frequency Noise
ars writes "The New York Times is reporting on a device called the Mosquito invented by Howard Stapleton designed to drive teens away by emitting a high frequency noise at 75db. Apparently most older people can not hear the sounds, but teens can not stand it. Reports are that it works quite well, but some older people can hear it too. He found the prefect irritating sound by experimenting on his children."
Isn't this just going to make the kids as deaf as the adults?
-={ Security does not exist - give up }=-
Yet another way for parents to avoid spending time with their kids. Seriously why the heck would anyone come up with this sort of thing? As someone who works with teenagers a lot already, I have to say I'm a bit annoyed. Tons of the kids I work with through our church have parents who I swear can't be bothered to give their kids the nurture and self respect they need. Instead they just buy them things. At least an iPod nano to an unloved kid makes the kid cool at school. This'll just drive them to try more medications designed for chemical imbalances that won't fix depression brought on by these sorts of situations.
Teens have rights too, you can't discriminate on the basis of age.
In another article this would be called a "nonlethal weapon". Do we really want a world where people deploy such things to drive select non customers away? Legal or not I find the idea of such a system being used not only insulting but sad.
This will have no effect on the metal heads and punk fans who go to loud shows who also happen to be the people buying it want to drive away anyways.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Why is this country so anti-teenager? We got the "coveted marketing demographics" of late teen to young adult that the tv networks and pretty much a lot of companies go for. Yet as a group, teenagers sure are very ostracized, looked down, and picked on. I'm sure there are some bad seeds but for the vast majority, I'm sure there are good kids. You got all these anti-cruising laws, school crackdowns, and now this. Shouldn't we be cherishing and nuturing them instead? I'm sure the Army would like to use this device to get them shepherded to the nearest recuriting office.
This is ridiculus. They talk about using something like this to drive away 'bad teens' who hang around their store. Did they ever stop to consider that not all teens are bad, and what if some young person is actually going to their store to buy something legitimately. They need to stop stereotyping and realize most teens arent like that. I'm 17 and I do nothing of the sort. They are not only driving away these occassional trouble makers but also some of their own customers...
While I agree, it's not modern society at all. Society IN GENERAL, throughout time, has had contempt for the very young and the very old.
Glad to see you've gotten over that arrogance problem... ;)
How about instead of looking down on youth for acting the way you admittedly acted, try to remember why you acted that way and understand them. Then maybe you won't react with fear followed by reactionary measures like this ridiculous device which further alienate youth.
You may even remember that for all your youthful posturing, you weren't so dangerous and evil, that you loitering around a store wasn't so threatening. Next time you see a bunch of youths and you feel some emotional response (fear, disgust, derision, etc.) try looking for the root of that response and see if it's reall well founded, or if it's just there because you watch too many 60 Minutes stories about our out of control youth, or in your case, maybe you're just too entrenched in this clash-of-the-generations psyche.
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
...are the ones who are doing the loitering, bothering customers, etc., as explained in the article. It's an "anti-loitering" device, not anti-teenager -- it's just that teenagers have more time to hang out and make a nuisance of themselves.
Teenagers don't want to be cherished and nurtured -- they want freedom without responsibility. (Generalization, not applicable for every teenager.)
As someone who has had a 70-75 dB hearing loss in the 500-4000 Hz (i.e. voice) band since age 5, I can vouch for this. Funny thing is, I didn't lose my high frequency hearing, so for years I could hear the 17.5 kHz squeal from our old TV's flyback transformer.
Hearing aids are no fun. Modern technology has yet to make them better than pathetic. I've got an all-digital (DSP) set that set me back $5K and in a restaurant I hear all the other tables better than the one I'm sitting at. Hard to avoid that; like all people, my ears point sideways, not forward. Then there's the self-oscillation ("feedback"); since these things use IIR filters instead of FIR filters, they tend to go unstable at odd times, usually as a result of some sound that is barely audible, or a pure sinusoidal sound, like many computer beeps and alarm sounds. Solution? Cycle power on the devices. It's a Windows world, and these don't even run Windows.
Some folks think that hearing aids are convenient because you can just turn them off when you don't want to listen to some blowhard. I think that's worked exactly twice in my life; the other times, the teacher gave me a demerit or whatever. On the flip side, because they don't help you dig out speech as well as they should (it's like having 25% of the consonants you hear be wrong), you have to ask people to repeat themselves, which not only makes you look ignorant, but instead of actually repeating themselves, people will say, "Oh, nevermind" or "It's not important." Bull; if it weren't important, you wouldn't have bothered to say it, and I still want to know what you said. People quickly learn that you're no fun to have a conversation with, because conversations start feeling like work. Of course, how well would the Internet work if UDP was all you had, and packet loss was around 10%?
My hearing loss has done far more to end my social life than my being a geek and/or nerd ever could.
Now, a device like this will likely make me effectively deaf. How? The hearing aids set their overall gain based on the sound level in the room, regardless of band. Thus, they will sense the loud HF sound and cut the gain way down, so, from my point of view (hearing?), the world will suddenly get really quiet.
Do not screw with what little hearing I have left.
if only the young can hear it, why do I think mothers with young children and babies will get peeved because it will wake up sleeping kids or provoke tantrums?
Today: Miracle Hypersonic siren drives away teens and children. Tomorrow: Modern teens going deaf, lets blame iPods.
I used to live in downtown Long Beach, Ca, and would often find guys on our porch smoking, drinking and cussing. Asking them to leave got old after a while, and wasn't really effective. We finally got a hymn CD, that worked better than anything else we tried.
Actually, it is the rise of industrialization and the expansion of childhood that drives teens crazy. 13 - 16 year olds used to be valuable farm workers or craft apprentices, learning skills and doing work that was valued by society. Now they are largely un-employable. While trying to leave childhood behind, teens find they have no meaningful work and thus no value to adults other than as consumers.
Frankly, I'm pretty sure that this is turning my stomach (though that may be the pizza from last night) -- in the course of my high school career, I developed a very high pain threshold because every day of every week of every... I had a monster, killer splitting headache by the time I got home due to the countless TVs left on, tuned to a blank station.
This strikes me as somewhere between sadistic and evil and I think this is going to backfire long-run -- if your future customers associate your shop with pain now, they'll go elsewhere later.