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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."
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.
Teens have rights too, you can't discriminate on the basis of age.
You must be new here. And by here, I mean society. It's one of the few things that not only are people still discriminated against for, it's one that no one complains about, or really even thinks about.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
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.
Personally I don't get it. I can achieve the same effect by simply asking them to take out the trash.
Honestly, I was just over at the server room with my teenage step-son and he is totally cool. He washed the white board, helped me install some servers, then I let him drive the Jeep around the parking lot and even go off road. I don't understand all his stuff and he doesn't understand all mine but we have fun together and thats all the counts. Hey, we even played HALO for an hour after school.
A high freqency buzz to drive away teens? Something seriously wrong with this invention. Yet another examply of soulless empty technology. I am happy that God watches over my family and both my teenage kids are a gift. I would never drive them away. If we keep and hold the communication channel open then we will never have them feel that they can't talk and we can't listen.
Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/
Glad to see you've gotten over that arrogance problem... ;)
...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.
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.
Personally I don't get it. I can achieve the same effect by simply asking them to take out the trash.
Then again you're talking about your own kids living in your house, and not hooligans smoking cigarettes in front of your store and harassing your customers.
Honestly, I was just over at the server room with my teenage step-son and he is totally cool.
That's wonderful. He's also not the target of this type of device.
A high freqency buzz to drive away teens? Something seriously wrong with this invention.
Why?
I own a gun. If a criminal enters my house to do me harm, I will have no choice but to kill him with this gun. That doesn't mean I want to kill everyone with this gun.
Yet another examply of soulless empty technology.
You mean like those servers you and your son installed? Or the Jeep you let him drive around in circles? Or the video game system you two played? What exactly is "soulless empty technology"? Technology is what it is.
I am happy that God watches over my family and both my teenage kids are a gift.
This thinking always bothers me. This is like the guy who comes out of his house after an earthquake, looks over at his dead neighbors, and says, "Thank God we survived!"
I don't think God has anything to do with your kids, I think it may be that you're just a good parent.
I would never drive them away. If we keep and hold the communication channel open then we will never have them feel that they can't talk and we can't listen.
Again, great advice for parents, terrible advice for store owners.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
You should know full well that these restrictions have nothing in common with a device designed exclusivly to annoy and frustrate a given demographic. As a 22 year old who hears high frequencies very loudly (I can hear almost all screens whistle) I can imagine the havoc this will cause not just with teenagers, but with parents that have babies (who have even higher auditory ranges), with children wating outside while their mother shops and with people walking their dogs on the footpath. There are many legitimate uses for the public land outside this store and the public has the right to use it for things like waiting and pedestrian transport regardless of their age. I've met store owners that believe that they own the public land around where they are, such as one particually charitable gentleman who demanded my spastic uncle be moved from near his shop to improve the ambience, but they are invariably wrong. Public land belongs to the public, at least where I live.
I find the public's callous attitudes towards teenagers to be disgusting. Sure, teenagers are stupid, boring to talk to and nearly everything they do is pointless, but this also applies to people who are mentally handicapped. Yet if someone was to invent the Retard-Prod(tm) that jabs everyone with an IQ less than 60, the inventor would be lynched within a day. I was a teenager 2 years ago, I was pretty stupid back when I was 15, in the same way I'll discover I'm stupid now in another six or seven years, but generally I didn't hurt anyone and only wanted to mind my own buisiness and have other people mind theirs, most teenagers are like that. Picking on kids because you don't like their demographic is not cool and it never will be.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Heaven help me if I'm in a room with a TV where the flyback is really whining because of a missing sync signal.... The light dimmers at work piss me off because they hurt my ears. Many of my friends (even some younger ones) can barely hear them. Defective computer monitors? Torture. I'm told the lowest sync rate on VGA is 30 kHz, so I figure there must be a frequency divider somewhere, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm a bat or something. After my last job (slight flicker and lots of whine, with near-daily migraines), I now refuse to use any non-LCD displays when working with computers.
I'll say this: as someone who takes care of my ears, if a store I shopped at regularly put one of these things in, I can be fairly certain that it would bother me well into my 40s. And I would choose to shop elsewhere. Companies should take into serious consideration that doing this sort of thing -will- undoubtedly drive away some of their actual customers....
For now, I'll just stay away from people with dogs. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.