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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."
Everyone driven away?
-={ Security does not exist - give up }=-
sitting on the porch yelling and shaking a cane?
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.
We sell skateboards and paintball shit. We aren't in the mall.
1. Hide a few dozen of these in the mall shops
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Teens have rights too, you can't discriminate on the basis of age.
We used to rebel in the 5th grade by blowing air through the small holes in our proctractors. Teacher nearing retirement had no clue. Sometimes the din was so loud that we couldn't hear teacher clearly...
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.
The teen population today is growing up with the voices of "pop music". If they can survive that drivel and keep it on the Top 20, what chances does this gadget have?
What's the buzz?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
This is EXACTLY what I pulled in my undergraduate 'Modern Electronics' class. When we used small speakers I could adjust the frequency to a positively epilepsy inducing sound (especially if you ran the speakers on square wave functions with slight frequency scanning) that caused most of my classmates considerable discomfort but my professor (a fan of loud and live rock shows) could hear nothing. The best part is that he was proud that he was "immune" even though it indicates the beginnings of hearing loss.
By the way, a great role model for fathers everywhere:
"Okay honey, how much does this hurt?"
BZZZZT!!!!
"Ah, turn it off, turn it off!!"
"In a second honey. Daddy has to hurt you to show how much he loves you. Now, how about this?"
BZZZZT!!!
"AHHHHHH!"
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth." - George Carlin
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.
This reminds me of a guy I knew once who kept an opera CD in his far-too-tricked-out-for-an-old-man car stereo. Only he optimized his stereo for treble rather than bass.
Everytime a low-rider came next to his car at a stop light thumping away, he opened his windows and cranked some good ol' Italian opera out to screw with them. He told me he never could quite drown them out, but quite a few did turn down their stereos to try and figure out what the crazy old man next to them was doing...
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.
In Toronto, we used to have a problem with teen gangs hanging around the Kennedy subway station. The solution to this? The TTC started playing classical music over the loudspeakers. Pow, the gangs were gone, plus it was actually quite nice for those of us that enjoy classical music.
The only thing to watch out for now would be gangs that listen to classical music. Care for a bit of Ludwig Van?
1. U. Landström, "Noise and Fatigue in Working Environments," Environment International 16, 471476 (1990).
2. R. N. Slarve and D. L. Johnson, "Human Whole-Body Exposure to Infrasound," Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 428431 (April 1975)
I'm unsure about the age significances though. Elder people tend to lose their hearing quite frequently. Maybe they can pick up other frequencies. Who knows maybe Grandpa did pick up Aliens' conversations.
MoFscker
When I was a kid I built a variable frequency tone generator. Once I got it up above the range I could hear, I could make my dog go batshit. Not as in running around yelping, but scratching and chewing himself with a passion. Turns out it was the fleas that were going batshit; against his white fur, I could clearly see them start jumping incessanctly when I hit that certain range.
So maybe his kids are just nasty.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
If only we could come up with a noise frequency to ATTRACT the elderly. Then we could lead a merry dance of baby boomers straight off a cliff into the ocean and watch them all drown :)
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...
Problem is, kids AREN'T going around shooting and killing each other, at least not in the US.
The FBI reports that crime overall has gone down steadily since 1994. The most recent stats show that 2004 had the lowest level of violence in over 3 decades.
I wish I could find the specific graphs on this, but here's the raw data for each year... and if you take the time to look at it, it also shows that juvenile crime specifically is at it's lowest level in over a decade.
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... ;)
I mean irritating smell and irritating lighting dont stop people from going to bars do they?
They still come in, they just don't sit next to me.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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?
I frequently whip out my tone generator in class and put it at high frequencies very loud. Gets hilarious when half the class is yelling about a noise and the teacher thinks they're crazy.
On another note, would those neat Bose active noise cancelling headphones remedy this problem? I know it's rather easy to build active noise cancelling headphones, and if this happened anywhere in my town I would make pairs of these for everyone just to spite them.
Also, I tend to have worse hearing than most of my peers due to the fact that I play drums rather extensivly. Would this stop me from hearing the sound?
-Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
Many forms of discrimination are illegal for government agencies and many/most public businesses and services. Private discrimination is a different matter. I could keep black people, hispanic people, white people, blind left-handed people, or people who voted for Bush off of my private property simply because I wanted to. The government couldn't do anything about it. On that note, I could keep teens out, as well. No matter the inventor's intended use, there are plenty of "non-infringing" uses for this device. Suggesting it's would be illegal because it discriminates against teens shows a gross misunderstanding of (American) law.
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
This just looks like an ultrasonic animal repeller to me. Here's an easy Google Search that shows how common they are. The thing is, anyone with decent hearing will hear these ultrasonic devices too -- and yes, they are extremeley irritating, to the point of being painful. My parents live way out in the country and use one to keep deer away from their garden, and another one to keep their neighbor's cats away from their parked cars. Having to suffer around 2 of those things any time I visit my folks, I can easily recognize the high-pitched agony-inducing devices now.
... it actually makes me feel slightly nauseous if I hang around in that entrance area too long.
And as a result, I suspect there is a powerful one in use at the Huntington metro station. It's cranked way up, frankly to the point that I worry about hearing damage when I walk through the protected area. I can hear the sound just inside the entrance, aimed right at the turnstyles (slightly stronger at the side near the fare card machines). In this case, I imagine they're using it to keep birds and squirrels out of the station. The station itself is in a surprisingly wooded area, nestled into the side of a small hill. I'm sure they found an ultrasonic animal repeller was the only thing that worked at keeping critters out of the station. It nearly keeps me out too
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
It's easy enough for me to create a home made high pitched squeal. Just take the phone away from my teenage daughter. From what I have been able to ascertain, the telephone is permanently attached to her ear. Taking it away causes her physical pain which results in her emitting an extremely loud high pitched squeal.
I try not to do that anymore because the neighbors complain.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I belong to a club that's made up of mostly seniors, so I'm one of just a few people there under 40. A few years ago (I was 25 or 26 then) I was playing with one of our long-time members when I began hearing this really high-pitched whining noise, right on the high edge of my auditory range. Wasn't super loud, but definitely loud enough to notice if you could indeed hear it. After determining to my satisfaction that I wasn't crazy, I deduced the noise was coming from some definite source. I asked my opponent if she could hear it, and she said no but wondered if it was her hearing aid. She turned it down and sure enough, the noise went away! Apparently I was the only one who could hear it.
Two more occasions I heard the noise and immediately asked her to turn it down and it went away, so that pretty much confirmed the first time wasn't a fluke. I dunno exactly what was happening, but I figure the hearing aid was generating feedback when turned up too loud. After all they are just compact microphones and speakers.
I tell you, when I heard this noise and I couldn't figure out what it was, I started to get really agitated. The agitation was to the point that where if someone heard it for a sustained long time they could seriously go insane or even try to kill themselves. It was bad. The sense of relief I felt when the noise was turned off was quite profound.
So anyhow, I didn't RTFA but if they're talking about using this device on a long-term basis to keep teens away from somewhere, this is tantamount to torture. I think anybody considering using this for anything other than security in imminent danger (e.g. teens harassing you) deserves to lose the rest of their hearing too.
Today: Miracle Hypersonic siren drives away teens and children. Tomorrow: Modern teens going deaf, lets blame iPods.
Some good classical music with maybe a little John Tesh thrown in for good measure. Just don't make me haul out the "big guns" and start playing some Celine Dion!
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
A McDonald's near me runs off the teenagers with a ~60db loop of the 1812 Overture. I love watchin' em try to talk on the cell outside with an index finger jammed in their other ear up to the second knuckle.
Near Halloween they switch it to Bach's Toccatta and Fuge in D Minor. Really cool for 90 seconds and then you know what Manuel Noriega must have felt like and need to flee.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Severe to profound losses range from PTAs of 75 dB and greater.
I think you may have mixed up your measurements. The 75dB referred to in TFA is the noise level. The 75dB in your linked page is the level of hearing loss - that is, the threshold at which the person can hear a sound of that pitch.
The standard TWA for industrial noise is 85dB for 8 hours, so it's unlikely this device would cause any problems.
In fact, many years ago, I used to make little devices with two 555 CMOS chips (or one 556), a photocell and a hearing aid speaker coil. They'd put out this high-pitched heterodyning whine that sounded a lot like a mosquito circling. The trick was to hide one in a dark area like a cupboard or under furniture so when someone opened the cupboard, or let light under the furniture, the photocell would cut the noise. There was no way they could locate it by sound, and you could fit the whole thing in a matchbox. As far as I'm aware, we never sent anyone deaf. Insane perhaps, but they could definitely still hear...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
As bad as it may sound, Steven J. Levitt, author of the award-winning Freakonomics, said that the lowering crime rate is because of the legalization of abortion about 2 decades before. Teens that otherwise would have been neglected and possibly would turn to the streets were aborted instead, so syousef may actually be pretty correct.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Not that we abused this or anything...
A cinema in my town had the same problem with large groups of teenagers loitering at the entrance. Once they started playing nice classical music (not even loudly) they all dissappeared. I guess it was no longer a "cool" place to hang out any more. I think the makers of this device should have tried their first option, at least it's less iritating to customers.
Here I was hoping that that they'd found a way to drive off prefects of various kinds. Not that I dislike the one we have around here, but sometimes it could be useful.
This signature is not in the public domain.
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.
Thanks for the explanation, from somebody that has an acceptable level of hearing, this is quite interesting.
..., and choose which sound bands should be filtered, and which should be increased.
I do hope that at least once you have filtered out the people that do not like to "work" (have a meaningfull conversation) it leaves you with enough interesting people that you can meet at some quite place.
It also points to some interesting suggestion for hearing aid maker, since the level of computing power available is going up, I would guess that two improvements should be possible either now or soon.
1) compare the sounds that are comming in from both side of the head and boost up what is "similar" (i.e either in front or directly behind you)
and boost down the rest (what is not in your sphere of direct interest)
2) provide some level of environment profiling that enables you to "say" I'm at a disco, or at home, or
"You DO know that the 80s, and thus the 60s..."
I might be misunderstanding your post. It sounds like you claiming the "greed is good" era (80's) was similar to the "flower power" era (60's)? If so, were you actually alive to participate in either of them?
"Ever met a teenager?" - I kept two of them until they grew into adults, the last one without female assistance. I released them both into the wild at age 18-19. They both lead usefull lives and have been sucessfull in finding a mate. I am now waiting to see if they breed.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Get yourself a frigging dictionary (or go dict.leo.org ) and look up "Geiz". It has lots of translations, but none of them is "greed". Closest one is probably "stinginess".
"Greed" refers to "want to have a lot of (usually money)", while "Geiz" implies "not wanting to spend a lot of (usually money)".
"Ever met a teenager?" - I kept two of them until they grew into adults, the last one without female assistance. I released them both into the wild at age 18-19. They both lead usefull lives and have been sucessfull in finding a mate. I am now waiting to see if they breed.
Glad you're a biologist - most of the computer geeks here wouldn't get past the design document.
You can actually calculate what the audible frequency is of a TV.
For NTSC in North America:
For PAL in the UK:
And yes, the sound drives me crazy, too. I'm 30 and an audio engineer. And I'm the only one in my household who can hear the damn TVs whining. :-)
Jory