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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?
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!!!
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.
What's the buzz?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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
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?
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/
What are you talking about? This is just a device to stop teenagers from loitering. No one said anything about parents using this to get rid of their own kids.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
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 :)
As a teen, having gone through very frustrating and annoying shit just because of my age, I'd love to know why the fuck this was modded funny.
This *is* discrimination. If the guys are annoying, call the cops on the fuckers. Don't take it out on everyone who just happen to be the same age. It's no better than racism.
toresbe
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.
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.
The main reason for this is chavs, don't understand it, look it up. These are roving gangs of teens in England that like to fuck with people for no reason at all. Oh, and look up happy slapping while you're at it (honestly).
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.
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
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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.
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.
"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.
"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