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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...
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...
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?
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
Why is this country so anti-teenager?
They don't buy enough CDs or go to enough movies.
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
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
"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.