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Teen Creates Device to Track Speeding
An anonymous reader writes "A teen in Massachusetts has created a device that he hopes will help prevent traffic fatalities among teenagers. The unit plugs into a car and uses GPS to track and report on speeding — but only while the car exceeds a limit set by parents, so as to minimize invasion of the teen's privacy."
Parents set limit to 5mph - track kids everywhere they go.
said teen is tracked down and given a beating for being such a snitch. Film at eleven.
Yes because we can so trust the parents to have the teenager's interests in mind when it comes to these things. Anyway aren't there like different speed limits per area? what if a parent were to set it to 50 and you were bleeping as speeding around in the country.
Or may be he knows how to find a workaround to protect his privacy...
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
couldn't you just take the thing out or un-plug it? then it'd look like you never drove over the speed limit : )
More seriously this relies on the people who are driving (you can do it from 16, right?) being rational and sensible. If they were rational and sensible they wouldn't do it because it would make them look bad to their parents, but they wouldn't do that anyway because they wouldn't want to break the law and risk their lives. If the people weren't rational and sensible they would drive like an idiot anyway and not thing of the consequences (something I think is far more likely).
Further I'm not even convinced that speeding is that dangerous, drink/drug driving is far more likely to result in a fatal accident - and I have met people who do just that for fun. It's idiocy but these are just the people who you'd need to deal with...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I don't want to know how fast my (hypothetical) kid is driving 99% of the time. It's not my business, it's really not, unless he gets hurt, hurts someone else, damages MY property or gets in trouble with the police. I don't care what he does until something happens. THAT'S when I spring into dad-mode. THAT'S when I start to ask questions and yell and devise new and cunning punishments. Until then, it's up to him what he does. Hopefully I'd've raised him smarter than to put himself and his passengers into danger, and I'll assume I did until he proves me wrong.
It's called trust. Remember that?
Triv
The device don't know the speed limit of the road he's on. He can go 70 mph on a 20 mph road. The device won't know.
If you slapped it on a dog and your nosey parents see you as driving through all the neighbors lawns, maybe a school yard or two.
My only regret would not being able to see their faces as this happened
Maybe this should be fitted to the cars of adults - the results could be sent to their local schools to show that they are setting a good example.
I'm assuming they're driving this car in public. Unless they're driving through their room with the door shut how could this be a violation of privacy?
The car is legally the parents responsibility. The teen is legally the parents responsibility. Kids expect so much privacy these days.
That's what I was thinking. My parents were such control freaks, that I had one of them or grandma on my back pretty much the whole time. Even in about half the summer camps or such, one would actually take a vacation to come keep an eye on me. I have no doubt that if such a device had existed, they'd have set the speed limit to 1 mph just for tracking sake.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The device, which plugs into the electrical outlet in a car and sits on the dashboard, will monitor a car's speed only when the driver exceeds a specified limit.
.. but that's not what the article says.
Is it a magical device? Because I don't see how it can only monitor the speed of the car only when the car is speeding. It'd need to monitor the speed of the car all the time to know when it starts speeding. I can see that it might only log the GPS location of the car when the speed exceeds a certain amount
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I think this is wonderful. The news is not about tracking teens, nor is it about snooping governments. This is a success story for an young engineer. This kid has seen his invention from conception, through development and prototype, all the way to investment. He has polled his resources and called upon special talents: (from TFA) "Jon's sister, Julie, 21, helped coin the device's name, and Jon's uncle, Kurt Lanza, helped with the computer programming." He has a specific goal in mind. "His program weeds out extra information from the GPS, protecting teens' privacy. Their parents can see what they're doing only if they break the rules set by the parents." IMHO Jonathan Fischer may be a Benedict Arnold to some "Speed Demon" kids, but to proponents of safe driving and to parents who have buried their children, he is a Benjamin Franklin.
Keep going, Jon. Call me if you need a good email checker-er-er.
FairTax baby!
We learn what we *do*.
What's a teenager doing when he's being monitored by his parents?
What he's doing is not being trusted. So he's learning that his parents do not trust him, and he's learning that they will forcefully impose themselves into his life to coerce his behaviour; he's learning to resent them and he's learning that speeding is only wrong because it is prohibited by parents.
So the device plugs into the electrical outlet...surely any teen that's going to go off speeding would simply reverse slowly out of the driveway of their parents house, wave goodbye, drive cautiously round the corner- unplug the thing and dump it in a hedge- speed like mad for the next five hours then pick it up on the way back...
Or am I just too much of a miscreant?
That said, this is probably the best incentive a teen ever had to get a job, save money, and buy his own damn car.
This is not my sandwich.
Should be titled "Teen creates device to prevent himself from ever being invited to parties".
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
First off, this is a trust _verification_ mechanism. If you've got such issues with your kid that you think they're going to start pulling stuff like you just described, the obvious answer is to just not hand them the car.
Making the assumption that all you can do is disable the GPS antenna, and not actually tamper with the logs or the device physically, don't you think the parent might notice something when the device points out that they didn't have a GPS lock (or even PRN sighting) at any time during their little trip? In other words, your scenario wouldn't work against an even-somewhat well designed device.
It surprises me how Slashdotters give teenagers the brilliance and skills of MacGyver, where no security measure could possibly work against them. Of course, it also makes me think there's a decent percentage of them who hated their parents, and considered themselves much, much smarter than them, which could be correlated with their apparent revulsion to just telling a kid "no, you can't".
It's sad and pathetic, honestly. My parents and I had an excellent relationship - I knew what they would say no to, so I didn't ask to do that stuff, and more importantly, I didn't actually do it, either. They trusted me because of that, so the sphere of "no" was relatively inconsquential anyways. It's a lesson many of my peers never really figured out.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Much of teen driving problems come from two sources: overconfidence, and distractions. Some states have laws that permit only a certain number of people in the car at certain stages of the licencing process- and they do that for a reason. Teens are notorious for packing friends into a car to go out and 'have a good time', but the passengers become a major source of distraction. Despite what young drivers may think of their abilities, they need to concentrate on driving, and worry about having 'fun' after they exit the vehicle.
I work for a large cemetery. Every year, we have two periods when teens are killed in automobile accidents. The few weeks after school starts and the few weeks after school is out.
These accidents seldom involve speeding. They usually happen in the teens own neighborhood. Losing control of the vehicle and hiting something solid or rolling over cause the fatalities.
Better driver education, more emphasis on seatbelt use, etc. would save more lives than any speed recorder.
People who coddle their children have them grow into misfits, because they don't know how to act in the real world. On the other hand, people who let their kids run wild have them grow to be criminals and outcasts, because the kids grow witht he notion that it doesn't matter what they do since no one cars.
You should raise a child with plenty of freedom, but make sure the child knows they will be held responsible for their own mistakes. I was given my own car when I was 16 - but I had to pay my own insurance. And I knew if I trashed the thing, or got tickets so my insurance would go up, etc - that Mommy and Daddy would *not* be bailing me out.
Then smart kids will drive backwards.
Are you sure that is a good idea? There was a gear-head in Germany (IIRC) who reversed the superstructure on his WV Beetle so that the boot was at the front and he looked out what used to be the rear window while driving. He was eventually banned from driving the car due to the fact that the wierd way it looked caused so many accidents.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I took an internship this summer that forced me to drive a 1/2 hour to work. When you're cutting through a city and then taking the interstate highway every day you tend to see a lot of cars and a lot of crazy driving. I fail to see how children are the only problem, when people from every demographic seem to speed, and not just a little. Is it because the kids are getting hurt? Could that have something to do with inexperience? Or is it just that adult speeding isn't getting reported because they get out of speeding tickets more often (no basis for fact here, just a possibility).
In terms of the specific unit from TFA, Delorme has come out with something that can do relatively the same thing, minus the phoning home. The data it collects can be used in an Atlas or GIS program to do pretty much the same thing as this new unit. The tools have been out there, this teen just used one in a way that would ensure he wouldn't get laid.
If I was a teenager I would only agree to use the device if my parents agreed to put one in their vehicles as well;
Hope you like walking, then, son.
I ask my son to see his report card, I don't take his word for it. If he's supposed to be home at midnight, I stay up until he gets home, I don't take his word for it. I make him keep his bedroom door open when he has his girlfriend over to "do homework."
I trust my son. I let him borrow my car. I trust him to watch his sister. I trust him to stay at home overnight by himself on occassion.
But if you think a 16 year old won't lie through his teeth to get out of trouble, you're insane. There is no question about this.
Your comments suggest to me that you're either a child yourself, or you've never raised a child yourself. Nothing personal, but if you "trust" your teenager to act like a responsible adult, you're probably making a mistake. There's a reason that 18 is the age of majority, and not 15, 16, or even 17. If you quit parenting at 16 because you think you've done a good enough job so far, you're just begging for trouble.
I'd like a device like this for myself. It would need to know the speed-limit of all roads and warn me when I'm over the limit. There could even be a speed-limiter (easily to disable, if necessary).
Not that I'm speeding a lot, but once in a while I find myself too fast because I'm not aware of the limit.
Markus
Yea, I've seen a lot of that stuff in my life...I had pretty much the opposite situation, which meant, of course, that I dicked around, got mediocre grades, got in trouble, ran amok, etc.
Then I hit a point where I got concerned about the rest of my life, got my crap together, and started making an effort...I was around 16 or 17 (I understand this is not common).
So I go to college, and I do fine, because I'd always had to motivate myself, and I'd always had to prioritize my time, and I'd always had freedom so it didn't go to my head, and I understood how to balance life and work...Whereas all the "good" kids who people had been held up to me as a positive example didn't perform half as well when they were out of range of supervision for the first time in their lives.
There is definitely a happy medium. You need to give your kid enough freedom so that they understand how to make their own descisions, and how to accept the consequences for those descisions, but they also need rules.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This kind of product has been commercialized in select cities in Canada for a while now. The Otto has a map of speed limits, intersections, photoradar, etc. http://www.myottomate.com/
Either by ignoring their kids or crushing them with the weight of monitoring and impossible expectations. Sounds like your parents were closer to the latter camp than the middle. Sorry about that.
My job as a dad is to become less and less controlling with my kids - to give them enough lattitude to make errors where the consequences are minimal. I knew a guy in HS whose uncle bought him a Corvette at 16. He totalled it, and his uncle bought him another one! DUMB!
I allow my kids as they mature to have more freedom - when they blow it with bad judgment, I discipline them to help them learn to use better judgment next time.
By the time they leave my house, they should have the skills to operate successfully in the world - personal integrity, honesty, work ethic, compassion for others, operation of basic power tools, operation of a motor vehicle, discipline about sleep, discipline about eating, conflict resolution, know the importance of relationships with others, and the ability to self-educate.
Until that time, I believe strongly in "trust, but verify." I have no issue at all with tracking a kid using my car, my gas, my insurance, living in my house. In general, I will be able to ignore the logs because I have enough RELATIONSHIP with my kids to have a pretty good idea about how trustworthy they are. If the systems I put in place to check up on them show me that my trust is misguided, then I have an opportunity to shapre their character with additional discipline.
Within the bounds of the limits I set up for them, they have complete freedom! They will (and do) get MUCH more by living within the fairly wide open spaces I define for them than they could "get away with" by lying and breaking my rules.
Finally, I'd like to point out that biologically, kids brains are not at full maturity until the early-mid twenties - specifically the part of the brain that influences reasoning and judgment is still in development at 16. This is a BIG factor in kids making good choices, and I need to protect them as they don't yet have the strong skills to navigate the rough waters they are in.
Once again, I apologize for overbearing, critical, controlling parents. They obviously didn't know what they were doing.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
A parent demonstrated the same device 3 years ago on TV. Showed that he caught his son doing 42 in a 35 zone.
Seems like the older device was better as it somehow showed the speed limit of the road with the speed of the car.
I don't see how this MA kid recently "invented" this device.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
"Trust, but verify."
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Try google: http://www.google.com/search?q=gps+speed+monitor
Rental car companies have gotten into trouble for trying to fine drivers who exceed some limit.
The first teen driver monitor I saw was from Autotap and was code-named "narc on Lisa" because the inventor wanted to make sure his daughter Lisa wasn't doing anything bad. This one plugged into the car's OBDII port, monitored various vehicle parameters such as speed, ignition state and the current time, could sense if it had been disconnected and record that fact.
The "invention" in the original article is neither original nor noteworthy.
Parents are financially responsible for the screw ups of their kid. If their kid is not responsible the parent will get their ass sued off. I'm not saying that this is the right solution, but since a parent is financially responsible for when their kids screw up they should have resources available to know what their kid is up to.
We know how lawyers are, imagine this scenerio, "Your kid caused a major accident because of speeding. How come you did not use this device to control his driving habits?" as the parent gets nailed for punative damages.
This device sucks, but until kids start acting reasonable, parents need to account for what they are doing.
Let the flames about how I am a ideal kid begin.
Spelling and grammar mistakes specifically left in to give the grammar and spelling nazis a meaning to their life.