New Tech in Schools
November 25th, 2008 Posted in Los Angeles Trial Presentation, Phoenix Trial Presentation, Trial Consultants, Trial Graphics | No Comments »We thought this technology was particularly interesting. It deals with mosquito (aka bumblebee) frequencies and there application. Adults over 30 can’t here the noise and the applications are interesting. Could it this technology affect the courtroom before long?-
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From National Public Radio:
The war between teens and authority figures has a new — or old — front: ears. British shopkeepers tired of teenage loiterers have turned to the Mosquito teen repellent, which emits a high-pitch frequency that most teenagers can hear — but not most adults.
But now teens have struck back against the Mosquito: They are using the same sound to communicate without adults’ knowledge.
At issue is a text-message ringtone that emits the same pitch as the Mosquito. Using it, students can learn about a new message while they’re in class — where they’re not supposed to be using their cellphones. Most of their teachers can’t hear the alert.
Inventor Howard Stapleton, creator of the Mosquito teen repellent, says only a few people over age 30 can hear the Mosquito’s sound. He and his 16-year-old daughter Isabel talk to Melissa Block about the sound, which has been dubbed “Teen Buzz.”
From the NY Times:
The technology, which relies on the fact that most adults gradually lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds, was developed in Britain but has only recently spread to America — by Internet, of course.
The cellphone ring tone that she heard was the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.
It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.
The principle behind it is a biological reality that hearing experts refer to as presbycusis, or aging ear. While Miss Musorofiti is not likely to have it, most adults over 40 or 50 seem to have some symptoms, scientists say.
While most human communication takes place in a frequency range between 200 and 8,000 hertz (a hertz being the scientific unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second), most adults’ ability to hear frequencies higher than that begins to deteriorate in early middle age.
“It’s the most common sensory abnormality in the world,” said Dr. Rick A. Friedman, an ear surgeon and research scientist at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.
But in a bit of techno-jujitsu, someone — a person unknown at this time, but probably not someone with presbycusis — realized that the Mosquito, which uses this common adult abnormality to adults’ advantage, could be turned against them.
The Mosquito noise was reinvented as a ring tone.
“Our high-frequency buzzer was copied. It is not exactly what we developed, but it’s a pretty good imitation,” said Simon Morris, marketing director for Compound Security, the company behind the Mosquito. “You’ve got to give the kids credit for ingenuity.”
British newspapers described the first use of the high-frequency ring tone last month in some schools in Wales, where Compound Security’s Mosquito device was introduced as a “yob-buster,” a reference to the hooligans it was meant to disperse.

