DNApes is now on Twitter

Every DNApes post will now be tweeted - If Twitter is your social media of choice then consider following: http://twitter.com/#!/dnapesblog

Op-Ed: Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.

This is an AMAZING op-ed about technology, social media, environmentalism, conservation and love. Enjoy! -MA

Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
By JONATHAN FRANZEN
from the NYTimes

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.

I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.

New book: The science of evil

from the New York Times
From Hitler to Mother Teresa: 6 Degrees of Empathy
By KATHERINE BOUTON

“The Science of Evil,” by Simon Baron-Cohen, seems likely to antagonize the victims of evil, the parents of children with autism spectrum disorder, at least a few of the dozens of researchers whose work he cites — not to mention critics of his views on evolutionary psychology or of his claims about the neurobiology of the sexes. “The Science of Evil” proposes a simple but persuasive hypothesis for a new way to think about evil.

“My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy,’ ” he writes at the beginning of the book, which might be seen as expanding on the views on empathy expressed in his 1997 book, “Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind” (Bradford). Evil, he notes, has heretofore been defined in religious terms (with the concept differing in the major world religions), as a psychiatric condition (psychopathology) or, as he puts it, in “frustratingly circular” terms: “He did x because he is truly evil”).

Dr. Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge and director of the university’s Autism Research Center, proposes that evil is more scientifically defined as an absence of empathy, exacerbated by negative environmental factors (usually parental, sometimes societal) and a genetic component. When these three exist in tandem they result in what he calls a Zero-Negative personality. Zero-Negative takes at least three forms (and possibly more), borrowing from terms used in psychiatry: Zero Type P (psychopathology), Zero Type B (borderline disorder) and Zero Type N (narcissism).

Whereas psychiatry groups these three loosely under the term “personality disorders,” Dr. Baron-Cohen proposes that they all share the characteristic of zero degrees of empathy. (His “empathy quotient” scale is available in the book or online, with an instant numerical score that is translated into degrees of empathy from zero to six, or super empathy.)

Viewing these disorders in terms of empathy “has very different treatment implications,” he maintains. Psychopaths aside, people with low degrees of empathy can be taught empathy, as is done in schools concerned about bullying, and treated with standard psychiatric approaches.

I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist or neurobiologist, but to a lay reader there seem to be limitations in describing pathological behavior in terms of zero degrees of empathy. He cites the example of a Nazi guard who forced a boy to put a noose around his friend’s neck as “cruelty for its own sake.” But rather than zero degrees of empathy, it seems instead that the guard possessed six degrees of anti-empathy: The guard acted in the cruelest way he could think of, fully understanding how devastating the act would be to both boys.

“What leads an individual’s ‘Empathizing Mechanism’ to be set at different levels?’ ”Dr. Baron-Cohen asks. “The most immediate answer is that it depends on the functioning of a special circuit in the brain, the empathy circuit,” which he maps in great detail. (This question — and many sentences in the book — could have used an editor. Does he really mean that an individual’s empathy mechanism goes up and down? I don’t think so. I think what he’s trying to say — and in fact does say at a later point — is “What determines where an individual falls on the spectrum?”)

Further, what causes the same neurological circuitry to produce behaviors as different as Zero N, Zero P and Zero B? The dual answer is environment (extreme emotional deprivation or social pressure, as in Nazi Germany) and genes. The discussion of empathy genes is crammed with caveats and warnings: “I hope this book will not be misunderstood as arguing that empathy is wholly genetic”; “I have put quotation marks around genes for empathy”; “we examine evidence that some genes are associated with...” (italics his). The editors dispense with all this hedging and call the chapter “The Empathy Gene.” (The American publishers did the same with his caveats about the word “evil,” using it in the title. The British edition was called “Zero Degrees of Empathy.”)

In his final chapter, “Reflections on Human Cruelty,” Dr. Baron-Cohen addresses perhaps the most central question: If zero degrees of empathy is a “form of neurological disability, to what extent can such an individual who commits a crime be held responsible for what they have done?”

Does this hypothesis mean that there is no such thing as individual responsibility, free will? Possibly. But sensibly, Dr. Baron-Cohen finds that prison is necessary for the most serious crimes, for three reasons: to protect society, to signal disapproval and to restore some sense of justice to the victim or the victim’s family. (He does not believe in capital punishment.) For lesser crimes, though, imprisonment may not be the answer.

Finally, zero empathy is not necessarily negative. In what he acknowledges is a controversial idea, he maintains “there is at least one way in which zero degrees can be positive.” Preparing for the howl of dissent, he adds: “It seems unthinkable, but bear with me.” People with Asperger’s syndrome also fall on the zero end of the scale, but they are Zero Positive. Zero Positive is almost always accompanied by high scores on the systemizing scale (and can lead to genius). In addition, the way “their brain processes information paradoxically leads them to be supermoral rather than immoral.”

My guess is that even suggesting these two conditions are related in some way will be inflammatory, though in the context of the book the discussion seems reasonable, and in no way does Dr. Baron-Cohen equate the two — except that they have in common zero degrees of empathy.

At the core of this deceptively simple book is the question of the nature of cruelty. In the last and most philosophical chapter Dr. Baron-Cohen discusses situations in which an individual who is not otherwise lacking in empathy may behave cruelly. Citing the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s term “the banality of evil,” and discussing the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo in which ordinary people exhibited cruel behavior, he acknowledges that in most of us empathy may be suspended temporarily, under certain circumstances.

This is a frightening thought, but one borne out not only by research but by history. Dr. Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis that cruelty is merely the zero end of a continuum on which we all fall makes that possibility more comprehensible.

Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life

pic is from my personal stash from this years' WGT

Its one of my two most favorite times of the year in Leipzig - Wave Gotik Treffen (Wave Gothic Festival) - when the goths of the world descend upon the 'zig to colour (decolour) our little world in all things beautiful and grotesque. So with that in mind, you can imagine how absolutely vampiric this posting by NPR seemed today. I wonder if anyone will do it for cosmetic reasons? -MA
(PS: it may not seem obvious why I picked this pic, but its because the lovely lady on the left has an open heart wound...)

Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life
by CARRIE FEIBEL
From NPR

The search for the perfect artificial heart seems never-ending. After decades of trial and error, surgeons remain stymied in their quest for a machine that does not wear out, break down or cause clots and infections.

But Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier at the Texas Heart Institute say they have developed a machine that could avoid all that with simple whirling rotors — which means people may soon get a heart that has no beat.

Inside the institute's animal research laboratory is an 8-month-old calf with a soft brown coat named Abigail. Cohn and Frazier removed Abigail's heart and replaced it with two centrifugal pumps.

"If you listened to her chest with a stethoscope, you wouldn't hear a heartbeat," says Cohn. "If you examined her arteries, there's no pulse. If you hooked her up to an EKG, she'd be flat-lined."

The pumps spin Abigail's blood and move it through her body.

"By every metric we have to analyze patients, she's not living," Cohn says. "But here you can see she's a vigorous, happy, playful calf licking my hand."

Human Trials
In March, after practicing on 38 calves, Cohn and Frazier felt confident enough to try their device on a human patient. They chose Craig Lewis, a 55-year-old who was dying from amyloidosis, which causes a buildup of abnormal proteins. The proteins clog the organs so much that they stop working.

In Lewis' case, his heart became so damaged, doctors said he had about 12 hours left to live.

His wife, Linda, said they should try the artificial heart.


"He wanted to live, and we didn't want to lose him," she says. "You never know how much time you have, but it was worth it."

Lewis worked for the city of Houston, helping to maintain the city's vast system of wastewater pumps.

At home, in his garage, Lewis dabbled in woodworking, metalsmithing and what his wife calls general "piddling around."

"He would go into his shop and create or fix or modify something to make it work," she says.

That's what his two doctors did, too. Linda Lewis says her husband appreciated how the doctors cobbled together the pulseless heart from various materials.

"Dacron on the inside and fiberglass impregnated in silicone on the outside," Cohn says. "There's a moderate amount of homemade stuff on here."

Cohn and Frazier did not start totally from scratch. They took two medical implants known as ventricular assist devices and hooked them together.

A ventricular assist device has a screwlike rotor of blades, which pushes the blood forward in a continuous flow.

"I listened and it was a hum, which was amazing," Linda Lewis says. "He didn't have a pulse."

The doctors say the continuous-flow pump should last longer than other artificial hearts and cause fewer problems. That's because each side has just one moving part: the constantly whirling rotor.

But Cohn says they will still have to convince the world that you don't need a pulse to live.

"We look at all the animals, insects, fish, reptiles and certainly all mammals, and see a pulsatile circulation," he says. "And so all the early research and all the early efforts were directed at making pulsatile pumps."

However, the only reason blood must be pumped rhythmically instead of continuously is the heart tissue itself.

"The pulsatility of the flow is essential for the heart, because it can only get nourishment in between heartbeats," Cohn says. "If you remove that from the system, none of the other organs seem to care much."

Progress and Setbacks
After the implant, Craig Lewis woke up and recovered somewhat. He could speak and sit up in a chair.

But then he began to fade as the disease attacked his liver and kidneys.

"Amyloidosis is horrible," Linda Lewis says. "I could see the other organs were not cooperating."

Craig Lewis lived for more than a month with the pulseless heart. He died in April, due to the underlying disease. His doctors say the pumps themselves worked flawlessly.

"We knew if it wasn't a success for Craig, if they could get data that would help them, if it helps the next person, then you did good," Linda Lewis says.

Biomedical companies worldwide are still trying to perfect a pulsing artificial heart.

But Cohn says those companies are like the last buggy-whip manufacturers: fine-tuning a product that will soon become obsolete.

He is sympathetic to their efforts, though. He points out that the history of invention is full of dead ends.

"When man first tried to come up with machines that flew, he looked around and saw bats and birds and butterflies and mosquitoes," Cohn says. "Everything had wings that flapped."

But what works in nature is often not the only mechanical solution, or even the best one.

"When they saw that you could create wind, and that wind over a fixed wing was a great way to provide lift, then the whole field shifted," Cohn says. "There are very few flying machines in modern times that have flapping wings. And I think this is the same intellectual leap in pumping blood or pumping fluids."

In order to bring a continuous-flow artificial heart to the market, the doctors will have to decide on a final design, find a manufacturer and get FDA approval.

Although there's more work to be done, Frazier says he's confident the pulseless approach will win out in the end.

"These pumps don't wear out," he says. "We haven't pumped one to failure to date."

The tradeoff, of course, is the loss of the familiar, primordial sound of a beating human heart. For these surgeons, though, that's a small, poetic price to pay to make medical history.

Taxodermy Fails - Badly Stuffed Animals.

When my friend Alex C posted this I thought I was going to be truly horrified. Taxodermy is one of those things that has always confounded me. If its an art form, I just don't get it. Even when we would work with museum specimens, which have some actual functional purpose, I just always found it wholly unpleasant...This gallery though helped me find some peace with it all by highlighting how absolutely ridiculous taxidermy is. Such major FAILs also take a lot of the creepiness out of the whole practice. Enjoy! - MA

• Gallery at WVEL
• Facebook group - badly stuffed animals

Why Smokers Are Skinny

by SARAH C.P. MILLER
From Science Magazine

Craving an afternoon snack? Take a drag on a cigarette, and your hunger will likely disappear. Smoking is the number one cause of preventable deaths in the Unites States and other developed countries, causing lung cancer, heart disease, and chronic bronchitis. But smokers are, on average, skinnier than nonsmokers. New research reveals how nicotine, the active ingredient in cigarettes, works in the brain to suppress smokers' appetites. The finding also pinpoints a new drug target for nicotine withdrawal—and weight loss.

The nicotine receptor in the brain has 15 subunits; they can combine in a multitude of ways to form different receptors with different jobs. Nicotine can bind to each combination and spur a cascade of distinct events; some lead to the addictive properties of cigarettes, others to an increase in blood pressure or a feeling of relaxation. It's long been known that nicotine causes a slump in appetite, and scientists suspected that this worked through receptors associated with reward and behavior reinforcement. After all, the brain considers both cigarettes and food to be rewards. But the new finding suggests that appetite has its own pathway.

Behavioral neuroscientist Marina Picciotto of Yale University set out to study whether activating one particular nicotine receptor, dubbed α3β4, had antidepressant effects on mice. But as postdoctoral researcher Yann Mineur was caring for the mice, which had received drugs engineered to stimulate only α3β4 receptors, he noticed a side effect: the mice were eating less.

"Before this study, we really didn't think that this type of receptor would have such a big role in the brain in food intake," Picciotto says. She and Mineur went on to show that nicotine does, in fact, bind to α3β4 receptors, which then send a signal throughout the rest of the brain, signaling satiety. It's indistinguishable from the signal the brain propagates after eating a large meal. Mice that received the drug binding to the α3β4 receptor ate half the amount of food as untreated mice in the 2 hours following administration of the drug. Their body fat dropped 15% to 20% over 30 days, the team reports online today in Science.

Since the weight gain that comes with stopping smoking is often one deterrent for smokers to quit, Picciotto suggests that the new pathway could be targeted by pharmaceuticals to suppress appetite during the initial stages of smoking cessation. In addition, such a drug could have wider reach as an appetite suppressant to aid in weight loss, without the health hazards tied to cigarette smoke.

Neil Grunberg, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, was the first to prove, through rat studies in 1982, that nicotine causes a decrease in appetite. He says the new study is a step forward in understanding the phenomenon he first observed.

"Most people had accepted that the decrease in appetite was caused through a dopamine-reward pathway and left it at that," Grunberg says. "So I think the most important contribution of this paper is to prove that there is another whole pathway that nicotine is working through."

Grunberg notes, however, that the study looks only at male mice. In his previous work, he has found differences in the effects of nicotine on weight between males and females. Females, he says, experience larger weight loss when they start smoking and a larger weight gain if they quit. Whether this means nicotine is working through an additional, hormone-regulated pathway in the female brain is yet to be determined.

Picciotto says her group is repeating the experiments on female mice. "We're also still trying to get back to that original question we had," she says: "Does this also have antidepressant actions?"

--
Reference
Mineur YS, Abizaid A, Rao Y, Salas R, DiLeone RJ, Guendisch D, Diano S, De Bias M, Horvath TL, Gao X-B, Picciotto MP (2011) Nicotine Decreases Food Intake Through Activation of POMC Neurons. Science 332 (6035): 1330-1332 DOI: 10.1126/science.1201889

Abstract
Smoking decreases appetite, and smokers often report that they smoke to control their weight. Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the anorexic effects of smoking would facilitate the development of novel treatments to help with smoking cessation and to prevent or treat obesity. By using a combination of pharmacological, molecular genetic, electrophysiological, and feeding studies, we found that activation of hypothalamic α3β4 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors leads to activation of pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons. POMC neurons and subsequent activation of melanocortin 4 receptors were critical for nicotinic-induced decreases in food intake in mice. This study demonstrates that nicotine decreases food intake and body weight by influencing the hypothalamic melanocortin system and identifies critical molecular and synaptic mechanisms involved in nicotine-induced decreases in appetite.

High Pitch Only Teens Can Hear

If anyone caught this week's Southpark then this will seem relevant - I thought I had posted it a couple years ago but I couldn't find it in the archives so here it is (again?) P.S. I am happy to say I have the ears of a "younger than 24 year old" ;) - MA

From the Huffington Post
by KATHARINE ZALESKI
Kids Be Gone: High Pitch Only Teens Can Hear Used As Deterrent (AUDIO)

As 15-year-old Eddie Holder sprinted from his apartment for school one recent morning, he held his hand to one ear to block out a shrill, piercing noise.

The sound was coming from a wall-mounted box, but not everyone can hear it. The device, called the Mosquito, is audible only to teens and young adults and was installed outside the building to drive away loiterers.

The gadget made its debut in the United States last year after infuriating civil liberties groups when it was first sold overseas. Already, almost 1,000 units have been sold in the U.S. and Canada, according to Daniel Santell, the North America importer of the device under the company name Kids Be Gone.

To Eddie, it's tormenting.

"It's horrible, loud and irritating," he said. "I have to hurry out of the building because it's so annoying. It's this screeching sound that you have to get away from, or it will drive you crazy."

The high-frequency sound has been likened to fingernails dragged across a chalkboard or a pesky mosquito buzzing in your ear. It can be heard by most people in their teens and early 20s who still have sensitive hair cells in their inner ears. Whether you can hear the noise depends on how much your hearing has deteriorated -- how loud you blast your iPod, for example, could potentially affect your ability to detect it.
Civil liberties groups in England, Australia and Scotland have expressed outrage over the device, and England's government-appointed Children's Commission proposed a ban. They describe it as a weapon that infringes on the basic rights of young people, and claim it could even have unknown long-term health effects.

The $1,500 device has also been challenged in some American cities and towns that have proposed installing it, with some criticizing the tactic as needlessly cruel.

Santell said the noise can be heard by animals and babies, but is bothersome only to children older than 12 and becomes unbearable after several minutes, making it a perfect teen-repellent. The same sound is also used as a cell phone ring tone meant to fall on the deaf ears of adults, and is a popular download on the Internet.

The town of Great Barrington, Mass., banned the device last year after a movie theater owner installed one.

"There was an outcry, and people didn't like the idea of torturing kids' ears like that," said Ronald Dlugosz, a town official. "People here don't tolerate that kind of stuff."

Milford, Conn. faced similar resistance when the city announced plans to install the Mosquito in a park. They increased police patrols instead.

Elsewhere, there have been few or no complaints. A mall in Calvert County, Md., announced plans to introduce the buzz to disperse skateboarders, and officials and police said they haven't had any outcry. A school district in Columbia, S.C. recently installed one on the front grill of a school vehicle and another in a parking lot where students gather after high school games, with no complaints.

"We'd have crowds gather in parking lots and there'd be the usual trash talk, then you'd have fights," said Rick McGee, the school district's emergency services manager. "Now there's no confrontation at all, they just get aggravated and leave within a few minutes."

Santell, the device's marketer, said most of the company's inquiries are from major corporations and government agencies looking for a way to protect private property. Overseas, complaints arose when the device was projected into public spaces, like sidewalks.

Santell said it does not violate any noise ordinances, but added that the company will soon be selling the same product with a higher "power," or decibel output, that will only be sold to government agencies.

Carmen Ramirez, superintendent of the Queens apartment building where Eddie lives that recently installed the Mosquito, described it as "a miracle."

"We used to have young men here all of the time, bothering people in the building and doing illegal things," said Ramirez, 50. "As soon as we put it up, they were gone and they haven't been back. If they return, we'll just put up more."

A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union said the organization does not yet have a position on the issue. But James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said crowd-monitoring devices in the hands of private businesses and citizens is "dangerous."

"There is a significant problem with giving people a tool like this and empowering the public to take over the tasks of law enforcement," Fox said. "It can certainly be used in a way that's inappropriate, and without a doubt it will be."

Nobody at the Queens apartment building could say where the loitering kids had gone after the Mosquito was installed.

"I just deal with it, but I can't be around here for too long," Eddie Holder said. "If I am going to stand around somewhere, it won't be here."