May 25, 2006

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

4:44 a.m. Thursday (Blogroll)

Teen Buzz isa ringtone that takes advantage of a high-frequency sound that grown-ups can't hear. If adults can't hear your phone ring, text-messaging becomes possible anywhere, anytime.

In a stunning re-imagining of a weapon used against them, teens may have outwitted the grown-ups again.

You may recall reading last fall about a a Welsh convenience store owner who discouraged teens from hanging around outside his shop with a device called the Mosquito, which teenagers found irritating but was inaudible to adults. From Mosquito's manufacturer:

It seems that there is a very real medical phenomenon known as presbycusis or age related hearing loss which, according to The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, "begins after the age of 20 but is usually significant only in persons over 65". It first affects the highest frequencies (18 to 20 kHz) notably in those who have turned 20 years of age". It is possible to generate a high frequency sound that is audible only to teenagers.

You can try to hear Teen Buzz at Orange Days, the site of an 18-year-old in Denmark ("I could hear it I think, made me feel slightly uncomfortable"). I couldn't hear anything but headphone buzz through headphones; when I put Teen Buzz through a tuner and large speakers and cranked it up, the tuner started flashing "Overload" but I heard nothing.

Blogging about a sound I can't hear has a lot of potential for egg on the face (lovely new clothes the emperor is wearing, no?) so I shot that link to 17-year-old Liz Petow of Providence, yesterday's guest blogger.

She e-mailed back, "I hear a low buzzing and then a couple of cracking sounds. That's really interesting."

A final irony: You can download the Teen Buzz ringtone, but many grown-ups won't know how to open the file: It's a .torrent — a pointer to the file that the open-source peer-to-peer filesharing software BitTorrent (Help) and its clones can open. (How Bit Torrent Works.)

Mosquito was invented by Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, the sort of place you might expect to find fairies that only children can see.

What it used to be: Art in Ruins is a lovely site that's documenting Rhode Island buildings, and seeking memories and stories about them.

Now the building demolished after the Downcity restaurant brisket fire this week has joined the archive:

(from RIHPHC review of Downtown Providence, 1984)

Second Universalist Church (1847-1849): Thomas A. Tefft, architect. Romanesque Revival, 3.5 story brick structure with end-gable roof; 20th century storefronts; 2nd story windows infilled, five round-head windows with voussoirs and connecting imposts on third story, centered round-head window with tracery flanked by two lunette windows below datestone in attic; simple corbel cornice; irregular fenestration on Eddy Street elevation.

Built as the Second Universalist Church, the building housed the first private normal school in Providence by 1852, the antecedent of Rhode Island College (a normal school trains teachers). The structure was converted to commercial use later in the 19th century. Significant both as one of the few remaining buildings designed by Thomas A. Tefft, and as a reminder of the generally residential nature of this part of downtown before the Civil War. The Second Universalist building, though heavily altered inside and out, adds architectural variety to the streetscape in a block of vernacular buildings.

Inside the fortress: Technorati Teams With The Associated Press to Connect Bloggers To More Than 440 Newspapers Nationwide. From the blog search engine's founder, David Sifry:

Today, as a first step, Technorati is now connecting bloggers to the more than 440 AP member web sites in the U.S. that take the AP's Hosted Custom News product, taken by local papers such as the Buffalo News or the Sun Journal. The new service will bring blogger commentary about AP news stories to communities large and small throughout the USA, giving bloggers a voice in trusted local papers throughout the nation. For many news readers, this will be their first exposure to the blogosphere with national, international, business and sports news presented along side links to blogger commentary and perspective.

When readers visit an AP member Web site that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the "Top Five Most Blogged About" AP articles right next to the article text, dynamically powered by Technorati. Additionally, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver "Who’s Blogging About" that article. Now, if you have commentary about an AP story, you can get mentioned in that module simply by linking to that AP news URL, akin to what you can do with Washington Post articles, Newsweek articles, Der Spiegel articles, and a host of other media partners that currently work with Technorati.

Interesting stuff. AP give bloggers an incentive to read its stories on the pages of news sites that subscribe to its feed rather than on Google or Yahoo News. (Here's projo's AP front page.)

Local papers increase their page views, and get blog readers following links into their sites. Bloggers get exposure as part of their hometown papers (commenting on mostly national stories, though). And, while bloggers might hope to be similarly cited alongside the paper's own staff-written stories, the papers' "content management systems" vary in their ability to do that.

One potential snag: News sites that require registration. Bloggers are loath to burden readers with lengthy registration processes when the same story can be found at non-reg sites. How will papers react if bloggers offer a generic password or a link to BugMeNot, a site that collects donated passwords?

The New York Times has long made available a special link for bloggers that will keep stories so linked from slipping into the paid archive after seven days. Perhaps a similar workaround might offer a registration bypass for blog links?

Back to that lead: "Today, as a first step..." What comes after this, David?

Turnabout: City Council votes to seize Wal-Mart land: San Francisco Chronicle,

The Hercules (Calif.) City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to take the unprecedented step of using eminent domain to prevent Wal-Mart from building a big-box store on a 17-acre lot near the city's waterfront.

The vote caused most of the 300 people who had packed Hercules City Hall for the meeting to break out in cheers and applause....

Lists:

•  The 100 science fiction books you just have to read. Childhood's End tops it.

•  The 50 science fiction films you just have to see. Both lists from Phobos Books.

•  101 Fabulous Freebies at PC World.

Posted by Sheila  at 4:44 AM | Permalink | Comments: 2