Standard notice that this Forbes article is essentially equivalent to a Medium or Substack post (this is more of a criticism at Forbes and its pay-to-post system rather than at the individual writers).
Brad Templeton founded Looking Glass Software and ran rec.humor.funny via the Usenet address funny@looking.UUCP, so he was known as the Funny Looking Guy.
>Edited by Brad Templeton. MAIL, yes MAIL your jokes to funny@looking.UUCP
Attribute the joke's source if at all possible. I will reply, mailers willing.
Topical (current events) jokes should be sent to topical@looking.UUCP
As I noted, I'm not criticising the author, but because Forbes has sullied their reputation just to lend their name to nearly anyone. The warning is for someone who's still unaware that Forbes has turned into this and they should probably check who's behind the author and not rely on the Forbes' name to lend credence to the ideas (which unfortunately has published some very, very questionable articles like obvious pump-and-dump schemes).
... which is unfortunate since that there's still a Forbes newsroom (which produce the published magazine editions) which is the only part of Forbes which has actual editorial accountability (and therefore you can lend to Forbes' name).
While Forbes does have some articles from paying contributors, these are marked. Articles from "Senior Contributors" involve paying the contributor, not the other way around. So not really like Medium or Substack (Though these do provide some remuneration to those who restrict their articles to paying subscribers, I believe.)
Okay, radar detection is trickier than what this writer seems to imply - it is hard to detect a pedestrian on regular cars already so I have doubts that the radar technology, as currently stands, will enhance safety.
On the other hand, if the white noise technology lives up to its promises then wow, please actually implement this!
I live in NYC and on many heavy machinery I hear a white noise-type sound when they back up -- just like the article describes.
It's still pretty noticeable, but the ambient noise is already pretty high in the city, so it does fade quickly. Not sure how it would be in a quieter environment, but it's much less annoying than a beep for sure.
No sympathy from me on this one. We should not remove longstanding and effective safety features because their sound is displeasing to people far outside the zone of danger. Put up noise abatement fences.
A person walking in my neighborhood was hit by a speeding cop car. The cop had his flashers on but not his siren. As it turned out in court, the local cops had been getting complaints about sirens being too loud and so had begun operating with only flashers when making basic traffic stops at night. Safety had been sacrificed for convenience, leading quickly to a serious accident.
There's more effective methods that create less disturbances. Noise pollution is proven time and time again to be both a physical and mental health hazard. People are subjected to this crap while trying to live their lives in their own home, and brain washed into thinking its ok and to just deal with it. There should be huge pressure to reduce noise pollution when solutions exist. In this case, solutions do exist.
But this isn't noise pollution. This is noise that serves a safety purpose and is being created deliberately for that purpose. Should we make fire alarms quiet so that people outside the burning building are not inconvenienced? Shall we stop the little beeping noise at crosswalks because not all of us are blind? Abate the noise. Put up barriers. Don't sacrifice the safety of workers for your peace and quiet.
The time for such debates is before work begins. Complain at the zoning committee that issued the permits for the construction. Demand that your peace and quiet is more important than allowing new construction or a new business in the area. Demand a proper mitigation plan. Demand that they soundproof surrounding buildings. Don't show up mid-construction and ask people to disable the safety alarms.
Deliberate noise does not mean that it is not a noise pollution, in the same way as light pollution can be caused by deliberately emitted light.
If I hear machinery 300m away and 20m lower then at this point it is a pure noise pollution with zero benefit to me[0].
And if it can be made less noticeable from far away without damage to safety then it should be done right now.
> Complain at the zoning committee that issued the permits for the construction. Demand that your peace and quiet is more important than allowing new construction or a new business in the area.
Making better safety systems is preferable to NIMBYism.
The smoke coming out of a coal powerplant exists for a good reason. Its still pollution.
The fire alarm example is a bad one. They don't go off hundreds of times a day for hours on end. If they did, yes, we'd need a different solution.
The construction project across my street has been going on for 6 years. 6 years of beep beep beep beep. There is technology and solutions that serve the same safety purpose but do it better. We can use directional beeper alarms, they can use different noise patterns and frequencies that are more easily blocked by windows and are easier to hear by people near by. They don't need to be as loud, too. There's no reason a backup alarm needs to be audible from 5 blocks in FRONT of the truck when its going BACKWARD.
> Don't show up mid-construction and ask people to disable the safety alarms.
What kind of strawman is this? Folks are asking for better safety code so that future construction can be handled safer with less disturbance. Not asking for a truck on a construction site right now turn off the alarm.
TFA is not talking about just removing backing alert sound, but replacing it by another one that fades much faster. Are you really in danger of getting crushed by a truck if said truck is 200m away?
The article also argues that since the current beep travels very far, you hear it all the time on a construction site even if you are not nearby the backing equipment, and thus you start not paying attention to it anymore.
A noise that would fade faster could be safer, because you would hear it less frequently and only when you are actually concerned, making it harder to ignore.
Try listening to these beeps while wearing proper ear protection. While talking on a radio. Beside a running generator. While you are driving another piece of machinery yourself. Anything loud/penetrating enough to be heard by workers in the immediate area will also be heard by non-workers a great distance away.
Policy at my workplace demands that all vehicle backing up, including personal cars, honk their horns twice before doing so. I'm sure the neighbors don't like the noise but after more than a couple accidents it was deemed necessary.
> Anything loud/penetrating enough to be heard by workers in the immediate area will also be heard by non-workers a great distance away.
Yes except not all noises are created equal. A white noise is very different from a single frequency noise and much less disturbing. After all many people even use white noise to block other type of aggravating noises.
Here in Montréal all snow removal vehicles are equipped with a white noise backup alarm. It's snowing a lot in winter, so you have huge snow plows that might back up at any time in the middle of an intersection with pedestrians with earphones not paying attention, and I can say first hand that you cannot miss that noise when it's nearby. While at the same time when they are removing snow one block away from my place, you can still hear it but it doesn't prevent you from sleeping.
> We should not remove longstanding and effective safety features because their sound is displeasing to people far outside the zone of danger. Put up noise abatement fences.
From the article:
"Those who first mandated the beep thought it was good that it was annoying and impossible to ignore — and thus went for a distance. Because it "travels" like this, on any construction site (or near one) you are hearing them all the time. You become used to them and even start to ignore them, and that is why people still get crushed."
The argument isn't about removing the sound but making it less intrusive and more effective at its job. Even in your example of police sirens there was a recent study posted on HN which concluded that loud emergency vehicle sirens causes panic in motorists leading them to make poor snap decisions resulting in accidents.
> you are hearing them all the time. You become used to them and even start to ignore them, and that is why people still get crushed
I don't even work in construction, but I hear these so often every day, day after day, that if there's one coming up behind me, I'll likely get hit. The only way I can live my day to day is by having trained myself to ignore them. It's really useless as a safety measure. I know at least one person (elderly family friend who had perfect hearing) who got squashed by a large truck because she was in the same situation. Didn't bat an eye at the beeping right behind her until it was too late.
The point is that it's not an effective safety feature. If you've ever spent time on a worksite you just hear the beeping constantly, and you start to ignore it
Someone driving too fast for the conditions, failing to notice and then striking a pedestrian, points to a different problem than not having the siren on.
Father and son stand in queue behind obese man. Son says:
- Wow, what a big man!
- Shh, don't say that loudly.
Then man's cell phone got sms, son says:
- Run, he's backing up!
I hate noise pollution too, but out of curiosity if you live in a place where winter has the properties that makes sound travel further, doesn't it also necessarily have the properties that make it a bad idea to leave your windows open?
Upper floor apartments can sometimes get quite toasty, even with the heat turned off. There was a recent HN discussion about this but I wasn't able to find it.
See this article [1] for more detail on the problem. You will learn that the current beeps are poorly designed, do not do their job well as is, and are frequently so loud that they can damage worker’s hearing. As someone who got beeped on for months on end, I can confirm they routinely violate both OSHA worksite noise regs and municipal noise ordinances.
Unfortunately it will take decades for any change to happen to the 100000s of pieces of equipment out there, even in the best case. Under current regs operators can not update the beepers without approval from the manufacturer. It will take a lot of pressure from multiple sources for any change at all.
Looking at that paper, the criticism isn't around effects other than their ability to make things safer. The beeps are annoying but what else does a better or equal job?
Any solution that doesn't do an equal or better job will lead to more workplace injuries and deaths. Do we want that?
It's a trade-off. As someone who was around large construction equipment with all those beeps for some time, I would love to have a different solution.
The problem here is that the venn diagram of "people who care enough about safety to have an opinions" and "people who's minds won't implode when faced with a tradeoff that cannot be easily side stepped by inputting money" and "people who are ok with subjective solutions that are not one size fits all" are very nearly three separate circles.
The obvious answer here is to use one type of beeper in quiet environments (e.g. warehouse forklift) and one beeper for loud environment (scrapyard forklift). Of course that opens the door to subjective decisions (the inspector may have to judge whether a beeper is appropriate) and gaming the system (a workplace could run loud machinery at reduced speed) and the vast majority of the people trying to handle workplace safety are coming at it from a perspective where that is a non-starter. You see this any time the subject of "required" PPE and the health and safety implications of it when worn in extreme and non-typical workplaces. People get tied in all sorts of ideological knots when it becomes clear they can't just sling one size fits all solutions at problems.
Isn't that exactly what the Forbes article is talking about?
The patent should be expired now, so third party companies can finally mass produce these things cheap enough that they can start to appear in new construction and transport equipment.
Such equipment can last decades, though, so even if every truck, bulldozer and crane switches tomorrow, we'll still be in for another 10 or 20 years of beeping at least.
Not knowing about the patent (only the info from the Forbes article), the device producing the sound from Tom Scott's video would have been around when that patent was still active. Therefore, either 1) it was from the company issuing the patent and they weren't able to bring it to the US market; or 2) it was from a different company. Given that the comments in the video mention that the US still has the beep-beep sound, I wonder if that was preventing the UK company selling the system to the US. In that case, why didn't the creator of the patent bring it to market in the US while it was still valid?
This will probably never happen, but... There is technically already a partial solution for this but AFAIK there are no regulations or legal frameworks to allow it. Construction workers can already buy noise cancelling bluetooth headphones [1][2] so they can listen to music while working. They will still need ear plugs when working with loud tools but the headphones are loud. If the equipment with the beepers also transmitted a signal the headphones could be adapted to pick up via bluetooth along with a TDR calculation to figure out distance, the worker could hear the machine coming to them and would probably be more annoyed they can't hear their music. All of this also assumes that regulations were stricter on fencing off the area from non construction workers assuming you get rid of the beepers.
Missing is the standard for linking these headphones and the myriad of construction equipment to something that calculates distance and warns the listener. So there you go HN entrepreneurs. Write the RFC's, make some prototypes and give them for free to a construction company. Maybe partner with companies that produce the top 10 fork-lifts, skid-steers, tractors, bulldozers, flat-bed trucks and dump trucks as a start. BONUS if you give the workers a way to talk to the driver without having to allocate licensed frequencies.
People struggle to get their Bluetooth headphones to pair reliably with their phone, can you imagine the nightmare of simultaneously pairing with a phone, an excavator, and two bulldozers?
I think you would pair your headphones with some type of primary multiplexer that knows how to talk to the other gear and is probably centrally managed by the foreman. So your headphones in this model could see one device and thus you could use standard bluetooth headphones. I could see some type of Arduino or similar device acting as the multiplexer. Unsure if an arduino is capable enough but others here could probably chime in. That device could also handle the local communications. Maybe its a RasPi in a bright yellow case that goes on your tool belt with a DeWalt/Hilti/Bosch logo, whomever you partner with to fund this. Oh and a removable standard speed charging battery standardized to charge with the other tools.
I suppose that works for the headphones that have FM receivers. I use those today for playing mp3's in the vehicle since I only use older vehicles. Tricky part is workers close to each other having to coordinate frequencies but it's doable.
I'm familiar with cases of people wearing noise canceling headphones on a job site being killed because they didn't hear the beep and were struck by a machine they didn't notice.
The beep is for safety. The annoyingness makes it hard to ignore which is good for safety.
Anything that tries to replace it needs to keep safety up. It can't be easy to ignore. I can't require headphones on a person (what if the battery dies after 8 hours and they are working a 12 hour shift... or any number of other things).
So many organizations are pushing safety. Governments who want to protect people. Insurance companies who don't want to pay the cost (and put requirements on construction companies). And people who don't want to die or get maimed.
A patent on an idea doesn't mean it works to get people to notice who have been around the equipment for 3 or 6 or more months. I would love to see some research on it.
That annoying beep works well so it's hard to replace.
LED lighting is similarly wedged in patent hell. Put the damn things on "flexible wire" and the lawyers will devour you. If you want to launch a product in the space, expect that you will need to hire a bevy of attorneys to get things in order and expect your IP license costs to exceed your BOM costs by about a factor of 5.
I believe strings of "dumb" LEDs are mostly free of IP, but once you start getting into controlling them in some way by sending signals over that wire, you are squarely in the soup.
The article just says that the patent could be a reason that the white-noise system didn't take off, but also notes it could be due to regulations. If you make your bulldozer with the beep-beep alert it meets regulations everywhere. If you make it with anything different that might not be the case.
As someone nearly deaf, a few things come to mind:
* Can I hear this white noise thing? I can hear the typical backup beep up close. They're annoyingly loud for people like me. In theory white noise might be audible to more people with partial frequency losses. I don't know in practice.
* Audible measures should never be a sole indicator of danger. Why isn't there a flashing light?
I'm puzzled by which machines are covered by these regulations, and which aren't.
I bought a new farm telehandler three or four years ago, and a dairy farmer friend did about the same time. His machine has the reversing alarm which is apparently non-optional. Mine doesn't, and as far as I know, they never sell anything with one.
They're from different manufacturers and mine's centre-pivot whereas his is side-mount, but they're basically similar-sized kit to do the same job. Nonetheless, only one of us makes an enemy of the neighbours at 4am. (I wonder if the rules only require them for construction sites, and my manufacturer doesn't sell into that market whereas his does?)
That "Accursed Beep-Beep" can be a life saver when it is used to signal a vehicle in reverse. Depending on your situation, you may be interested in installing such a warning device on your personal car or truck.
The model ESZ-26B is a Piezo Alert that will operate from 3 to 28 Vdc and can deliver either a continuous or intermittent warning sound. It is usually a simple task to have it wired to the brake lights in most vehicles.
It is available from many vendors. If you need more information, just do a serch for "ESZ-26B".
65 comments
[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Templeton
http://www.anvari.org/shortjoke/Big_Jokes/12870_edited-by-br...
>Edited by Brad Templeton. MAIL, yes MAIL your jokes to funny@looking.UUCP Attribute the joke's source if at all possible. I will reply, mailers willing. Topical (current events) jokes should be sent to topical@looking.UUCP
... which is unfortunate since that there's still a Forbes newsroom (which produce the published magazine editions) which is the only part of Forbes which has actual editorial accountability (and therefore you can lend to Forbes' name).
On the other hand, if the white noise technology lives up to its promises then wow, please actually implement this!
It's still pretty noticeable, but the ambient noise is already pretty high in the city, so it does fade quickly. Not sure how it would be in a quieter environment, but it's much less annoying than a beep for sure.
A person walking in my neighborhood was hit by a speeding cop car. The cop had his flashers on but not his siren. As it turned out in court, the local cops had been getting complaints about sirens being too loud and so had begun operating with only flashers when making basic traffic stops at night. Safety had been sacrificed for convenience, leading quickly to a serious accident.
Are there any studies that quantify this effectiveness?
The time for such debates is before work begins. Complain at the zoning committee that issued the permits for the construction. Demand that your peace and quiet is more important than allowing new construction or a new business in the area. Demand a proper mitigation plan. Demand that they soundproof surrounding buildings. Don't show up mid-construction and ask people to disable the safety alarms.
If I hear machinery 300m away and 20m lower then at this point it is a pure noise pollution with zero benefit to me[0].
And if it can be made less noticeable from far away without damage to safety then it should be done right now.
> Complain at the zoning committee that issued the permits for the construction. Demand that your peace and quiet is more important than allowing new construction or a new business in the area.
Making better safety systems is preferable to NIMBYism.
-------------
[0] With possible exception for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket-wheel_excavator but I am not convinced that beeping would help if I would manage to miss THAT.
And if I have Bagger 293 in my room then things already went really wrong and weird.
The fire alarm example is a bad one. They don't go off hundreds of times a day for hours on end. If they did, yes, we'd need a different solution.
The construction project across my street has been going on for 6 years. 6 years of beep beep beep beep. There is technology and solutions that serve the same safety purpose but do it better. We can use directional beeper alarms, they can use different noise patterns and frequencies that are more easily blocked by windows and are easier to hear by people near by. They don't need to be as loud, too. There's no reason a backup alarm needs to be audible from 5 blocks in FRONT of the truck when its going BACKWARD.
> Don't show up mid-construction and ask people to disable the safety alarms.
What kind of strawman is this? Folks are asking for better safety code so that future construction can be handled safer with less disturbance. Not asking for a truck on a construction site right now turn off the alarm.
The article also argues that since the current beep travels very far, you hear it all the time on a construction site even if you are not nearby the backing equipment, and thus you start not paying attention to it anymore.
A noise that would fade faster could be safer, because you would hear it less frequently and only when you are actually concerned, making it harder to ignore.
Policy at my workplace demands that all vehicle backing up, including personal cars, honk their horns twice before doing so. I'm sure the neighbors don't like the noise but after more than a couple accidents it was deemed necessary.
So the beepers don't actually even work well enough?
Yes except not all noises are created equal. A white noise is very different from a single frequency noise and much less disturbing. After all many people even use white noise to block other type of aggravating noises.
Here in Montréal all snow removal vehicles are equipped with a white noise backup alarm. It's snowing a lot in winter, so you have huge snow plows that might back up at any time in the middle of an intersection with pedestrians with earphones not paying attention, and I can say first hand that you cannot miss that noise when it's nearby. While at the same time when they are removing snow one block away from my place, you can still hear it but it doesn't prevent you from sleeping.
This type of backing alarm has been approved as safe on construction sites by many places. In Canada at least its very commonly used. e.g: https://www.heavyequipmentguide.ca/article/24957/backup-alar...
From the article:
"Those who first mandated the beep thought it was good that it was annoying and impossible to ignore — and thus went for a distance. Because it "travels" like this, on any construction site (or near one) you are hearing them all the time. You become used to them and even start to ignore them, and that is why people still get crushed."
The argument isn't about removing the sound but making it less intrusive and more effective at its job. Even in your example of police sirens there was a recent study posted on HN which concluded that loud emergency vehicle sirens causes panic in motorists leading them to make poor snap decisions resulting in accidents.
I don't even work in construction, but I hear these so often every day, day after day, that if there's one coming up behind me, I'll likely get hit. The only way I can live my day to day is by having trained myself to ignore them. It's really useless as a safety measure. I know at least one person (elderly family friend who had perfect hearing) who got squashed by a large truck because she was in the same situation. Didn't bat an eye at the beeping right behind her until it was too late.
One of my fondest memories of this time was him walking backwards down the hall making the "err err" sound of a bulldozer backing up...
Unfortunately it will take decades for any change to happen to the 100000s of pieces of equipment out there, even in the best case. Under current regs operators can not update the beepers without approval from the manufacturer. It will take a lot of pressure from multiple sources for any change at all.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3018517/
Any solution that doesn't do an equal or better job will lead to more workplace injuries and deaths. Do we want that?
It's a trade-off. As someone who was around large construction equipment with all those beeps for some time, I would love to have a different solution.
The people who set the requirements (e.g. insurance companies) care about safety effectiveness.
White noise generator / 'broadband alarm':
> White-noise / broadband alarms offer advantages over the typical tonal alarms:
> * Broadcast a range of frequencies making them easier to locate
> * Sound is more confined to those in the area who are most at risk
> * Reduces noise disturbance and noise pollution in surrounding community
> * Are available with adjustable sounds for specific environments
* https://www.worksafenb.ca/about-us/news-and-events/campaigns...
* https://www.heavyequipmentguide.ca/article/24957/backup-alar...
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/new-back-up-alarm-snow...
The obvious answer here is to use one type of beeper in quiet environments (e.g. warehouse forklift) and one beeper for loud environment (scrapyard forklift). Of course that opens the door to subjective decisions (the inspector may have to judge whether a beeper is appropriate) and gaming the system (a workplace could run loud machinery at reduced speed) and the vast majority of the people trying to handle workplace safety are coming at it from a perspective where that is a non-starter. You see this any time the subject of "required" PPE and the health and safety implications of it when worn in extreme and non-typical workplaces. People get tied in all sorts of ideological knots when it becomes clear they can't just sling one size fits all solutions at problems.
The patent should be expired now, so third party companies can finally mass produce these things cheap enough that they can start to appear in new construction and transport equipment.
Such equipment can last decades, though, so even if every truck, bulldozer and crane switches tomorrow, we'll still be in for another 10 or 20 years of beeping at least.
Missing is the standard for linking these headphones and the myriad of construction equipment to something that calculates distance and warns the listener. So there you go HN entrepreneurs. Write the RFC's, make some prototypes and give them for free to a construction company. Maybe partner with companies that produce the top 10 fork-lifts, skid-steers, tractors, bulldozers, flat-bed trucks and dump trucks as a start. BONUS if you give the workers a way to talk to the driver without having to allocate licensed frequencies.
[1] - https://www.homedepot.com/b/Safety-Equipment-Hearing-Protect...
[2] - https://www.lowes.com/pd/DEWALT-Earbud-Noise-Canceling-Headp...
The beep is for safety. The annoyingness makes it hard to ignore which is good for safety.
Anything that tries to replace it needs to keep safety up. It can't be easy to ignore. I can't require headphones on a person (what if the battery dies after 8 hours and they are working a 12 hour shift... or any number of other things).
So many organizations are pushing safety. Governments who want to protect people. Insurance companies who don't want to pay the cost (and put requirements on construction companies). And people who don't want to die or get maimed.
A patent on an idea doesn't mean it works to get people to notice who have been around the equipment for 3 or 6 or more months. I would love to see some research on it.
That annoying beep works well so it's hard to replace.
So, LEDs in Christmas/holiday lights are patented?
* Can I hear this white noise thing? I can hear the typical backup beep up close. They're annoyingly loud for people like me. In theory white noise might be audible to more people with partial frequency losses. I don't know in practice.
* Audible measures should never be a sole indicator of danger. Why isn't there a flashing light?
* I can't hear electric cars at low speed at all.
I bought a new farm telehandler three or four years ago, and a dairy farmer friend did about the same time. His machine has the reversing alarm which is apparently non-optional. Mine doesn't, and as far as I know, they never sell anything with one.
They're from different manufacturers and mine's centre-pivot whereas his is side-mount, but they're basically similar-sized kit to do the same job. Nonetheless, only one of us makes an enemy of the neighbours at 4am. (I wonder if the rules only require them for construction sites, and my manufacturer doesn't sell into that market whereas his does?)
The model ESZ-26B is a Piezo Alert that will operate from 3 to 28 Vdc and can deliver either a continuous or intermittent warning sound. It is usually a simple task to have it wired to the brake lights in most vehicles.
It is available from many vendors. If you need more information, just do a serch for "ESZ-26B".