Revenge by Gadget

Attention loud cellphone talkers, overzealous horn honkers, inconsiderate cab drivers and other everyday pests. Your days may be numbered.

Thanks to the falling cost of microcontroller chips and the lure of easy online sales, inventors are turning out record numbers of gadgets. One growing subset of these inventions: products that help people neutralize antisocial behavior at the push of a button.

Students at MIT's Media Lab demonstrate new inventions and gadgets that carry social applications or have social aims.The brains behind these devices range from entrepreneurs in suburban Los Angeles to graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.



British inventors are exporting a new product for people who hate lousy drivers -- it's a luminescent screen that fits in a car's rear window and, at the driver's command, flashes any one of five messages to other motorists.

These include a smiley face, a sad face and phrases like "Back Off" and "Idiot." (Since the product's U.S. debut, the company says it also has received several requests for images of offensive hand gestures.)

Some products, like the "Outdoor Bark Control Birdhouse," which aims to quiet loud dogs, came about by accident. Though the technology has been around for five years, the manufacturer, Radio Systems of Knoxville, Tenn., initially sold it as an indoor training tool for pet owners. But the company says it began getting requests from customers for an outdoor version that could be used on annoying neighborhood dogs. When a market analysis showed 60% of consumers would welcome a covert way to shut up somebody else's canine, the company decided to proceed.

Mike Taylor, a Radio Systems executive, says the company doubled the bark controller's range to 50 feet, then asked a focus group to help figure out a way to camouflage the unit so neighbors wouldn't know what it was. After flirting with fake rocks and footballs, the company settled on a somewhat unlikely design -- a brightly painted Bavarian-style birdhouse. "I was the first user," says Mr. Taylor, who says he tested the prototype on an obnoxious neighborhood German shepherd. "I'm sleeping pleasantly now."

Several years ago as an engineering graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Eric Paulos built a device called the "I-Bomb" that emits an electromagnetic pulse that disables all electronics in its range (a similar device was depicted in the movie "Ocean's Eleven").

While Mr. Paulos says he has operated the I-Bomb only about half a dozen times in front of audiences -- he considers it a work of performance art -- he says he continues to get emails from would-be manufacturers and marketers and, more oddly, people who live nearby and just want to borrow it. One such message: "My neighbor is playing loud music, I just want it to stop."