Reservoir Hill writes "Researchers have discovered that human skin may contain millions of tiny "antennas" in the form of microscopic sweat ducts that may reveal a person's physical and emotional state. This discovery might eventually result in lie detectors that operate at a distance. In experiments, the team beamed electromagnetic waves with a frequency range of about 100 gigahertz at the hands of test subjects and measured the frequency of the electromagnetic waves reflecting off the subjects' skin. Initially, the experiments were carried out in contact with the subjects' hands, but even at a distance of 22 cm, researchers found a strong correlation between subjects' blood pressure and pulse rate, and the frequency response of their skin."
I hereby ask that nobody ever refers to "tinfoil hat" in a deragatory manner anymore, because we are going to seriously need them.
(cue all known jokes about tinfoil hats, of course; but this is actually a serious post; when some guy will first need to use tinfoil to do any political activism, mainstrem medias should not be able to diss him just because "tinfoil hat" is linked to crazy people).
And better than a tinfoil hat, we will need something able to filter what you let or do not let through, as was done with the rfid firewall: http://www.rfidguardian.org/index.php/Main_Page [rfidguardian.org]
Combine these technologies and you'll have marketers using your movements in public to create a "real world" MMORPG in which NPC's movements and actions are based on what happens to non-Players (literally people who don't pay the MMO company) in the game.
And yes, the marketers will jump out with swords and chain mail and scare the NPCs in order to garner appropriate reactions, when needed.
Or just use the "system over-ride" that prevents players from being tracked in the game to stop tracking people's mo
That's just a high tech upgrade to "Society", the MMORPG we've all been playing since birth. Just replace "chain mail" with "bullet-proof vests" and "swords" with "batons" and "Tasers" and you get it. To stir up the game the DM (called PM in the UK, President in the US) sometimes orders police vans armed with tear gas grenades and water cannons out onto the streets. There are relatively few NPC's in this game (among them hobos, Travellers, illegal immigrants and wild animals) since most of us are forced to
Bear in mind that we can now use these to tell if politicians are lying.
Sadaam has WMDs! *BZZZT!*
He is a threat to our safety! *BZZZT!*
He hates our freedom! *BZZZT!*
He is armed with foul language and has a nasty temper... *crickets*
Not too sure about that, Monica Lewinsky's lips moved quite a bit from what I hear, but it certainly wasn't in the course of saying anything. Then again, she's not a real politician, so...
I knew a guy who claimed he was abducted and sodomized with various probes then dumped in a field in the middle of nowhere. Is he lying? He believes it.
Whether you know if someone is lying or not does not necessarily bring you closer to the truth.
It's even crappier. We already know know about the normal polygraphs that they don't really work. They just mention someone's reaction to stress, and from there it's a leap of faith that "lying emotional stress". The latter just isn't so.
1. As you mention, what do you do about people who genuinely believe something bogus?
As a milder example, human memory isn't photographic, ever. It seems to store more like the description of a scene, and just ad-lib the details that it forgot. Over time you'd forget that, say, the guy was wearing a blue shirt, or maybe that detail never even made it into permanent memory in the first place. But if you try too hard to remember it, it will just give you some best guess. Like that he was wearing a black shirt.
2. We know that people can train to not feel much emotion about lying, and to psychopaths it even comes naturally. So even measuring their pulse and blood pressure and everything directly, you just can't tell that they're lying.
Basically we're relying there on the false idea that everyone was educated that it's not nice to lie, and everyone therefore has a hard time telling one and is feeling severely guilty about it. Which is false from start to finish. E.g., speaking of education, we know that some people's upbringing just taught them that it's perfectly _normal_ and indeed _logical_ to tell a lie, if the alternative is a savage beating by your father. They won't feel any guilt extrapolating from there to lying to save their arse from jail.
3. That emotional stress someone is feeling, can be for a bazillion other causes.
E.g., because the topic is painful to them for other reasons. A rape victim being the witness in someone else's rape trial might experience severe stress just thinking about it, whether they tell the truth or not. A PTSD [wikipedia.org] sufferer will be in a disproportionate amount of stress when recounting the event that caused it, or anything that reminds them of it. So, you know, some grandpa who fought in Vietnam and still wakes up in cold sweat after dreaming of it, would register as shamelessly lying when they tell you about the atrocities of war. Etc.
E.g., particularly bad cases of repressed memories and/or the results of some particularly hard to justify cognitive dissonance, can cause a disproportionate emotional responses when you're forced to think or talk about something which challenges them. You see that not only in polygraph tests. A lot of people who are rabidly against something are really just against you challenging their already decided model of the world. The less of an actual justification they have to support that position, other than "but my daddy said so", actually the harder it can be to get them to think logically about it.
Etc.
Basically let's just say there are good reasons why that test can't be demanded in court.
So now we have something that promises to test one parameter from a distance, instead of several measured directly, and which must correlate in certain ways to be considered a "yep, he's lying" proof. It's basically adding one more indirection step to that already weak inference chain. But even if the correlation between skin pores and all those parameters were that infallible, you're back to "stress he's lying", which is already known to be false even measured up close with electrodes.
But really now. I *did* have to dodge sniper fire from angry Chiba farmers who didn't want their land "annexed" into a new runway the first time I flew into Narita.
This is not about getting to the truth, in the sense most people mean it, this is about finding the TRUTH: what they already know is TRUE - they just need somebody to admit it. Hence the use of torture, sorry coercion, polygraphs and other dubious methods. It is scary to see how these things are used in the US - the nation that is supposed to be the epitome of scientific knowledge.
For anybody who thinks that the scientific basis of the polygraph is anything other than 100%, weapons-grade bullonium, I got a couple of names names for you: Aldrich Ames: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames [wikipedia.org]
Hypnosis can be used to remember e.g. a phone number you saw when you were 6 months old and couldn't read yet...
According to some sources [wikipedia.org] roughly as reliable as most hypnosis publications, people can pull up memories dating all the way back to conception. The fact that somebody recovers a repressed memory and strongly believes its accuracy doesn't make it true...
You bring up an important point here. A lie is only a lie if you believe it is a lie. If you believe the lie is the truth then all of the lie detectors in the world ain't gonna get you one step closer. What bothers me in all of this is that you are going to catch the idiots who can't lie. The ones who are sophisticated enough to get through are the ones that we need to worry about, and they will not be caught.
The more I see technology being applied the more worried I get that people will not understand what
It's not a lie detector, it's a nervous person detector, just like the polygraph. It's clever, but it's more likely to find someone who doesn't like being interviewed by the [insert agency here] than a cold blooded killer.
it's a nervous person detector, just like the polygraph
Exactly. And only idiots and talk show hosts believe in polygraphs. If you're highly strung or ill or prone to hot flushes or know how to deliberately raise your heart-rate then they won't work. If they don't work even for a small percentage of people then they are useless as lie detectors.
The most significant result from polygraph tests is and has been the Galvanic Skin Response Test. It works by measuring the voltage change in your skin when your sweat glands dilate due to a response in your sympathetic nervous system. The simplified (and not completely accurate) version is that telling a lie triggers your fight-or-flight reflex which is tied into your sympathetic nervous system.
Being interrogated by jack booted thugs, be they cops, soldiers, school administrators or Agent Smith (or his many alphabet soup lookalikes), is generally enough to raise any innocent individual's fight or flight response. Which of those two responses it is depends on how much they have left to lose at the time of the interrogation. What has to be asked is this. How much more will people put up with... and how often will this be used, as the "polygraph" is used now, to merely incriminate nervous individual
Not if you want to monitor large groups of people... like in a shopping mall or ($next_wild_idea_to_improve_security && $think_of_the_children);
Combine this with CCTV, face recognition and you can detect who goes where and if they're 'suspiciously nervous' without having to tell the person(s) in question.
Being someone who has panic attacks and periods of agoraphobia, I do not like this at all..
Even if this worked, which it won't since it has all the same problems as polygraphs and probably a few more (want someone to read guilty? put them in a warm cell for a few hours), the countermeasures are easily available - antiperspirant.
I want these detectors to be made a mandatory addition to any camera that is used when
interviewing politicians. Data from the detector should be processed into a simple BS-o-meter gauge that is displayed along with the interview.
Unfortunately the detector is also bullshit along the lines of the long running scam from the writer of the Wonder Woman comic - the polygraph. Human thought is a little more complex than skin resistance.
If they can get this to remotely measure blood pressure and pulse to an accuracy that is acceptable (90%? Pure guessing on my part, the article only mentions a "strong correlation"), using it for lie detection would still be based off of the shaky assumption that increases in blood pressure and pulse indicate lies or deception.
Even a polygraph, which measures blood pressure and pulse directly and accurately, as well as additional things such as respiration, skin conductivity and even muscle movements (fidgeting, ticks etc), is not all that reliable. To borrow from Wikipedia:
The [National Academy of Sciences] found that the majority of polygraph research was of low quality. After culling through the numerous studies of the accuracy of polygraph detection the NAS identified 57 that had "sufficient scientific rigor". These studies concluded that a polygraph test regarding a specific incident can discern the truth at "a level greater than chance, yet short of perfection". And "A 1997 survey of 421 psychologists estimated the test's average accuracy at about 61%, a little better than chance."
In reality, even if polygraphs could be PROVEN 95% accurate, it wouldn't ever hold up in court: 1 in 20 is reasonable doubt. This thing would be using the same theory, but with less input. FAIL
The real benefit from this will be in medical monitoring. If blood pressure and can be measured remotely, accurately and in a short amount of time, that would be a big improvement over the current sphygmomanometer (a regular BP cuff that gets pumped up), especially in situations where it is hard to measure BP because of background noise or vibration. Ambulances sometimes have to stop to take a blood pressure (not on critical patients, but still).
Considering that the inventor was the comic book artist famous for Wonder Woman's lariat of truth and the device got only credibility by being accepted by the famously bribable J. Edgar Hoover we should not really be suprised that the polygraph gets thrown in the same basket as Uri Geller by law enforcement in the majority of the world. It's one of the most sucessful technology snake oil scams.
it's a sweat detector. It has the same problems as other lie detectors: sweating and similar reactions don't mean you're lying. Maybe you find the interrogator hot, or maybe he or she reminds you of your mother in law, or maybe you just generally fall apart under pressure.
Precisely. More hocus-pocus rubbish from the "we'll sell you security" brigade.
Still doubtless the TSA will buy loads so they have a new toy to intimidate travellers with.
I can see the scale on this remote lie detector now..... it would have to have a nice big round dial labelled in words (in big serif type) and a black arrow-tipped pointer pivoted on jewelled bearings which, thanks to a well-crafted damping vane, would sweep smoothly and hardly oscillate at all.....
"TRUE"..... "MILDLY DISINGENUOUS"..... "FIB"..... "STRETCHING CREDULITY"..... "MARKETING"..... "WHOPPER"..... "SOFTWARE MARKETING"..... and in big, red letters over at the far end..... "YOUNG EART
Old and venerable practice. In old times they didn't used fancy staff like microwaves though, just plain red-hot iron. Show it to test subject and he admit his lies at once.
Gee, a study that says 40% of us are paranoid, then this article gets posted as newsworthy ( and with the tag "privacy" ).
I used to think slashdot was a site about technology but now days it's just a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists worried about stuff that isn't happening, at the same time complaining about the Bush administration's culture of Fear.
Women (Score:5, Funny)
and cats (Score:2, Funny)
Science may soon match the mood detection ability of cats.
tinfoil hat (Score:5, Funny)
I hereby ask that nobody ever refers to "tinfoil hat" in a deragatory manner anymore, because we are going to seriously need them.
(cue all known jokes about tinfoil hats, of course; but this is actually a serious post; when some guy will first need to use tinfoil to do any political activism, mainstrem medias should not be able to diss him just because "tinfoil hat" is linked to crazy people).
Re:tinfoil hat (Score:5, Interesting)
Brain scanner can tell if you are going to buy a product or not:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/11/brain-scans-predict-.html [boingboing.net]
Brain scaner can tell what you are looking at:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/06/0435226 [slashdot.org]
Brain scanners are so easy to do that now they are in game controllers:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/1314254 [slashdot.org]
And better than a tinfoil hat, we will need something able to filter what you let or do not let through, as was done with the rfid firewall:
http://www.rfidguardian.org/index.php/Main_Page [rfidguardian.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
And yes, the marketers will jump out with swords and chain mail and scare the NPCs in order to garner appropriate reactions, when needed. Or just use the "system over-ride" that prevents players from being tracked in the game to stop tracking people's mo
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My guess is 'yes'.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sadaam has WMDs!
*BZZZT!*
He is a threat to our safety!
*BZZZT!*
He hates our freedom!
*BZZZT!*
He is armed with foul language and has a nasty temper...
*crickets*
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Is someone telling the truth? (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether you know if someone is lying or not does not necessarily bring you closer to the truth.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's even crappier (Score:5, Interesting)
1. As you mention, what do you do about people who genuinely believe something bogus?
As a milder example, human memory isn't photographic, ever. It seems to store more like the description of a scene, and just ad-lib the details that it forgot. Over time you'd forget that, say, the guy was wearing a blue shirt, or maybe that detail never even made it into permanent memory in the first place. But if you try too hard to remember it, it will just give you some best guess. Like that he was wearing a black shirt.
2. We know that people can train to not feel much emotion about lying, and to psychopaths it even comes naturally. So even measuring their pulse and blood pressure and everything directly, you just can't tell that they're lying.
Basically we're relying there on the false idea that everyone was educated that it's not nice to lie, and everyone therefore has a hard time telling one and is feeling severely guilty about it. Which is false from start to finish. E.g., speaking of education, we know that some people's upbringing just taught them that it's perfectly _normal_ and indeed _logical_ to tell a lie, if the alternative is a savage beating by your father. They won't feel any guilt extrapolating from there to lying to save their arse from jail.
3. That emotional stress someone is feeling, can be for a bazillion other causes.
E.g., because the topic is painful to them for other reasons. A rape victim being the witness in someone else's rape trial might experience severe stress just thinking about it, whether they tell the truth or not. A PTSD [wikipedia.org] sufferer will be in a disproportionate amount of stress when recounting the event that caused it, or anything that reminds them of it. So, you know, some grandpa who fought in Vietnam and still wakes up in cold sweat after dreaming of it, would register as shamelessly lying when they tell you about the atrocities of war. Etc.
E.g., particularly bad cases of repressed memories and/or the results of some particularly hard to justify cognitive dissonance, can cause a disproportionate emotional responses when you're forced to think or talk about something which challenges them. You see that not only in polygraph tests. A lot of people who are rabidly against something are really just against you challenging their already decided model of the world. The less of an actual justification they have to support that position, other than "but my daddy said so", actually the harder it can be to get them to think logically about it.
Etc.
Basically let's just say there are good reasons why that test can't be demanded in court.
So now we have something that promises to test one parameter from a distance, instead of several measured directly, and which must correlate in certain ways to be considered a "yep, he's lying" proof. It's basically adding one more indirection step to that already weak inference chain. But even if the correlation between skin pores and all those parameters were that infallible, you're back to "stress he's lying", which is already known to be false even measured up close with electrodes.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. As you mention, what do you do about people who genuinely believe something bogus?
As a milder example, human memory isn't photographic, ever.
My favorite proof of this is the work of Adriaan de Groot see http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3290 [chessbase.com]
But really now. I *did* have to dodge sniper fire from angry Chiba farmers who didn't want their land "annexed" into a new runway the first time I flew into Narita.
Re: (Score:2)
You're damn right it's crappier... (Score:3, Insightful)
Aldrich Ames:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames [wikipedia.org]
Gary Leon Ridgway (AKA green river killer)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_river_killer [wikipedia.org]
Both of them passed a polygraph. With Ames, he passed numerous polygraphs while he was working for the USSR.
Apologists for polygraph testing say that Ames was given big, bad, scary, 'sophisticated countermeasure
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What bothers me in all of this is that you are going to catch the idiots who can't lie. The ones who are sophisticated enough to get through are the ones that we need to worry about, and they will not be caught.
The more I see technology being applied the more worried I get that people will not understand what
I may have to consult a scientologist here, but... (Score:2, Funny)
i for one (Score:2)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/06/2056240
andhttp://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/06/1917259
on the day that Charlton Heston died, we can justhttp://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/06/1641201
and welcome our true new overlords -- our old overlords.Nerves (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2)
This isn't new (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
What has to be asked is this. How much more will people put up with... and how often will this be used, as the "polygraph" is used now, to merely incriminate nervous individual
Re: (Score:2)
At a distance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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Countermeasures (Score:2)
Nothing happening here, move along.
Good ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Trouble with that is most politicians are stupid, ill-informed, rabble-rousers who actually believe the BS they come out with.
Rich.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sci-Fi Lie-detection at a distance? I think not (Score:5, Informative)
Even a polygraph, which measures blood pressure and pulse directly and accurately, as well as additional things such as respiration, skin conductivity and even muscle movements (fidgeting, ticks etc), is not all that reliable. To borrow from Wikipedia:
The [National Academy of Sciences] found that the majority of polygraph research was of low quality. After culling through the numerous studies of the accuracy of polygraph detection the NAS identified 57 that had "sufficient scientific rigor". These studies concluded that a polygraph test regarding a specific incident can discern the truth at "a level greater than chance, yet short of perfection".
And "A 1997 survey of 421 psychologists estimated the test's average accuracy at about 61%, a little better than chance."
In reality, even if polygraphs could be PROVEN 95% accurate, it wouldn't ever hold up in court: 1 in 20 is reasonable doubt.
This thing would be using the same theory, but with less input. FAIL
The real benefit from this will be in medical monitoring. If blood pressure and can be measured remotely, accurately and in a short amount of time, that would be a big improvement over the current sphygmomanometer (a regular BP cuff that gets pumped up), especially in situations where it is hard to measure BP because of background noise or vibration. Ambulances sometimes have to stop to take a blood pressure (not on critical patients, but still).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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You mean, like hidden in the front door of insurance compagnies?
Who makes this device? (Score:2)
Is Diebold behind this?
that's not a lie detector (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Telemendaciometer Scale (Score:2, Funny)
"TRUE"
beam 100 gigahertz at the test subject (Score:2)
In Other News..... (Score:3, Funny)
(GASP!) You LIED to me!
Garak knows best... (Score:2)
Enough with the Privacy tag already (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to think slashdot was a site about technology but now days it's just a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists worried about stuff that isn't happening, at the same time complaining about the Bush administration's culture of Fear.
This isn't new (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
Something to do with the War on Freedom, probably.
Parent