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DARPA Has $3.2M to Sniff You Out
quackking writes "The Army wants to sniff you out. This fedbizopps.gov link to a DARPA pre-RFRQ tells more. 'The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Technology Office (ATO), as part of the Odortype Detection Program, invites proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes. Total program funding for this effort will not exceed $3.2 million in FY 2003. Multiple awards are anticipated. Proposals are due by January 29, 2003.'"
But could wearing heavy perfume mask your scent enough to avoid detection? Bah, just stick to good ol' bloodhounds.
I am a filthy pirate.
The government spies on YOU!
oh shit.. wait a minute...
Good luck tracking geeks.
Get it? =)
And its called a dog
Perhaps someone can enlighten me to where this will be very useful. I just can't even imagine how knowing what a terrorist smells like or whatever it is they're doing is going to be useful -Siguy
Developing the equipment to identify unique scents would be costly, bulky, and probably easily confused by purfumes and other forms of distraction.
I say that nature does the best job, use some sort of animal to sniff a trail, or use a better means to identify a person.
As it is, fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA are much better than smell, and how would you store the signature of a scent in a database?
"subject has a old-man on crack smell about him."
That they use RMS as a test subject. Given his potent odor, their prototype equipment will have an easier time functioning.
who could do this. He could pick out ethnic types with almost nearly complete accuracy. Then Howard got bored with him and brought out a guy who could fart a whole lot.
Ok, you have my name, social security number, IP address, you want to decide how I use MY computer, you take pictures of me when I go to sporting events, you want to cache my surfing habits, sniff my e-mail, and NOW you want to know what my ass smells like??
Two Letters: FO!
Oh, and by the way, All your funk belong to us!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
This kind of reminds me of the East German's intelligence program of keeping people's scents on file. Maybe that will be next?
... the ripe smell of anchovy paste. Gak, cross your legs!
1st/2nd/3rd post?! You're not even trying anymore, are you?
*Insert ATM card* *place armpit next to machine* *make cash withdrawl*
We already have Retinal Scans, Voice Scans, DNA Scans, Fingerprint Scans, and Heat Signature scans, who knows what else they've come up with, why the hell would someone invest this much money into something virtually useless. Instead of lineups we just going to brush body odor laiden cotton swabs in front of witnesses face?
A HA! that's the stinky perp!! I wouldn't forget that smell anywhere!!
Plus wouldn't this be extremely easy to fake, the nose is one of the weakest sensory organs alone for a reason, it's a additional sensor that aides other senses, mainly taste. Anyone who wants to argue with me, fine argue, but I know that compared to the sense of touch, sight, and hearing, smell is one of the more non-essential senses. And I know this isn't a nose, but the nose being non-important might be a clue to not spend 3.2 million dollars.
I got an idea, lets quit saying how much social security and federal aid are hurting and divert funds for researching CRAP (pun intended) to the people!
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
This is just another sneaky government plot, this one to get geeks to bathe!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
good thing I took a shower today.
(Sorry. Couldn't resist.)
Could the robotic hounds be far behind? Run, Montag, run!
Was it urban legend or ... didn't the nazi's already do this with dogs?
Taco Bell will become illegal!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Body odours are, as the proposal points out, the result of carboxylic acids.
Although the term carboxylic acid covers very many molecules - basically anything with a HO-C=O somewhere on it, the molecule has to be volatile to have a smell. The problem is that not many acids are volatile - the very composition of the molecule means it makes hydrogen bonds with others easily, and even light acids are involatile liquids or solids.
This means there is a small pool of molecules to pick from so the chances of an individual having a unique blend is very small.
The Statiz (sp? E. German Secret Police) did something like this once. They would take samples of everything and place it in sealed jars so if they needed to track you with the hounds later, they could in theory open the jar with a sample of your sofa in it and let the dogs loose.
Funny thing was that it didn't work.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Gee, I hope Ally's labia isn't that skanked out
You know, if their looking for new and impractical ways of identification, they may as well just make a device that can map you friggin tongues TASTEBUDS....
OMG ITS 1984 .. why cant they make something new for once...
with mechanical dogs that sniff you out and shoot you with needles full of poison.. damn darpa
A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders. A retreating force could leave these scattered in the bushes. Of course, they'd have to acquire some samples beforehand. Who does Saddam's laundry, by the way?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
So pretty soon bathing will become illegal because it can be used as a circumvention device. Thrift shops will also become illegal since they will sell "pre-scented" disguises.
The premise was used in a scifi story... sorry I can't recall the book but basically a smartbomb was let loose to track the target by genetically-determined odortype... I don't think perfume can adequately cover the primary body odour.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
My guess would be that this would be useful because scent, unlike appearance, is harder to alter. A wanted criminal can just put on some different clothes, maybe grow a beard, etc, and he won't be easily recognized - wear shades, a hat, and he won't be very easy to recognize with any sort of automated system. Other methods of identification - fingerprints or retinal scan - are difficult to apply without the target noticing (and cooperating). I could see machines at airports or bus terminals that "sniff out" anyone who passes by, and if the smell matches with any in its database, bingo... IF the technology works, it could be far more reliable than current methods.
Of course, all this hinges on the idea that slapping on some cheap cologne won't confuse the machine. And I won't go into the privacy/1984/control etc. arguments...
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
I see a future where there are flying insect nanobots that attack and inject Vx nerve agents based on genetic odor patterns. It sounds very racist to me.
But seriously, people do smell differently, and I don't think it just from the food they eat. I have a poor sense of smell but I seem to be sensitive to certain types of odors, by chance all of them kinda gross-maybe it's because I grew up on a farm, who knows?
People who are related genetically seem to have have similar body ordors, so it potentially could be used to distinguish individuals.
If you use deodorant, you are with the terrorists!!!!
Should I pack my up my books and follow the train tracks out of town?
Crazy Muslims never shower and STINK!!!
some of my daughter's stinky flatulence to aid in the research. she drinks soy milk and eats soy cheese (milk allergies are fun to plan around) and she *definitely* has an odor all her own. anyone got any ideas on the best way to pass along some samples to DARPA? i'd hate to choose a container that failed to retain the potency :-D
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
are you telling me that black people smell
posted anonymously.. karma be damned!
YOU smell the government. And boy, does it ever stink...
...all international flights have updated their menus to include massive amounts of beans.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Imagine if you will... individuals trained to so control their body odour that they can produce on demand odours triggering fear, love, hate, submission, domination... the boardroom would never be the same and perfume would be antiquated. Join the Army become a B.O. warrior.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
3.2 million dollars to research this? I will take 1 million to tell them it won't work and they can use the remainder to put into some worthwhile efforts. Scents are not like retinal scans, they would be way to easy to mask or alter.
Of course it's a waste of money. When was the last time DARPA actually justified its funding by producing something? As soon as a DARPA project becomes economically or technologically feasable, it gets pulled by the DoD and put into a real R&D environment, where people don't just make PowerPoint presentations all day long.
First they wanted to taste my urine, searching for traces of that whiskey I chugged last night. So I bought an herbal supplement guaranteed to decontaminate my pee.
....
Now they want to sniff my pheromones. Guess I'll have to pick up a pair of Odor Eaters
-kgj
As long as this technology is only used to enforce good laws (i.e., against murder) then there's no problem. They're not going to start getting you for victimless crimes (except drugs and software piracy, maybe). So you have nothing to fear.
Repeal the DMCA!
And suddenly the large stockpiles of Old Spice found in Afghan caves seemed a little less ridiculous.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Actually, the East German Stasi had an archive of "smells".
t ml
http://www.wsws.org/history/1998/jan1998/gdr.sh
"In a country of 17 million, it maintained an army of 200,000 full-time and part-time secret agents to monitor every aspect of the lives of its citizens. The Stasi--or the "nationalised company listen and seize", as it was nicknamed by the people--even collected smell samples from suspicious elements, so it could use dogs to look for them if it wanted to arrest them. The samples were carefully stored in plastic bags. In the Stasi, as in many other fields, efficiency and monstrosity mingled with incompetence."
...of science articles. It is very unlikely that humans have a genetically determined smell. In 1992, Blaustein & Waldman did an experiment on tadpoles to see if they could recognize their kin based on scent. The reasoning behind it was to see if they could in fact be breeding collectively to increase indirect fitness. Out of the 12 species tested, they found that 8 showed a kin bias while 4 didn't. Three species favored full siblings over half siblings, three favored half sibliings over non-siblings, and one favored maternal over paternal siblings. Was it Kin recognition? No. Why? Well there was variable expression of this favoring within species and satistically it wasn't favored at all. In other words, it was an experimetanl artifact.
In 1990, Pfennig et al. repeated the experiment but fed different groups different diets. So non-kin got the same diet and kin recieved different diets. The result? Tadpoles stayed around those that ate the same material because they smelled the same. So it depended on diet rather than a genetic signature. However, further experiments showed that outside of nature, if the environment was completely identical then they could do some rough recognition but this condition never exists in the real world.
I have huge doubts the government will find a connection here. Before someone says that babies recognize the smell of their mothers, I want to say that is a common myth. Babies recognize the heart beat of their mothers and nothing more. What a waste of time and money.
Didn't notice that the post anonymously box wasn't checked there. Who needs karma?
Jeez, get a dog!
Seriously, when I read their specification for a device to enhance soldier performance (Silent engine, can run for hours without refuelin/recharging, will let a soldier carry extra gear, run faster and longer, jump higher and longer), I thought "its called a horse!".
I bet their final product won't even go fetch...
You can't take the sky from me...
if you don't try to subdue and control the resources of the rest of the planet, you don't have to do all this shit to your own population. you can still be a free democracy. iceland's been doing it for a couple of years, no?
They use "sniffers" at airports to detect explosive residue in carryon bags. Surely they can adopt that technology and just tell it to recognize other chemicals. Get sensitive enough equipment and you can recognize anything.
More like, in Soviet Russia the government might have spied on you.
In the USA, post 9/11, the government will spy on you.
So... what was the objective of this Cold War thing again?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sure.
I'll do the final product first, then I'll talk my way through it.
((12+32)^(4*x))*(3/(x+4))
is
12 Enter 32 + x Enter 4 * ^ x Enter 4 + # 3 * *
where # is the 1/x key
19 keystrokes for RPN, vs 23 for algerbraic.
Now the explanation:
firstly, we want to put the base on the stack
12 enter 32 + -->44 is on the stack
now we put the power in
4 Enter x *
and raise it
^ --> answer is put on the stack
that's the first part done, now for the 3/(x+4)
x Enter 4 + --> x+4 is put on the stack
(1/x) key -->inverts it
3 * --> times it by 3
* times the whole lot together.
Looks difficult like this, but I recommend you download the HP49 emulator from www.hpcalc.org and try it out. Make sure you set the calc in RPN mode!
So, odors are generally caused by 'aromatic molecules'. The nose, actually, is a molecular shape sensing device. Knowing what a terrorist smells like is central to knowing what kind of compounds and chemicals they've been working with. Somebody who smells acidic, dusty, and metallic is doing very different kind of work than somebody who smells of of wood/bark, musty, or moldy. The first person may be working with metals and acid etching things, whereas the second person may be a mycologist, and growing fungus. Between the two, the former is more likely to be making a bomb; the later bioweapons.
Considering that the article is partially humorous, and the icon for humor is a "stinky" foot, I would consider it more appropriate. ;-)
just not in such a high tech way.
When the Berlin wall fell and the STASI archives were opened they found zillions of sealed jars of odor samples taken from "suspects" IE citizens..
How quickly people forget.....
Still no cure for Cancer
The government consults slashdot headlines for the latest american technology.
Here's a link that gives a somewhat simplified explanation of dog and cat taste/smell... it even spares you some of the arcane aspects of organic chemistry
Animal senses
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
as
but that is just a matter of taste.
Which explains the how - but not the why.
RPN does the calculation the way YOU would do it by hand, from the inside out. You get the intermediate results handy for inspection. If you actualy understand the formula this can help prevent gross errors. You can also do some realy complicated calculations without stopping to write down the formula first.
What does this have to do with identifing folks by smell?
Cant you just use allot of cheap cologne or some other kind of odor masker to disguise your stench?
And all the cool geeks that will help implement it.
I'm kidding. Fuck you.
teen spirit.
Steps to hide from government smell detectors: Perfect the "scumbag" smell. Move into US Capitol Building.
Well, that's tadpoles.. but here's my experience as a dog breeder (33 years and an average of around 30 individuals in my kennel):
For 12 years I had two essentially unrelated bloodlines. And I found that I could not keep dogs from the two different lines together or they'd fight (even when they didn't fight with their own relatives). Even those of the different lines that were raised together as pups would take a dislike to one another as adults. When I got some dogs from a third unrelated line, BOTH the other lines tried their best to kill them!! OTOH, they tended not to care one way or the other about newly-introduced dogs of other *breeds*. So it wasn't just a "new dog in town" problem.
Second, I've observed that in general, given a choice, dogs will mate with a closely-related dog in preference to one that's not related (whether they know the individual dog or not). With some stud dogs, it's such a marked preference that they aren't at all interested in breeding unrelated bitches -- and act like they don't "smell right".
BTW, contrary to common perception, newborn puppies recognise their dam (or other source of food, if bottle-fed) by touch first, scent somewhat later, and heartbeat *never*.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Both ways take 7 keystrokes - It really doesn't matter which one is used :-)
RPN does the calculation the way YOU would do it by hand, from the inside out. You get the intermediate results handy for inspection. If you actualy understand the formula this can help prevent gross errors. You can also do some realy complicated calculations without stopping to write down the formula first.
That's what I'm trying to get across.
What does this have to do with identifing folks by smell?
Absolutly (sp?) nothing. I am trying to convince the TI heathens that there is a Better Way (TM).
I can just picture Osama wolfing down burritos in the hopes of overwhelming the sensors.
Table-ized A.I.
Warning to those who eat a lot of curry... beware of DARPA!
Your government throws money at all types of security "solutions" right now because it believes that is what you want it to do. It believes that, given the events of the last 14 months, you are frightened enough to break Franklin's famous principle about trading freedoms for security. It will do anything to make you feel safer, not only by making you safer, but by throwing tax payer dollars at pointless and socially dangerous projects such as "odor identification systems", as well as more infamous projects such as the face scanning technologies used in Tampa that were found to misidentify a large percentage of the population.
This quagmire of government spending to make you feel safer regardless of the consequences will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them not to do anything. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to protect your safety, but if money keeps being thrown at more and more invasive and ultimately pointless security measures you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how them doing stuff all the time just for the sake of being popular harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they can summon up the political courage to spend an entire term getting nothing done.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Maybe we can use this technology for good, and we'll finally be able to tell the difference between the Trekkers from the Trekkies.
Dr. Who fans, you're next.
it's called postfix man.
everyone's hygiene will no longer be kept a secret and all those hackers who never bathe will have to "come clean"!
Why do the different races of people smell funny? You know there is a certain smell to black people and another smell to asian people... why?
How can this be "Redundant" if it's the first post? I don't understand... Oh well, I hope I see this in meta-mod...
C:\>
didn't my dog do this a long time ago, via his genome? For free (as in beer), no less, since his parents evidently did the Wild Thing (TM) for free, also....
C|N>K
Loud noise immediately following is DARPAs collective forehead-slap.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I think you need an account. I suggest you create "postfix guy", in the lines of "in soviet russia" and "you fail it", so you can continue to tell me off. Btw, HP call it RPN. There's nothing racist about it.
The object/character of "The Hound" comes to mind.
is DARPA spending 3.2 million to lame a computer learn how to sniff farts????
Note to self.
great sig. actually, this sort of thing may be doable. the DARPA web solicitation refers to sampling the environment for a chemical signature derived from a person's Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) proteins. these have a genetic basis and when sampling blood can be used to discriminate individuals without examining the DNA which encodes them. obviously, the technology DARPA wants developed will be to sample small amounts of protein from a defined environment to look for an immunological signature of an individual.
from a distance and without making direct contact with an individual, this type of technology would obviously be more useful to remote monitoring devices than fingerprints, DNA, etc. who knows, possibly in a 2nd or 3rd gen incarnations something like this could be used in a predator type aircraft scanning an area. flying bloodhounds in a sense.
IANAL, etc, etc... not legal advice, blah, blah, blah
Courts have long held that using odors is not necessarily a violation of your fourth amendment right to be free of unreaonable search and seizure (with a few exceptions).
The air around your vehicle, luggage, or other "object" is free to sniff, so drug sniffing dogs and explosive jiffy-sniffers are usable without a warrant. Vehicle "stop and sniff" random checkpoints have run into some trouble, but if you've been stopped by a police officer for some reason (traffic offense), and he suspects the presence of drugs, he can call for a dog, no problem. If said K-9 alerts on your car, probable cause to search is established. I believe the case was United States v. Place in the early 1980s.
Air around your person has been treated a bit differently, since random, agressive sniffing by a dog, without some articulable suspicion, has been considered a "search" by some courts.
There was a case of high school students being personally sniffed, and found unconstitutional... it was B.C. versus Plumas Unified School District. Here's a link with some info: Newspaper article you can probably google for the whole text of the decision.
Based on some of the above cases, this might actually BE unconstitutional, since it's a direct sniff of a person, not an object. You can sniff people without individualized suspicion, but the state has to seriously justify it... minimal privacy invasion, and compelling state interest. However, with the current terrorism problem, and simply having to walk through a gate of some kind to be sniffed (minimal invasion of privacy), this might pass constitutional muster. The lawyers will have their work cut out for them with this one.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Only terrorists use deodorant.
Only terrorists use perfume/cologne.
Only terrorists keep their mouth minty fresh.
See? ESR was a patriot all along.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Let the eagle soar. I let the eagle soar so much I'm sore!
That was so funny it caused me to shit my trousers, which is just going to draw them to me.
Fuck you! Star Trek was boring and D&D isn't fun!
So the Stassi, East German Secret Police, kept track of odors of people for their surveillance state. They also had national ID's, being held without due process, and the right to videotape or search you whenever if they suspected you for committing a crime against the state.
To me the police cameras in the UK are a bit much. I see similarities with the current laws that are anti-terrorism, with laws in East Germany to protect the socialist/communist party. I also see the future of the US laws being totally unsuccessful, just as the East German laws failed in keeping the communists in power. Like those medicines that target symptoms, they do little to treat the root cause of the disease and more to make the people feel better.
Oh no! They're after us!
Quick! Run and hide in that Phish concert!
I can smell those unix guys a mile away - Mt. Dew and Taco Bell...
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
The smell is bad enough when you have a bunch of geeks together for a lan party. Would you really pay to be able to smell every slashdotter from across an entire continent?
Perhaps a chemical attack?
(snare flourish)
This story is BS. Slashdot owes it's existance to DARPA. DARPA funded the creation of resiliant networking and ended up with TCP/IP. DARPA funds a lot of projects, they are looking for stuff that geeks will consider "news" in 10-15 years. This story is currently hype but it may be real in the future. DARPA is a friend to many geeks.
Don't bite the hand (at least based on this story).
Y
no sig.
Probably they are investigating how to make mines that will trigger on movement and camelodor.
The mine will start sniffing upon sensing vibration and if it's camelsmell it detonates. A nasty little thing you could spread into deserts.
This weapon would be safe for US personell since they don't have this love for camels. Dropping loads if these kind of mines into terrorist countries could be a pretty efficient payback.
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
You might find these other Projects at the Office of Information Awareness worth a look. Satire cartoonist Tom Tomorrow mentions them in two very funny and recent comics, here and here
I've often thought they should try to train dogs
to sniff out HIV. It would be a lot cheaper than
high tech test kits for lesser developed countries.
Maybe DARPA will try it, and accomplish something really useful off the battlefield.
It wouldn't be the first time (e.g., internet).
I said, no text.
Keen are the Nostrils of the Elves.
Cross-dressing? Orgies?
This is going to be a bitch.
How long before some android just uses a spray bottle full of the commanding officer's breath to breach security and try to kill Sigourney Weaver's clone? She musn't be harmed, as she's the only one who can defeat the aliens.
since they were doing this in vietnam. though then it was just people detection by sensing the chemicals humans emitt.
i know the technology wasnt so hot back then because they were in a jungle (where everything is alive), but in almost everyother environment it should work just fine.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Is this the same Army "bag" job the Repubs are using to pay back that good soldier Poindexter?
This guy is a felon convicted of destroying documents and lying to congress during the Iran-Contra affair under Regan and bush the elder. Ollie North and the James Bond wannabe who offered to stand outside and be take a bullet for the gipper?
Is this the same outfit that is offering up big money to develop an all seeing and knowing database fully distributed and secure and updatable capable of IDing terrorist signatures by itself and with some human input?
Isn't this a shameless bag job 10 years after the fact for Admiral Poindexter for being a good soldier and not saying anything?
it should be easy to identify the genes cusing the particular smells. with targeted genetic drugs you could smell like someone from beijing or kabbul or arizona (just examples).but wouldnt diet really have the maximum effect on how you smell?
I reckon this is just a way for George to identify the compostion of male scents that his interns find most attractive so that he can run a scent replay attack on them to try and overcome the DDOS thing that is currently happening.
I hope the reasearchers are good though - a little cross-contamination during the collection phase might otherwise lead to a man in the middle attack.
The funny thing is, OpenBSD is recieving support from DARPA.
Look...
&shower
The obvious next step is to then create a huge database of people and their signature smells.
Then I could find a woman who smells as nice as my first love, but who isn't a cheating whoring selfish bitch.
Seriously, most romance/love/lust is all tied to smells. If you could assemble a database that maps smell types to people you could then create relationships between these smell types, essentially mapping who is attracted to whom, based on their own bio-chemical makeup. Talk about an effective dating service!
Knowledge is power.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I saw a challenge show in the UK- they had challenges for people who claimed to be able to do amazing stuff.
s they go see a psychiatrist. Whereas guys go on TV and brag about it. Or form a Special Interest Group with other likeminded guys. ;).
There was a guy who claimed he could identify stamps by tasting them. He really could! He had difficulty with one stamp, but that was identified by actually chewing and _eating_ it!
Stamps! It was mostly guys.
I suppose when women have these abilities/obsessions/compulsions/hobbies/interest
Coz I'm sure the dog smells a LOT more on the gun than just those dozen guys.
After all, dogs can detect cancer in people, and detect mines just from shipped air samples stored in test tubes. Trained dogs can even detect lung cancer from air samples.
So my guess it's more a communication problem.
It's probably like calling a wine expert over the phone and asking them to identify which of 12 unlabeled identical bottles of wine you sent to him come from the same vineyard, when 1) you don't speak the same language. 2) you don't even know the names of any regions. 3) Your only knowledge of wine is it's fermented grape juice. 4) You were born with no sense of smell.
Sure it can be done. Easier if you had done similar work together before. But it will still take time, even for slightly different scenarios.
If the DARPA finds a way to improve interspecies communication that could help.
Most dogs probably never have to ask "How are you?", they can smell the answer just a few feet away.
Of course there are dumb ones who might be able to smell all that, but never remember/figure out what it all means. Still, they probably never needed to learn about their sense of smell - just need to know "walkies, food, sit and stay".
$1M will disappear in the acquisition of a grant administrator and office space for him/her.
$1M will be absorbed by the staff to fill that office and their office equipment.
$200K will be used to publish and distribute the requirements documents.
$800K will be used to properly vet the applications, applicants, sponsors of the applicants, families and friends of the owners and companies involved, to clear them of terrorist and Enron ties.
$250K will be needed to pay for auditing of the process.
$100K will be needed to explain why the process was $50K over-budget before the first grant was issued.
$500K will be needed to defend the suits brought for improper handling of the application process.
$250K will be needed to pay for the staff time needed to investigate and cover up problems before the congressional hearings start.
As you can see, we as citizens have nothing to worry about on this from the privacy angle...
Will take a fair bit of doing for machines. Not sure if they'd be able to do it with 3.2 million without dogs.
l s /d ogs020611.html
Dogs can identify individuals. And they can even distinguish twins from each other, if they are exposed to both trails simultaneously, if it's one at a time, it's about the same as us having difficulty identifying twins by sight on different occasions.
And they can even detect _cancer_ in individuals.
http://www.canoe.ca/HealthNews/980910_jones.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNew
For more do a search on: dogs smell cancer
For a time I worked as a contractor on a program in the DARPA ISO (Information Systems Office). A common misperception about DARPA is that they're bumbling DoD idiots who are always running off chasing impossible goals.
DARPA was established specifically to go after high-risk, high-payoff technologies. They know that many of their projects will not result in immediate payoff in terms of useable technologies, but they figure that those technologies which do make it will leapfrog two generations ahead of any competing technology.
That being said, the program methodology at DARPA is oriented toward specific uses of technology. They're not generally interested in creating something just to see if the technology will work.
People also have the impression that the research and development takes place *at* DARPA (the infamous "clones in the basement" episode of the X-Files springs to mind ;-) . The truth is that the project managers work out of DARPA, but university labs, defense contractors, and other organizations do the actual development work. In many cases, "failed" DARPA projects later lead to working technologies, based on the expertise gained during the original project.
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I remember watching a show about the east german secret police, the stasi, collecting people's scent on some special cloth and storing it in a jar for years. Supposedly, they had millions of these and a bunch of trained german shepards. It was so good I heard, they could trace a person's path on the street up to an hour after they had walked it. Kind of scary...
Am I the only one who thinks they came up with this idea after watching Homer become a food critic?
Next they'll fund the revolutionary technology that can "hear pudding".
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The bloodhound lobby will put a stop to this. Think of all the union canines that would be put out of work if this gets developed.
This sounds like a joke, but it was true. The Stasi would collect "odors" by covertly stealing articles of clothing or by running a cloth over a surface that the person had been in contact with. Then they would store the cloth in what was basically a mason jar and catalogue it. When the wall came down in Germany, it was discovered that the Stasi had storerooms full of thousands of these jars with the stored odors. I'm not sure what the practical reason for collecting the odors, but I suspect it had something to do with tracking suspected enemies of the state with dogs.
So, why is it unlikely that HUMANS have a non-genetically determined smell? What makes you so certain that it was the smell that made the tadpoles prefer certain ones based on DIET? And how could "Pfennig et al." REPEAT a 1992 experiment in 1990??
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
Dogs are being trained in Florida (U.S.) and England to sniff out various cancers. This does not have the excitement of the $3 million for the Army's sniffing dogs and using them in war. But it is probably more important for you to know, as either 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 of you will develop cancer in your lifetime. Thus making it more likely for cancer to hit you than a bomb--that the Army is trying to protect you from ostensibly.
It makes you wonder why the Army Medical Research section isn't spending the $3 million on training dogs to sniff out more than the 5 or 6 cancers that are currently under study of how well they are sniffed out by trained dogs.
The Cambridge, England study is training dogs to sniff urine specimens of prostate cancer and some others. The Florida study is sniffing the breath of lung cancer patients to train their very sensitive sniffers as to what that breath smells like so they can identify it when screening a "normal" person for lung cancer.
I would not be surprized if dogs with their enormous noses could sniff out lung cancer when it is still very small before the damaging and invasive X-ray can "see" it! Then you wouldn't need invasive surgery to "cut it out." You could
treat it by non invasive, non toxic treatments.
Perhaps these "cancer bloodhounds" are being trained to bark twice when they smell lung cancer on your breath. Who nose??
Go not unto the Usenet for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (and .sig somewhere
quite a few things that just have nothing at all to do with the question).
-- seen in a
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