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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.
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."
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
One application I saw on Discovery channel, was a machine which looked pretty much like a metal detector ala airport style. You stood sideways in it, a small puf of air was blown on you, and the sensors "snorted" in the air. They where very sensitive to all different sorts of explosives and similar chemicals. Can't recall the exact figures, but it was in the region of if you touched anything the last couple of days, it'll go off.
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!
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.
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.....
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?
A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders.
Yet another example of something cyberpunk author William Gibson envisioned many years ago. Quoting the first four paragraphs of his second novel, Count Zero, published in 1986:
About ten years ago, I had a band that was called Slamhound for a little while, until we found out that the name was already taken by an L.A. glam-rock band. Ouch!
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
Actually, not all dogs have a nose superior to a human. Some toy breeds have a nose that is demonstrably inferior to an average human nose!! In my observation (as a professional dog trainer) Boxers and Danes are about on a par with most pet breeds in the nose dept., but seriously sub-average compared to hunting breeds that have been selected for scenting ability.
:)
A fairly consistent clue to how good a dog's nose is, is to watch how long it takes the dog to identify a scent. The better the nose, the faster it happens -- the best noses ID a scent in passing and don't even slow down to do it. A dog that sniffs and sniffs before finally deciding what it's smelling, is a dog that has a poor enough nose that it can't quite make out the scent. Kinda like a nearsighted human trying to read a sign that's just a little too far away.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
Complete lack of self-control? What do you mean by that?
Combine this with those robot butterflies. Then we can roll all our paranoid assassination devices into one package.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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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