Slashdot Mirror
Lie Detector Glasses Coming Soon
Zelphyr writes "The EE Times is reporting on a product soon to be released by an Israeli company that allows the wearer of special glasses to tell whether the person they are talking to is telling a lie. Not only that, they can tell you whether someone loves you! Apparently a PC version of the 'love detector' is in the works as well. Think my Windows box will be upset when it knows how much I hate it?"
V Entertainment claims the love detector has demonstrated 96 percent accuracy.
Oh, good. I'm glad that they have tested this empirically and have hard numbers for us.The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
*sniff sniff*
Who farted?
Oh shit you got those new glasses
RUNNNNNNNNNN!
Better keeps this away from any large group of politicians... it just might explode.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
... but where are the X-Ray glasses promised to us in the throngs of comic books of our youth? Hmmm?
It will end up being a 'just wanna be friends' detector.
'No Joe, you're reading it wrong, he just wants to fuck you.'
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
These love detection glasses are broken, I have never seen anything. I think I will stick to ye olde love tester
Just what I've always wanted, the unscientific* and unreliable results of traditional polygraphy, only in portable form!!
Where do I sign up?
(Oh, sorry.. there is research that has PROVEN the polygraph to have 50% accuracy rate.. ranking it right up there with the 'other' lie detector: A coin with the word 'truth' on one side and 'lie' on the other!)
Do you seriously think your Windows box cares if you love it or not? If it did, it'd be treating you much better.
Israeli company that allows the wearer of special glasses to tell whether the person they are talking to is telling a lie. Not only that, they can tell you whether someone loves you!
I was going to make a joke about these glasses telling me that the Israeli CEO was lying about the usefulness of his product, but then I realized I'd fallen into a logic paradox. : (
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
Remember back in 96-97 there was a big rage in "lie detection software" which supposedly would analyze audio input of someone speaking and then match their voice stress level to either "True" or "False" indicators?
It was crap. I think more than a few morning radio shows tried to use it on their callers with failure after failure. I tried a copy myself and found that not only was it horribly written, but even if you were able to get the subject to "train" it (by answering several questions that are known to be true) it gave inncorrect responses virtually half the time.
Come to think of it, the software might have been made by an Israeli company too. Maybe the same one, I don't know. Can't remember the name but it was horrid.
Do I think the FBI/CIA might have technology like this, to analyze voice stress or facial temperature and determine if you are lying? Sure, why not. But there's a reason why lie detection technology is not admissible in court. It just doesn't work. Too many experts can beat it and too many amateurs get nervous and give false positives.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
It is bad for you and for the Windows box to be living in the same house if you hate it. Obviously the Windows box isn't going anywhere, so it is up to you to take the initiative and move out. It'll be best for both of you.
--
E_NOSIG
Darl McBride has protested against the possibility of jurors wearing lie-detection glasses.
How about the "open to one night stand" detector.
I bet they are not compatible with beer goggles.
If these work with at least 90% "accuracy" I say our elected politicians ban these, citing "national security!"
Sigh... if only.
The CB App. What's your 20?
There are serious doubts as to whether polygraph machines actually work or are simply junk science... and that criticism is of using polygraphs in a controlled environment like an interrogation room used by law-enforcement types. Now this company wants us to believe that an under-paid & under-trained security screener working in a chaotic environment like a busy airport is going to be able to detect a lie using their unproven product? Ha!
Our products were originally for law enforcement use -- we get all our technology from Nemesys-co...
Nemesys-co? What, are they a division of the E-Ville Group or something?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
You wouldn't believe how often women lie when you ask them "Are you carrying pepper spray?"
Trolling is a art,
I know, that's not a problem for most slashdotters, but..
Do I look fat in this?
Did you like the meal I made?
.
.
.
I can see disaster and a lot of broken relationships.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
How can you tell if a politician is lying?
You watch his mouth. If it's moving, he's lying.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
In other news, divorce rates sky rocketed to 98% following the release of these glasses.
With your neck on my shoulders we could wreck civilization!
Hmmm, do I wear my X-Ray glasses today or my Lie Detector glasses..
Damn all these fashion choices!
obligitory simpsons ScullyThis is a simple lie detector, i'll ask you a few yes or no questions and you just answer truthfully, do you understand?
HomerYes
lie detector explodes
I Mean it is hard, but what if ANY other country with such a horrible Human Rights record as Isreal came up with a lie detector 'prototype' and claimed to market it.
Would you buy a detector from N.Korea (or S.Korea), Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Argentina, Turkey, Belarus, Angola, Guatamala, Uganda, Or The *n*t**d St**t*s.
Even the Best polygraph tools are only 50% accurate. It isn't anti-semetic to call a country which has never kept a treaty or accord in my entire life 'Isreal' but it is a little more than shady to use their tools and methodology in any (so called) War on Terror
--Shaddup and support your local PBS station Plan for it
So let's assume the 90% accuracy figure is not bullshit (which it probably is). That means 1 out of 10 innocent passengers will be harrassed as suspected terrorists and 1 out of 10 terrorists will be allowed through. Not especially comforting thoughts in either case.
A certain percentage of the population lies so comfortably and so easily that this sort of thing is useless for catching them in a lie. Guess which percentage of the population politicians are in?
Is it fascism yet?
Want to learn how to lie well? Just practice your campaign speech in front of this thing.
96% accurate huh? Well, I'll just point my lie detector glasses at your lie detector glasses and see if your glasses are really telling the truth.
And all this coming from V-Entertainment. Well entertainment is right...they probably just tested these things against 100 SCO employees and asked them if they had any evidence. The 4 that were marked inaccurate really did have evidence but to the contrary.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Polygraphing is a given hot topic, there are zealots in both proponent and opponent camps. I find it diffucult to find an objective source of information on the topic and its accuracy.
Antipolygraph.org has a link here
and the American Polygraph Association has a link here
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Dammit! It's going to make it harder for us to marry for money. Oh well. Maybe if I convince her I love her money. No... That's not right.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
It's from Israel, isn't it? If El Al isn't using these for security, I don't see any reason to trust them to work.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Yeah, but the psychological power of being hooked up to a machine that can tell if you are lying is huge. Sure, the system can be beaten, and that has been proven. But most people don't know that, and furthermore don't know how to beat it. So they might be willing to divulge the truth more readily if they believe that if they lie they will be caught. That is why the term "lie detector" is much more ominous than "polygraph".
Is there a way to programmatically tell if someone is lying? I think there are general "tells" that most people do when they lie, and a computer can be taught to recognize these. But I don't think it will generally be accurate enough to escape harsh (and well deserved) scrutiny from the scientific community.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Regardless of the fact that the technology probably isn't accurate, if such a device is ever perfected and put into widespread use, it would be the end of normal social interactions (which maybe the slashdot crowd desires.) But no longer could someone tell a white-lie to protect a friends feeling, or let someone down gently, or tell their kids half-truths to protect them until they are older. Bluffing in poker would be obsolete. Millions of people would lose their jobs as their skills in marketing and sales would be rendered null. Lastly, the institution of marriage will be destroyed as millions of wives ask their husbands if "they look fat."
The law enforcement version achieved about 70 percent accuracy in laboratory trials, according to V Entertainment, and better than 90 percent accuracy against real criminal subjects at a beta test site at the U.S. Air Force's Rome Laboratories.
So ... more than 8000 algorithms. And it gets even better results in a field trial than it does in the laboratory. They didn't mention its secret, unbreakable encryption with the 10^6 bit key -- just slipped their mind, I suppose.
And, of course, this technology is so super-duper that they won't sell it to the government, but will market it to gulli^H^H^H^H^H ordinary consumers.
Apparently the market for lunar green cheese flavored with snake oil is thriving (see: P.T. Barnum's Law of Applied Economics).
It reminds me of the old joke about a mental patient that believed that he was Napoleon Bonaparte. After many years of treatment, he was ready to be released. As a final test, they gave him a polygraph examination. When asked whether he was Napoleon Bonaparte, he said no. The polygraph examiner concluded that he was lying.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Polygraph tests, and probably these glasses, too, make far too many assumptions about certain physiological responses which occur when someone is not being truthful. Firstly, they assume that a raise in heart rate or pulse can only mean that the person is lying, which is simply untrue. Secondly, unlike polygraphs, there's no way for these glasses to perform a control on the person being examined (meaning that you measure what a person's "normal" physiological patterns are like). And even those controls performed are dubious, at best, because there are simply too many variables to consider. Even in basic psychology classes, they go into the problems with polygraphs in detail, and it's not hard to deconstruct the test's assumptions, even for first-year university students.
Suppose you went up to a girl and asked her when the last time she gave a blow job was, and she answers you (hypothetically, she'd probably slap you in reality). You'd probably register a raise in blood pressure and heart rate. Are you to conclude that she lied to you? No, that's simply absurd. You asked her a personal question, out of the blue. Of course she'd be surprised. Furthermore, are you going to act normally and cooly when someone with glasses that can supposedly tell whether you're lying or not is asking you questions? Probably not. If you're an innocent man being polygraphed to see if you've committed a relatively serious crime, you're not exactly going to be acting normally, either.
Polygraph results are inadmissible in court for a good reason. I have a very hard time buying their "96% accurate" figure.
I think they need to have these guys make glasses which detect if the person you are looking at has a bomb strapped to his waist.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Oh wow! You love me. Uh... You're looking awfully horny today.
Uh... Sorry... I'm not _that_ type of guy.
Hey! This thing is beeping... would you like to go on a blind date?
Honey, this thing says you love me lots so you better buy me a BIG ring!
Uh Honey, the latest version of this thing says you don't love me at all. I'll have to contact my lawyer about my will.
The way I see it, there are major ethical implications to this kind of technology. I can see it now - the first attempted use of this in a rape defense - "According to my glasses, she was lying when she said 'no', and also, she loved me!!"
Even if these things were 100% effective (and there are serious philosophical problems with ever being able to show that empirically), I think they'd be a bad idea. Believe it or not, dishonesty has its place in the maintenance of interpersonal relations. Utterly getting rid of it would likely end up being worse than the problem that we're trying to solve. Better is to help people use their own built-in ability to detect emotions/truthfulness more effectively.
Finally, any technology (currently at least) that does sucessfully detect emotions will be prone to the same kind of 'arms race' that we see in spam detection. 'Professional' liers will learn to slip by the system, rendering whatever advantage it gave us meaningless.
If my enemy's enemy is my friend, what happens if my enemy is his own worst enemy?
Us paranoids are damned no matter what we say!
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Interrigator: Checks out sir, you're ok sir, you're free to go. Moe: Good, cause I got a hot date tonight. (Lie detector buzz) Moe: Odd date (Lie detector buzz) Moe: Dinner with friend (Lie detector buzz) Moe: Dinner alone (Lie detector buzz) Moe: Watching TV alone (Lie detector buzz) Moe: All right! I'm gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria Secret catalog! (Lie detector buzz) Moe: Sears catalog (Lie detector ding) Moe: Would you unhook this already, please?! I don't deserve this kind of sappy treatment! (Lie detector buzz)
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
Amir Lieberman, the developer of the system, is also responsible for the previous rash of questionable truth detector software, which happens to be still available. It did recommend training, and it was widely sold for its ability to work over the phone. It even has a sequal. (warning, Not compatible with Opera. Probably not Mozilla.)
Namesysco doesn't claim very high accuracy for the Truster software. "The voice analyst achieved an overall accuracy rate of 78% for truthful subjects and 61% for deceptive subjects." In other words, only 10% more liars were caught than flipping a coin, while 22% of innocent subjects were considered lying.
The American Polygraph Society does not have a much rosier view of the situation. They have concluded that Computerized Voice Stress Analysis, and specifically the Truster software, has only a "chance-level detection of deception,"
And actually, the dead giveaway to the scam should be from the lion's mouth himself. "Our products were originally for law enforcement use ? we get all our technology from Nemesys-co ? but we need more development time [for that application]" In other words, "our products don't work and can't be sold unless you slap a 'for entertainment purposes only' label upon them. Our products are to 'entertain' airport security."
Good catch.
The ______ Agenda
Let him testify under oath about the whole story!
Think that will happen? Haha! Not a fuckin chance.
He's been jacked full of mind-screwing drugs since the day he was taken by the US, and is being brainwashed as we speak, by US 'intelligence' operatives.
"No! I never spoke to Cheney!"
"No! I never shook hands with Rumsfeld or George Bush Sr!"
"No! I never purchased poison gas from Americans!"
"Yes! I played footsie with Osama every night!"
The only thing this device can measure is physiological arousal level, and it can't tell one kind of arousal from another. This is precisely the same problem with polygraph.
Both require interpretation. That requires training. Both can be bamboozled by anyone who can control their physio responses. That requires training too; yoga is good, but biofeedback is very simple and nearly subconscious.
Anyone can learn to fool them. And I am not about to place my personal safety in the hands of some previously underemployed and undereducated, and presently overworked and undertrained glorified rent-a-cop. I mean, my respect and sympathy to the hardworking TSA people at the airports, but they are not EVER going to receive adequate training to be able to correctly interperate physiological response measures in context. I would rather trust a Scientologist with their "clearing" device (a simple electrodermal activity meter) because at least they have experience in interperating their results in the context of a structured interview. A polygraph is not a structured interview, and some security guard spouting random accusations in the form of questions definitely is not.
I sincerely hope this is just another bogus device that is being publicized as part of the general anti-terrorism psyops, to keep the bad guys guessing as to what can really be done. Let them spend a few million on more high tech Dunsels. But if they deploy these for regular use, everyone who had too much coffee that morning and just rushed in late from a traffic jam to the airport is going to be targeted.
BTW, the sign on my office (room 9-151, VA Hospital, West Haven CT) says "Electrophysiology Lab". I know whereof I rant.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Let's make some assumptions that should help make the case for this kind of screening:
.0002
.9
.01
... a 2 in one hundred chance he really is one.
.0002, and that the test is not nearly as reliable as these figures assume (IMHO), the result will be even worse.
Frequency of terrorists in the sample population:
Sensitivity of test:
(That's the chance the test says x is a terrorist given that x really is one)
Specificity of test:
(that's the chance the test says x is a terrorist given that x is not one - false positive rate)
These assumptions and good old Bayes' Theorem allow us to say that if x tests positive for being a terrorist then there is
Given that the frequency of terrorists (even just at airports) is **way** less than
General screening is basically worthless.
If a woman thinks an erection is a good way of knowing that a man loves her, then she probably believes he'll still respect her in the morning, too!
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
>Ladies, if you see one, there's a 96% chance that the guy's in love with you.
Ladies, you can avoid false positives by avoiding early morning observations which account for the other 4%.
"Honey, do you still love me?"
"Mr. Sontag, this is all really just a load of crap, right?"
"What's the lowest price you can give me on this car?"
"Are you employed by any law enforcement organization?"
"Are those real?"
"Do you solemnly swear to defend and protect the constitution of the United States of America, and to execute the duties of the office of the Presidency to the best of your ability, so help you God?"
Metafilter pointed me towards a really interesting model for managing deception: Recognition detection. The idea is, rather than find out if someone is lying or not, simply find out if they recognize an object or scene they could only recognize if they were guilty. A certain brainwave, coined the P300 Wave, is emitted within a certain number of milliseconds of seeing an item one recognizes. One study, done by a group called Brain Wave Science, was able to reliably (and perfectly) separate FBI agents from average civilians by showing pictures of items from FBI training courses and operations. Detailed information may be found here.
I, of course, make no claims as to the veracity or accuracy of this material. But this wave is not pure pseudoscience -- the NYT has an article showing how weak P300's correspond to weak signal recognition. And BWS isn't the only group looking into P300 and deception.
There are other approaches -- blood flow and PET scans come to mind -- but this has the advantage of involving just a few electrodes.
So -- we may yet see a lie detector functional in our lifetime. Of course, it won't always be trusted, for reasons similar to the legalistic need for occasional exceptions to the rule of unique suspect DNA identifiers. But it'll be there.
--Dan