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Sweat Ducts May Act As Antenna For Lie Detection
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."
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
This is for our own good.
Something to do with the War on Terror, probably.
Ok, that does it.
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).
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
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.
Surely they'll only get readings if the subject's engrams are out of whack? :)
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.Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
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.
I hope they improve existing lie detectors, the "at a distance" option is much less important.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother.
The great sig in the sky!
Cool discovery, but I think the bit about using this for lie detection is a bit of a stretch. This sounds like a polygraph that does not require physical contact. But, polygraphs are not believed to be all that accurate.
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.
Nothing happening here, move along.
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.
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).
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Lie detectors aren't science. They never have been, and at this rate they never will.
Come on people.. sheesh.
Speaking of which...wikileaks.org just recieved the Scientology Thetan operating manual. Pretty scary stuff.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
"reveal a person's physical and emotional state."
Forget the lie detector. Bring on the gadget that shows me what my chances are of getting lucky.
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 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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I didn't read TFA because that's against the rules, you know.
Is Diebold behind this?
Great!
Science may soon match the mood detection ability of cats.
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.
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 .....
..... "MILDLY DISINGENUOUS" ..... "FIB" ..... "STRETCHING CREDULITY" ..... "MARKETING" ..... "WHOPPER" ..... "SOFTWARE MARKETING" ..... and in big, red letters over at the far end ..... "YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM"
"TRUE"
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
The underwire in a push-up bra also acts as an antenna for lie detection.....
(GASP!) You LIED to me!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
"Because lying is a skill like any other and if you want to maintain a level of excellence, you have to practice constantly." -Elim Garak
Am I the only one who at first glance read the title as "Sweet Ducks May Act As Antenna For Lie Detection"?
Most men are not thought unwise until they speak.
Or would he tell you more instead?
I know I'd confess the murder of Lincoln and JFK (or whoever, for that matters) for a 5s pause of the treatment, and yet I've never been within 4000km of the USA.
Of course, if you don't need truth but a scrapegoat, torture is a wonderfull investigation tool.
Great. Now they're taking a subjective indicator of a subjective indicator of a lie. Subjective correlation twice removed and that's an improvement? Where's the science in this country? Dare I say it's not evolving?
-[d]-
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.
Now that's some distance! (Yawn)
Lie detectors are the biggest scam against society. They only work in as much as people think they do. Study after study has shown that the galvanic skin response (used in the polygraph) DOES NOT detect lying or dishonesty, rather stress. People sweat when they are stressed. If you put a person in an interrogation room with authority figures and strap on a "Lie Detector" its going to stress them out when they lie. This is all the lie detector detects. If I understand the article correctly this is essentially what they are measuring. The galvanic skin response essentially measure how conductive the skin is, the more open the sweat glands are the lower the resistance across the skin. I personally would predict that this device would be less effective then a standard polygraph. If this technology worked it "could" potentially be better as the person would be unaware that the truthfulness of their answers was being "measured". Polygraphs work because the person KNOWS the truthfulness of their responses are in question which in turn raises their stress level. As a neuroscientist, I personally don't believe that a true lie detector will ever be invented. The signal to noise ration is low and variable from subject to subject, also what signal should actually be examined is unclear.
Don't think of it as a tool for lie detection. What about putting one in every hospitalbed, to know if people are sweating profusely.
It's clean as there's no contact.
Or pilots, to monitor stress levels?
Or astronauts, who are (at least, remembering the apollo 13 movie) constantly monitored. No longer having to wear crap but having an external system is much nicer.
the team beamed electromagnetic waves with a frequency range of about 100 gigahertz
Not only can the system detect lies, it can detect with 100% certainty that the subject has cancer!
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
Because you can never have too many "Withnail & I" quotes:
"All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight."
While its an interesting discovery, the term "lie detector" is a blatant badge of ignorance. The term is more than fraudulent for what amounts to a pure pseudo science. Why not just call them "truth detectors"? Wouldn't that make as much sense?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
This reminds me of a story I read long ago (cant remember the name - Ill leave this as an exercise for the reader) where a man wanted to commit murder, but the police had scanners all over the place that could read your mind.
He paid a commercial jingle musician to write the most annoying intrusive "sticky" jingle he could come up with, and listened to the jingle for 48 hours straight. Then went to the victim, shot him, and walked away. Through it all his head was filled with the annoying jingle playing over and over in his mind.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I suffer from palmar and plantar (feet), and to a lesser extent axillary (armpits), hyperhidrosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperhidrosis). I don't always sweat, but under stress I certainly do. If they ever tested me, I would fail every time, whether I were lying or not. There is a small percentage of the population for which this is also true, although most people suffer from the axillary form. So I hope for our sake, government agencies do not start using this.
There's been something around since the dawn of history that can detect a lie from a significant distance. We call her, "Mom".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I personnaly had a pre-employment polygraph test, and I can assure you that, remotely or directly, a polygraph is no more than a more or less sophisticated vital signs recorder.
The test was 10 questions long, repeated 3 times in a different order each time, and out of those 10 questions, I intentionnaly lied to 4 of them. Strangely, the guy told me "this particular question about computer crimes, I think you lied to this one". In fact, when I was asked this question, I could feel my eart beating a little faster, and my skin got a little sweating. But I know I was telling the truth about this one. It's just that since it's my domain of expertise, I was a little more stressed about the question, but I am so straight when it comes to licenses and copyrights that I even personnaly bought a retail version of Microsoft Office, and all the games I have are boxed originals...
Strangely, when I was asked questions about other stuff for which I lied deliberately, I had no reaction at all, and the guy thought I was truthful about them.
Ok, I prepared myself for the polygraph, and I read an EBook on antipolygraph.org . I guess the results are a little more biased than with someone who really believes the polygraph is a precision instrument to discover the truth, but maybe this is the reason NO FURTHER RESEARCH should be made about lie detection, except maybe with celebral flux, where I guess a different part of the brain creates lies than the part which effectively remembers the facts you actually lived.
If the question requires a yes/no answer, then it can be dicey too. There's that new reality TV show that basically puts people through a lie-detector, and they try to beat it (or let out their most embarrassing secrets) to win cash. Well enough, but a lot of questions don't have a yes/no answer, or you're not definite either way on the answer.
How about this one that popped up "could you see yourself having children with your girlfriend." If I say no, does it mean I don't want children with my current GF (and thus see less future in the current relationship), or I don't want children at all (but I'm happy with my GF), or maybe it's just a big decision, and I'm still uncertain enough that it shows a stressful/untruthful response no matter what I say. Heck, even if I tell the truth but I'm afraid that the external response to my answer won't be good, the stress might be enough to make me seem a liar.
Oftimes politicians, or chronic liars in general, are so enamoured with their mistruths or owned skewed point-of-view, that to them it becomes more truth than the reality.
Polygraph tests only detect an emotional response. Whether it's considered a lie is an interpretation of the person giving the test.
Does anyone else remember the RadioShack Biofeedback Monitor you used to be able to buy for $15.00? It had two velcro finger electrodes you wore and it would emit a tone which would change in response to your stress level. No doubt related to the conductivity of your skin (which changed) with your stress level. Read: Stress goes up results in pores excreting sweat ~ sweat = salt water which = more conductivity. This is not a new discovery, but a rediscovery that RadioShack had capitlized on in the 80's. So, what if you can use microwaves to detect the sweat. :)
Maybe this will result in more accurate e-meters? This would be great cause my hands get really sore from holding the cans during a long auditing session.
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
Gary Leon Ridgway (AKA green river killer)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_river_killer
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 countermeasures' by his KGB contacts, but he says that all his KGB guy told him was to get a good night's sleep and try to relax.
You can read Ames' letter to the federation of American Scientists here:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/polygraph/ames.html
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Of course, they don't really measure a lie.
However, what they do do very well is let an interrogator bluff better.
First of all, people will frequently make admissions or confessions in the 'pre-test' interview, mistakenly thinking "the magic box will be able to tell that I lied", and 2ndly, it lets the examiner come in after the exam and say "Look, you can lie to yourself, but your body can't lie to this machine. We know you did it now, this proves it.", and frequently get a confession.
It's a slightly more sophisticated version of the scam they pulled for comic relief on "The Wire" where they tell a suspect that their photocopier is really an experimental lie-detector.
So they ask this poor dumb kid a question, with his hand on the photocopier and the top down, then press the 'copy' button, and hold up a piece of paper (he can't see the side where the paper comes out) that either says "true" or "lie" in big red letters.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
I read that as Sweat Ducks...
My UID is prime. Hah!