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Indian Woman Convicted of Murder By Brain Scan
Kaseijin writes "Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan claims his Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test is so accurate, it can tell whether a person committed or only witnessed an act. In June, an Indian judge agreed, using BEOS to find a woman guilty of killing her former fiancé. Scientific experts are calling the decision 'ridiculous' and 'unconscionable,' protesting that Mukundan's work has not even been peer reviewed. How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible? Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?"
... they can reliably read someone's mind to determine whether they committed a crime?
That is mental.
== Jez ==
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In the U.S. I would say yes, because we have the 5th Amendment to the Constitution. In Indian law, I have no idea.
At first blush this sounds like a high-tech form of seeing if the witch can float.
Did anyone else read that headline and think, "She scanned his brain and it killed him?"
I talk about stuff.
is alive and well...
So, a male centric and predominantly misogynistic country used this new and entirely untested technique to find a woman guilty of murder.
Gosh, what a surprise.
We are talking about a country where women regularly get murdered by the men in their own family, and no-one is punished, after all.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Dang and I thought the DRM in Vista was bad. I had no idea that BEOS could determine if I witnessed a crime.
I knew that it was ahead of it's time but Geesh! Does anyone know what version he is using?
Just goes to show, there is no security by obscurity! Hopefully those Haiku guys will get it up and running soon!
load "$",8,1
..BEOS has always been way ahead of the competition!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I hear the judge has ordered that she be imprisoned inside a giant NeXTcube.
Would a man have been convicted in this case? Or is this just another example of the crap that women still face in most societies around the world?
This machine has not been peer reviewed, and yet a judge trusts it? Sounds like the judge should be removed from their position. And all convictions related to this judge that might be plausibly shown to have been influenced by this judge's ignorance, should be thrown out.
I hope this women is able to appeal.
As to privacy related to memories. Well, I would suggest that this machine isn't capable of reading a person's memories at all. However, I do think that this should be voluntary only. After all, there are many memories not related to the alleged crime that would have to be "read". Not only that (at least in the USA), all information "found" not related to the "crime" should not be able to be used by law enforcement.
I'm sure you could make a Fifth Amendment type argument here (if you are in the USA).
I wank in the shower.
With an undocumented feature like that, I'm surprised BeOS isn't still around.
If this would take a bad road then in another 10 years we'll be remote-scanned when we walk around outside (or even at home) and convicted when we have only intentions of committing a crime (which is already true in some countries just sans the remote-brain-scan part). Sounds like Precrime to me.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
You will be a terrorist supporter and friend to the paedophiles. Don't even think of preventing use of this weapon against perverts and terrorists.
Think of the Children (but not in that way... we will know).
In Roger Zelazny's classic Hugo award winning novel Lord of Light, the Brainscan was a key part of the tech that cemented the power of the faux Hindu Gods on a distant colony planet modeled after India....
They would use it to review people up for reincarantion (dying, aged, etc) before transferring their consciousness to a new body and life, one assigned based on the results of said brain scan...
I know this is nowhere near that, just found it ironic such a thing would surface in India. ------- Hey, wonder if it can determine if you saw or committed an act in a past life...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
In Red Dwarf Arnold Rimmer has to undergo a mind scan after which he is found guilty of the 1st degree murder of the whole crew of the Red Dwarf. Kryton is able to get Rimmer aquitted by pointing out that the radiation leak was caused by Rimmer being an incompetent half wit anf the mid scan confused the guilt he felt with culpability, in his own mind he tried and convicted himself... How would this mind probe deal this?
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Nope.
At one point to BeOS was considered a potential successor to Mac OS by Apple, after the collapse of the Copland project, but in the end Apple picked NEXTSTEP, supposedly because of two major issues with BeOS. The first was that Be, Inc. was asking too much. The other was that it was unfinished at the time it was under consideration, notably lacking a comprehensive printing system - which, at the time, was a major issue given Apple's success in the DTP market.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"Indian Woman Convicted of Murder By Brain Scan"
My first thought: How do you kill somebody by a brain scan? Maybe they had a piece of metal lodged in their brain that shifted during an MRI.
Ah, but this is just bad editing. It should read "Indian Woman Convicted by Brain Scan of Murder".
Slashdot: amateur editors pretending to be professional.
I honestly think that if someone commits a crime like murder they should be held accountable, period. BUT, there's no way this brain scan thing works. I mean, REALLY. Ask the question again when the thing isn't a bunch of BS.
Also...
:P
...the headline made me think she fried someone's brain with an MRI or something. Might want to see to that.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Murder by brain scan?! And they tell us these tests are safe...
Am I the only one who rad the headline and thought: "Also, I can kill you with my brain."
Ok, so is this guy Edward Nigma, or one of Frank Herbert's characters from Ix? I expect to see this kind of story at the grocery store, next to the reports of aliens eating someone's dog, and sightings of BatBoy.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Ouch. You know it's from an old(ish) movie when they get the population of the earth too low by over two billion people.
Actually, I would imagine it would be fairly easy to distinguish a lie from the truth by EEG or fMRI. The pathways for recollection as opposed to creativity (lying), cause activity in different parts of the brain.
'Where were you last Tuesday at 3:00pm?' - If the person tells the truth, they're recalling the events. If they're lying, they're constructing a scenario in their head. The two would be very distinguishable.
That said, it's not without issues: First of all, if I pre-construct a scenario and run it through my head enough, it becomes a recollection and not a creation, I believe. Also, I'm not entirely sure that there's been enough actual studies of using fMRIs and/or EEGs for detecting lies vs. truth, nor how beatable the system is. Until these things have been studied and documented, they certainly shouldn't be used by courts.
There are companies in the U.S. trying to get fMRIs used for precisely this purpose. One example is the company, No Lie MRI.
If such systems can be proven reliable, then I'm all for using them in courts. Not so much to convict people, so much as to keep the innocent from being convicted, which happens plenty in the U.S.
I'm not so sure that it is good to convict someone of a crime, but it is pretty accurate. It is simple to do with a brain scan too.
1) Hook person up to a brain scanner.
2) Show the person random images of places they never seen until their brain doesn't care anymore.
3) Show the person an image of a place they've seen, and it will trigger thoughts.
It is helpful for interrogation. It is a bit spooky to use for crimes.
God spoke to me.
" Man sexually attracted to children, court told "
"A Canberra court has heard an O'Connor man who has been charged with downloading child pornography from the internet finds young children sexually attractive."
So he must have done it! Police never try to set up unpopular members of society.
Presumably he'll get a longer sentence as a result of admitting that he's attracted to children.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
H. Beam Piper used a brain scanner (veridicator) to verify truth (lie detector) in courts and making statements. They had strict rules on when it could be used and what could be asked. Gutenberg has Little Fuzzy as free text
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Eyewitness testimony is fallible for the same reason one's own memory for personal events is fallible: everything we 'remember' is constructed from what is stored and seems related, producing the fastest good enough result. The same research supports both. False memory and memory rejection can happen because memory is never entirely accurate. One can even be fooled into "remembering" something someone else supposedly saw but never occurred, convolving both eyewitness report and personal memory. The foremost researchers in this field are often called to testify in court cases where false and lost memory are involved.
As such, if this judge had any sense, he'd throw the supposed researcher in jail and recuse himself after throwing out the verdict. There's no way a "brain scan" can tell how accurate a "memory" is unless it can compare what it's measuring with the perception and cognition during the actual event. And if it could do that, the operator would be there to witness the same event.
The researcher should at very least be investigated for scientific fraud. The same people that would have thrown his work(?) out under peer review would testify against him.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If someone calls you a witch there, you get lynched... I'd say a brain-scan is at least a step in the right direction.
That if you want true accuracy, you have to go for the Vulcan mind meld. No one's going to argue about the validity of Vulcan logic.
Reading the headline, I actually thought that an Indian woman committed murders using a brain scan machine.
And to think I can hardly get my video driver loaded in it...
What if James Randi has a psychic power of neutralizing other para guys?
Then he catches them in an alley and sucks their brain out.
No wonder they don't dare to fight him.
Ooops, sounds like i watched too much Heroes...
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See http://www.randi.org/joom/challenge-info.html for further info
Cultist of the Average Middle-Aged Ones
As far as I can tell, once you already imaginated the lie, and start believe in it then it will be a recollection and indistinguishable from a real memory. Heck, tehre are enough study on memory to show that people make up stuff while recollecting and afterward think what they made up is a real memory.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...the money is real and is going nowhere.
Actually, it is going somewhere. The prize is being discontinued in March of 2010.
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