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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...
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.
That's right. And if you want to stand up for women's rights vote McCain Palin 2008! Palin - Because women are always the victim (tm).
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 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.
Am I the only one who rad the headline and thought: "Also, I can kill you with my brain."
Not American, but I AM someone whose worked voluntarily helping set up a shelter for battered Indian/Pakistani wives in the UK.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.
The summary is a little missleading.
The two states in India that allow it have set up labs were the device was/is being tested, the lack of per review is that the people outside of India do not have full access.
This is the second case where the judge has mentioned the test, the first was against a man. In the first case the judge said that the test was not used as "concluded proof" but that the tests backed the other evidence. In this case the judge include 9 pages on why he used the test results and defense of the system.
As for its use, in India to have the test run on you requires that you volunteer. In the US I would guess it usage would have to meet the same requirements that were setup for lie detectors. A quick search shows that their has been no federal ruling, excluding that lie detectors don't work, so you have some locations where the judge can order a person, some where lie detectors were considered no different from taking a persons fingerprints, to others where they said a person could not be forced.
Honor killings as you have read recently about in the media, did not happen in the same country
Are you claiming that 'honor killings' do not occur in India?
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040113/asp/nation/story_2780541.asp
http://www.onlinewomeninpolitics.org/archives/04_0112_in_wrights.htm
Just like any other technology, now that its available, society has to make sense of how best to use it.
Yes, and that is by throwing it in the heap with all the other pseudo-science and outright quackery.
" 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
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
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.
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...
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Actually if you bothered to JFG, to would find that the $1,000,00.00 is in an endownent fund account administered by Golman Sachs, so bar the bank collapsing or it getting embezzeled, the money is real qand is going nowhere.
See http://www.randi.org/joom/challenge-info.html for further info
Cultist of the Average Middle-Aged Ones