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Lie Detector Company Threatens Critical Scientists With Suit
An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish newspaper DN reports that the Israeli company Nemesysco has sent letters to researchers at the University of Stockholm, threatening legal action if they do not stop publishing findings (Google translation). An article called 'Charlatanry in forensic speech science: A problem to be taken seriously' was pulled by the publisher after threats of a libel lawsuit." Online translations can be a little wonky; if your Swedish is as bad as mine, this English-language article describes the situation well.
1. socially conservative politics
2. intellectual property laws
civilization is bettered in terms of happiness, health, and financial prosperity as long as the power of social conservatives and corporate oligarchy are held in check. certainly, there is now ay to ever completely defeat these forces, and they do actually do good some good in this world. but they must be eternally pruned, for in part sof the world where their power runs unchecked, corruption and classism, intolerance and tribalism take hold
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nemesysco's Poly-Layered Voice Analysis measures 18 parameters of speech in real-time for interrogators at police, military and secret-services agencies. Its accuracy as a lie detector has proven to be less important than its ability to more quickly pinpoint for interrogators where there are problems in a subject's story. Officers then can zero in much more quickly with their traditional interrogation techniques.
The software measures voice for a variety of parameters including deception, excitement, stress, mental effort, concentration, hesitation, anger, love and lust. It works prerecorded, over the phone and live, the company said. V Entertainment recommends it for screening phone calls, checking the truthfulness of people with whom you deal or gauging romantic interest.
The display can show each measured parameter in a separate window, with real-time traces of instantaneous measurements while flashing the overall for each parameter, such as "false probable," "high stress" and "SOS." Ultimately, the company plans to offer versions of its detectors for cell phones, dating services, teaching aids, toys and games.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
to refute this libel claim, is a lie detector test :-)
Oh wait...
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I wonder when companies will realize that trying to silence people in this modern age will just lead to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
http://www.thelocal.se/17188/20090127/
Forget the lawsuits. Ask the researchers if they'd be willing to be connected to the lie detectors and to then testify that their research and conclusions were made in good faith.
If the detectors indicate a lie, the situation doesn't really change. But if the detectors do not indicate a lie, the manufacturer is pretty well cornered.
I'm so glad my employer lets me come in casual every day.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It's apparently fairly easy to fool a lie detector, and it's gotten to the point now where lie detector tests can't be submitted as evidence in court because they're so unreliable. Mind you, they still have a use on Maury to determine who's been cheating on who. That's always entertaining.
I have nothing compelling to say
I guess it's back to using an E-meter or flipping a coin to see who is telling the truth. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-meter
.
Hey, look! I can blast buzzwords and pretend my software works too!
So how much would you pay? Wait, don't answer because this can flash the overall value for each parameter in a separate window! Now how much would you pay?
Here's the abstract of the article from http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/IJSLL/article/view/3775
ABSTRACT
A lie detector which can reveal lie and deception in some automatic and perfectly reliable way is an old idea we have often met with in science fiction books and comic strips. This is all very well. It is when machines claimed to be lie detectors appear in the context of criminal investigations or security applications that we need to be concerned. In the present paper we will describe two types of âoedeceptionâ or âoestress detectors" (euphemisms to refer to what quite clearly is known as âoelie detectorsâ). Both types of detection are claimed to be based on voice analysis but we found no scientific evidence to support the manufacturersâ(TM) claims. Indeed, our review of scientific studies will show that these machines perform at chance level when tested for reliability. Given such results and the absence of scientific support for the underlying principles it is justified to view the use of these machines as charlatanry and we argue that there are serious ethical and security reasons to demand that responsible authorities and institutions should not get involved in such practices.
I wasn't able to find a copy of the paper itself.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
As in, Nemesys co, as in Nemesis Co? Man, I sure wouldn't work for my nemesis. These scientists should have seen it coming.
It's probably because the scientists' bullshit detector infringed on Nemesysco's patents.
I know lie detectors have only been more of toys or threats than really useful tools. A trained questioner doesn't need a lie detector. A lie detector is more for them to let you know that they are almost positive that you've lied on the subject.
There are folks that want lie detectors to work like in the movies or have it on their cell phones so that they know when the other person is lying. They'd hate to have it used on them though. I have news for you.
Everyone has a built-in lie detector. It's just how well that it's been trained to work. How would the world be different if we gave elementary school kids the same questioning for lies tools that are usually taught to police detectives? Short answer; not too different. They'd just know faster when the teachers are lost and clueless, and any attempts to bring new information that you know the teacher doesn't have would just be punished faster. We would get politicians that are even better at lying though.
I guess that's because English and Swedish share a lot of common roots... both are languages of Germanic peoples... Anyway it's my guess that falls within the category of "folk linguistics" :-)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Ever take a lie detector test? Years back, a prospective employer sent me for one. Unlike most people, I actually read the release they asked me to sign, and discovered: 1. I'd be giving up the right to challenge the results of the test, by any manner, and 2. The testing agency reserved the right to sell the results of the test, good or bad, to ANYONE, in perpetuity. Does this sound ethical, or as though they trust their own test? I told them to stuff the test, and the job. The next day, I was called about the position, and explained I could not, in conscience, acquiesce to the polygraph test. They said, "Oh, don't worry about that, we get it if we can, but it doesn't mean anything. Welcome aboard!"
Easy solution: the scientists should agree to undergo an interview in which they would be asked if they have proof of what they are saying. A lie detector provided by this Nemesys Co. would then detect if they are lying or not.
If lie detectors *really* worked, we wouldn't have to torture so many people, would we? We'd just hook them up to the lie detector, and ask them questions, like, "Will the LHC discover the Higgs boson?", and then we would know if they were guilty or not.
The US could close down Guantanamo in a fortnight.
But then the Torture Industry would need a bailout.
Or maybe the Torture Industry should just get a cut of every lie detector sold?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Perhaps we should bring back Trail by Ordeal [fire, water, combat, rabid wolverine] as a means of determining truth. Give them each a broadsword and let Odin decide who's telling the truth. Besides cutting back on this sort of dispute, it might make for an excellent (or at least revenue generating ) reality teevee series.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, coin flips, sticking your hand in the statue's mouth and Scientology's "E-Meters" all share the same validity in catching lies -- basically none. It's all pretend "science" with cool moving needles and wires, but you might as well be watching a seismograph for all the good it does you. It simply gives government agencies and insurance companies an excuse to call you a liar. "Hey, don't look at me, the MACHINE says you're lying..."
Now FOX has this propaganda puff piece for the TSA called "Lie to Me" going where an actor I like is helping spread nonsense I can't stand.
Can you imagine the revolution society would undergo if "voice stress analyzers" actually worked? "I did not have sex with that woman!" BZZZ! "Saddam Hussein is building nuclear weapons!" BZZZ! "The 700 billion will be wisely spent!" BZZZZ! "I was misquoted!" BZZZ!
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
It was extremely tasteless and irresponsible for the Swedes to publish this, especially considering the fact that two days ago was Holocaust day. Shame on them for insulting the victims, killing them a second time. Being a Holocaust fundamentalist, I ask everybody to join me in boycotting everything Swedish.
send this to Mythbusters, i'll like to see that company tying to sue them.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
I don't know about Swedish, but I use Google translate for Chinese and Arabic translations into English a lot ,and they've gotten notably better in some places over the past year.
MT system performance is often very dependent on language genre. They tend to be good at translating news because news text has been a big focus of NLP training corpus development. It's a pretty well controlled genre (you don't get a lot of random slang or neologisms, non-standard syntax, etc.) and there's a whole lot of it already electronically encoded (no print or speech to text conversion needed). And it's packed full of information, which is important to a lot of the big funders of MT research.
It's sad; the poor British always try so hard to be nice to every whinging minority. They feel guilty for their ancestors having a great empire that beat some sense into many backwards peoples.
That's no way to talk about the Americans. Oh, hang on... it is. Guess we didn't hold on to that one long enough to beat much sense into them ;)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Just the same, when Obama says "Yes we can close Guantanamo!" he isn't promising to do a goddamn thing, he's just phrasing his aspirations for what America could do in such a way that people hear "OMG Barack is gonna close gitmo!"
This is not lying, and treating it like it is is just victimology of the voter against eeeeeeevil politicians.
That is absolutely lying! We're talking about natural language communication here, not a programming language. Words and phrases have meaning that are not necessarily the sum of their individual parts, there is context involved that guides the necessary interpretation of both sides. As in, pedantic literal interpretation is not, and has never been, the sole judge of the meaning of a sentence.
When the words spoken by a speaker are designed to convey a certain meaning to the listeners, and the listeners receive that meaning, then we call that successful communication. When that correctly conveyed meaning is deliberately false, that's a fucking lie!
When the speaker also designs their words to leave themselves a semantic escape valve so they can claim to have meant something else later, that doesn't mean they weren't lying, it means they knew they were lying and thus needed the out!
When Obama said "Yes we can close Gitmo", everyone correctly interpreted that to mean that if he were elected, he would close Gitmo. That is the meaning he obviously intended to convey. If he doesn't close it, then that's a lie*. And if he defended himself by saying that all he had meant was he thought it was something America could do hypothetically, then that makes him a double liar because that obviously is not the message he intended to convey when he spoke!
The only people who think that isn't lying are:
1) People who've sacrificed reason itself on the Altar of Pedantry.
2) Liars who are lying about it not being lying and just like being able to use semantics to escape from obvious lies.
I refuse to sacrifice my ability to detect lies covered with such a thin ruse to either group of people.
* So far so good on this count, but of course I won't be happy until the thing is really truly closed.
The enemies of Democracy are
How do you test a lie detector? For it to work you have to have someone ACTUALLY LYING, not saying something contrary to the truth, but actually trying to be secretly untruthful. It is an impossible situation because you have to know 100% that they are lying and they have to be 100% concealing a secret. Otherwise, its all just guess work.
There is NO WAY to test a lie detector without the existence of a 100% accurate working lie detector. Short of that, there is no way to objectively or theoretically test any such device.
FTA:
'At the same time, Nemesysco's actions have led to even greater media attention for the two Swedish professors' research. "It was hardly their intention. But since the article was withdrawn, I have received lots of mail and requests for copies of the article. The article would not have been read to this extent if the company had simply ignored it in silence," says Francisco Lacerda to the Dagens Nyheter.'
So now, instead of the just the readers of some obscure journal, it's all over da Intertubes. Well done boys!