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Explosive Detecting Devices Face Off With Bomb Dogs
First time accepted submitter titan1070 writes "French scientist Dr. Spitzer and his colleagues have been working on a device that can sense faint traces of TNT and other explosives being smuggled into airports and other transportation methods. the hope for this device is that it will surpass the best bomb finder in the business, the sniffer dog. From the article: ' While researchers like Dr. Spitzer are making progress — and there are some vapor detectors on the market — when it comes to sensitivity and selectivity, dogs still reign supreme.
“Dogs are awesome,” said Aimee Rose, a product sales director at the sensor manufacturer Flir Systems, which markets a line of explosives detectors called Fido. “They have by far the most developed ability to detect concealed threats,” she said.
But dogs get distracted, cannot work around the clock and require expensive training and handling, Dr. Rose said, so there is a need for instruments.'"
It took me several tries to parse the title without the image of a dog's face exploding spontaneously entering my mind.
And they won't.
"We can't use dogs to spy on everybody, everyplace, all the time."
You wouldn't want to anyway. In blind studies, drug- and explosive-sniffing dogs actually have a pretty terrible track record. A literally unacceptable percentage of false positives, for example. Turned out, the dogs were responding to very subtle cues from their handlers, rather than their own senses. Which renders them completely inappropriate for law-enforcement use.
Not to mention the probable fact that the dogs are most likely smarter than the average TSA employee.
Have any lawyers won with the argument that the dogs were taking cues from their handlers yet?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Switches vs Bitches Smackdown.