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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.'"
The Hero Rats do just as well as dogs, and they are more suited to hot and humid clients. Plus, they work for peanuts.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
"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.
"Please link to proof of your "literally unacceptable percentage of false positives" for properly trained canines and handlers."
Easily done.
It amazes me how many people are so ready to call "bullshit" without taking 10 goddamned seconds on Google to check their facts.
If you think that is the only such study, you are mistaken. Google it dude. Learn something.
Here's another. Though not an independent study, it did evaluate actual success rates according to the courts' own records and found only a 44% success rate. And that was the average. For one minority, the true-positive rate was clear down at 27%. (Can you say "cues from handlers"? Sure. I knew you could.)
Also, they are probably not the best things we have. And even if they were, that "best" is pretty obviously not good enough.
You can't just argue that it's "the best". It has to be good enough. Not only that, but the huge potential for intentional cuing of the animals is seldom considered.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.