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.'"

Comments

In other words

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

"We can't use dogs to spy on everybody, everyplace, all the time".

Re:In other words

[causality]

Yeah, that's what it's all about. Nobody's actually afraid of any real bombs going off anywhere.

If it meant drastically reducing the size and power of the federal government, I would gladly take the chance of dying because of a terrorist's bomb.

I'd be more likely to die by being struck by lightning, in fact.

Re:In other words

[Jane Q. Public]

"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.

Re:In other words

[jamstar7]

"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?

Re:In other words

[Jane Q. Public]

"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.

Re:In other words

[Jane Q. Public]

"Not to mention the probable fact that the dogs are most likely smarter than the average TSA employee."

Now THIS one needs modding up.

Re:In other words

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:In other words

[hrvatska]

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 Mod -1000: Utter Bullshit.

Dogs are the absolute best tool we have for the job. There's a reason we use dogs to hunt animals, guard animals, property, and people, track fugitives, search for survivors, bodies, drugs, and explosives, detect cancer or seizures, lead the blind, etc. They have incredible senses and are very intelligent.

Please link to proof of your "literally unacceptable percentage of false positives" for properly trained canines and handlers.

Seems to me that she wasn't saying anything about properly trained handler and dog teams, but about the likelihood that so many trainers have biases that lead to false positives that dogs cannot be relied upon. She said "the dogs were responding to very subtle cues from their handlers." I don't see anything in that post about well trained dogs paired with unbiased trainers. It is very well documented that handler bias frequently leads to false positives. For example, this article notes that sniffer dogs got it wrong four out of five times in 14,102 searches. This articleclaims that over a three year period only 44 percent of alerts by dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. A UC Davis study found that if handlers expected their dogs to find drugs they consistently found drugs, even when there weren't any. A little bit of searching will turn up plenty of other examples. In some cases defenders of using dogs claim that the high rate of false positives is due to drug residue being left in a vehicle or on a person. That the mere presence of someone carrying a substance the dog was trained to detect, like marijuana, in a vehicle hours earlier could result in a false positive. Medical marijuana is legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Which means that just transporting someone to legally obtain some marijuana for a medical condition could result in being searched and detained.

Re:In other words

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Yeah, that's what it's all about. Nobody's actually afraid of any real bombs going off anywhere.
It's all an act so they can spy on your porn habits and find your drug stash.

The risk distribution of explosives incidents makes generalizations (while statistically possible) fairly useless.

There are high-risk demographics and applications: de-mining, certain flavors of perimeter security in areas with a fondness for truck bombs, the occasional booby trap hunt. People involved with such things tend to have an urgent and honest enthusiasm for explosives detection.

The K-9 units of a zillion dinky municipalities? Yeah, they spend an awful lot of time providing probable cause for traffic stops and hunting school lockers for joints.

That's the thing: For a comparatively small number of people, who are at high risk, the legitimate applications are most salient. For the people presently at little or no risk, there isn't much room for improvement and there is fairly obvious room for trouble.

Re:In other words

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But can they be trained to steal iPads at checkpoints?

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

If having an anon call you out bothers you (I admit he was a bit obnoxious about it), you should include links in the original statement. Anyone could have said, "dogs are perfect" or "dogs are worthless" without any references.

It's worth noting that the article you link refers specifically to bad training, and does not suggest that all detection dogs have those same issues with being trained to take detection cues from their handlers. It goes on to suggest that this is a problem elsewhere, and that there's too little information (or apparently, oversight in training).

The original material, linked in the summary, suggests dogs are the best thing we have right now. That's from Flir, who sells the alternative devices. They even suggest that their sensing technology is meant to be used only as a complimentary test, along with dogs.

I just I don't think it's appropriate for us to start drawing firm conclusions on the abilities of dogs, trained and handled properly. It seems they're the best thing going, made better in combination with technology, and what we really need is to keep an eye on how they're trained.

Re:In other words

[TheSync]

The judge later said this was a horrible mishandling of justice, but that automatic sentencing leaves him no alternatives

This is the biggest BS thing I've ever heard. If a judge feels that finding someone guilty will lead to a miscarriage of justice, the judge should find for innocence. Jury nullification has a rich history, nothing wrong with judges doing it as well.

Rats!

[sandytaru]

The Hero Rats do just as well as dogs, and they are more suited to hot and humid clients. Plus, they work for peanuts.

Meow!

[Tablizer]

They'll throw a boobie-trapped Schrodinger's Cat into the mix just to fsck with everybody

Re:Meow!

[Anonymous Coward]

And they won't.

Priorities....

[mark-t]

They have by far the most developed ability to detect concealed threats

That statement, entirely by itself, should qualify dogs as a better option, but let me elaborate...

But dogs get distracted, cannot work around the clock and require expensive training ...

so do employees. What's your point?

Dogs work. They work well. They are unsurpassed in reliability by any instrument we've been able to devise.... the fact that they can't be used like machines could should no more be a reason to not use them than the fact that humans can't work like machines should be a reason to not employ people.

When a machine can do a *BETTER* job at it than a dog... then I could see replacing them being viable. Until then, however, let Spot and Fido keep their jobs.

Title

[Time_Ngler]

It took me several tries to parse the title without the image of a dog's face exploding spontaneously entering my mind.

Re:Title

[madprof]

This just reminds me of this from The Day Today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nvfQw8UCDE

dogs vs machines

[BeaverCleaver]

So why the hell does every airport I've been to swab me for explosives instead of using a dog? Those mass spectrometers aren't cheap.

Re:dogs vs machines

[slippyblade]

Because there is far more money to be siphoned off using scanners and spectrometers.

Re:dogs vs machines

[girlintraining]

So why the hell does every airport I've been to swab me for explosives instead of using a dog? Those mass spectrometers aren't cheap.

You assume the swab is then used in a mass spectrometer. Putting the swab in a precursor that changes color when it detects something works too.

Cost?

[NoKaOi]

They complain about the expense of training dogs. Yes, they require a lot of training and that takes a lot of time an money, but how many dogs could you train for the cost of these devices? Each FIDO device costs $21k. It costs $10k-$15k to train a bomb sniffing dog, and once you pay for their education dogs are willing to work for room and board. If more resources were put into training methods then the per-dog cost to train could probably be brought down quite a big too. Dogs are also a lot cuter, and the FIDO device doesn't like to cuddle, or so I've heard. I say forget all the fancy super expensive scanners, just go back to old-fashioned metal detectors for people and x-ray scanners for carry-ons, and get a lot of dogs.

Re:Cost?

[ThatsMyNick]

The research is to make them more effective and cheaper. I would expect these to become cheaper as time goes by. I would support the research, but not buy these devices yet.

Re:Cost?

[NoKaOi]

man u dont know anything about the real world do you? dogs might seem cheaper but they die.... then the dogs are not "willing too work" they get beaten until they do... yes i would be "willing" to work then too

Wow! Are people really that ignorant, or are you troll? I really hope you're a troll, but maybe you're some PETA nut job? Dogs are not only willing to work, but they love it. I used to do K9 search and rescue. I moved and my dog is old and retired, but when she was working, it was her favorite thing (now her favorite activity is going to the beach, just like a retired human). She loved it! She had a special squeaky toy and wore a bear-bell (so I could hear where she was when she was ranging)...when she would hear a similar sounding bell or squeak she'd get super excited and happy. It's years later and once and while she'll hear a similar sounding bell or squeaky toy and she still gets excited because she thinks she might get to go work! Working to her was the human equivalent of having your ideal job, favorite sport and favorite hobby all rolled into one. This is true of all the dogs I worked with. A decent trainer can identify a dog who has the temperament to feel this way pretty early on. A trainer isn't going to waste their time on a dog that doesn't love to work, and isn't going to be successful even if they tried. So no, dogs are absolutely not forced to work.

and third... cute?? lol i wouldnt come too close too them trained dogs if i was you... try petting them and see what happens

She loves to be pet and she especially loves her chest to be scratched. She's had a child walk up and smack her in the face for no reason, and she just sat there still looking happy. Oh, and she's damn cute. So what PETA tells you about dogs not wanting to work is complete and utter bullshit.

Re:Dogs

[Artifakt]

The law gives the TSA a lot of flexability, but that doesn't mean the real limits the public will tolerate will always match the law. Why would any police type agent want to demand that the public simply believe they are totally fair and unbiased just because the law says so, when they can simply say the dog made the decision so their potential bias doesn't enter into it? If I somehow got a law passed saying I had the authority to do X because I am totally fair and unbiased, would you start believing that about me? If the law said you couldn't even question my fairness, under penalty, would that actually make you think I was fair? Dogs, machines (particularly computers), and for that matter FBI profilers, sometimes make good excuses for deflecting charges of bias without having to just tell people the law forbids entertaining those charges of bias. The system wants the majority of citizens to think it is fair, and will go to great lengths to achieve that goal.

Let's Get Ready To Rumble!

[Ukab the Great]

Switches vs Bitches Smackdown.

This will foil my efforts

[FilmedInNoir]

I was on the verge of creating a bomb that could detect faint traces of dog.