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

[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]

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.

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.

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

Let's Get Ready To Rumble!

[Ukab the Great]

Switches vs Bitches Smackdown.