snowdeal.org > ex machina: optical engineering, lying and beating hearts

ex machina

optical engineering, lying and beating hearts

interestingly, i'm 2 degrees away from britton chance , the venerable optical engineering professor whom is behind the seemingly goofy headband lie detector :

"Research subjects wearing the headband are told to answer some questions truthfully and others deceptively.

At the moment a subject makes the decision to lie, before even uttering it, there's a milliseconds-long burst of blood flow. Those bursts are read by the sensors and show up as spikes on a laptop computer. "

one of my undergraduate professors, clyde barlow , received his ph.d while doing his thesis work in britton's lab. in fact, i did "bioanalytical chemistry" independent research for clyde which had some similar themes, in terms of real-time monitoring of the specral properties of deep tissues to detect changes to stimuli. however, i studied beating hearts, not liars. i'll spare you the details of how and where i got the beating hearts.

anyway, the real point is that even the relatively simple model of monitoring heart tissues was hard to execute consistantly. it's hard to imagine an array of sensors that could reliably differentiate between something as complicated as lying. but i guess if anyone could do it, britton could. and probably clyde.

bookmark: del.icio.us ::digg it ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo ::

6/07/2003 11:19:00 PM 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

[ rhetoric ]

“"it is hard to be brave," said piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal." rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: "it is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us."”

the complete tales & poems of winnie the pooh

[ about ]

this site chronicles the continuing adventures of my son, odin, who was unexpectedly born on the fourth of july at 25 weeks gestation, weighing 1 pound 7 ounces.

he's quite a fighter and you can always send him a postcard to the most current address listed here if you're inspired by his adventures. see the postcard project/google maps mashup to see a map of the postcards.

if you're new, you can browse the archives to catch up. and don't forget to watch a few movies that i made while we were in the neonatal intensive care unit. or if you want the abridged version and you can find a copy, you can read about his adventures in the november 2005 issue of parents magazine.

[ search ]

[ outbound ]