Hand-held lie detectors

[mindstalk]

Being deployed in Afghanistan. To be used as "triage" in job interviews; not to be used on US personnel; less accurate than polygraphs; with a cited accuracy of 82-90%... or 63-79% if, unlike the Pentagon, you count all the results, rather than discarding inconclusives. And that's on US subjects in the lab, not on Afghans in the field, who might be a wee bit more stressed out. Studies are from the makers of the devices, and make questionable assumptions about base rates.

Heh, funny quote:

But they acknowledged that this was no easy task. They use the word "non-trivial," which in scientific lexicon means a problem is difficult, even unsolvable.

"Determining these decision rules," the researchers wrote, "is both non-trivial and subjective."

The article seems pretty detailed and documented. And they say investigative journalism is dead. Go MSNBC!