Polygraphing Players Is Not Cricket

Guardian reporter David Hopps reports in a story published by the Sydney Morning Herald that former Australia cricket team captain Steve Waugh is advocating the use of lie detectors in an attempt to root out corruption in the scandal-plagued sport. Excerpt: ANDREW Strauss and Mahendra Singh Dhoni will be encouraged to help stamp out corruption …

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The Truth About the Polygraph (According to the NSA)

The National Security Agency (NSA) has produced a video about its polygraph screening program. Watch it here, along with AntiPolygraph.org’s commentary: The original source video is available here. For commentary on the NSA’s accompanying polygraph leaflet, see our earlier blog post, NSA Leaflet: Your Polygraph Examination. For a thorough debunking of polygraphy, with extensive citations …

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Kaiser Fung on Lie Detectors

AntiPolygraph.org has received a complementary copy of statistician Kaiser Fung’s new book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010), a short primer on statistics written for a general audience. In Chapter 4, Fung addresses the trade-off between false positives and false negatives …

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Dueling Polygraphs in Pittsburgh Beating Case

Three Pittsburgh police officers who stand accused of wantonly beating 18-year-old honor student Jordan Miles have all passed lie detector tests. But Miles also passed a lie detector test regarding the incident. So whose lie detector is lying? Jill King Greenwood reports for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Three Pittsburgh police officers accused of beating a Homewood …

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An Example of How the Myth of the Lie Detector Is Perpetuated

An article published today in a small town newspaper provides a good example of the sort of shoddy reporting that perpetuates the myth of the lie detector. Lisa Rogers reports for the Gadsden, Alabama Times: Polygraphs useful law enforcement tool By Lisa Rogers Times Staff Writer Published: Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 9:37 p.m. A suspect …

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How Tom Henry Beat the Polygraph

In an oral history posted on YouTube, musician Tom Henry recounts the story of how, as a young Navy seaman, he was caught with a pound of marijuana in his locker, but escaped punishment after fooling the lie detector: The technique Tom thought of for fooling the lie detector (dissociation) wasn’t very sophisticated. But it …

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Penn & Teller Bullshit! Lie Detector Episode

As has been discussed on the message board, Penn Jillette, the “bigger, louder half” of the magic and comedy duo Penn & Teller, has disclosed via Twitter that a forthcoming episode of the Emmy Award-winning Showtime series Penn & Teller Bullshit! will concern “the bullshit of lie detectors.” AntiPolygraph.org anticipates that this PTBS episode will …

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