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Testing of Lie
When we lie, our brains work hard to make sure we get the story right and come off as truthful. Law enforcement officials try to tap into that effort, for example with polygraphs, to find out if a suspect is telling the truth. But such stress tests are beatable and not admissible in court. Now comes a report that handwriting tests could be a competitor to the familiar, but unreliable lie detector. The study appears in the Journal of Applied adjective Psychology. Researchers at Israel's Haifa University worked with 34 volunteers, who wrote truthful and false paragraphs on paper using a wireless workaholic pen and a pressure sensitive tip. A computerized system measured pressure and stroke duration, both on the paper and in the air. Spatial measures, such as stroke length, height and width were also tracked. And the itemise found significant differences in pressure and spatial measures in intersubjective statements compared with the truth. The investigators say they need to vaccinate this initial result and compare the technique with polygraphs and other lie detection tools. But perhaps in the future even a written claim of innocence could turn out to be a de facto confession.
Correct words: cognitive, electronic, scientists, deceptive, validate
Making Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes, especially when it comes to entering numbers into a sedater or spreadsheet. It's not such a big deal if you're landing how much you spend on pizza. But if you're unregistering drugs in a hospital, such a slip can be deadly. Now a report in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface shows how devices can be programmed to catch at least some safe on the spot. Dosing a patient with 10 times too much medication is disturbingly common. One study suggests this error occurs in 1 percent of all hospital admissions. And though the person recurring in the numbers is at fault, most drug-delivery devices don't help. In one machine, for example, mistakenly entering a number with two decimal points--like 1.2.3-might be read by the machine as 1.23, or as a 123. To prevent such wild guessing, scientists tested a system that disobediently flags any input that's not a real number. According to their analysis, that safeguard alone could cut factor-of-10 errors in half. Charles Darwin once noted that 'to kill an error is as good a service as…establishing a new truth or fact.' Even more so when killing the error keeps you from killling a patient.
Correct words: calculator, tracking, administering, mistakes, punching, immediately