Some Interesting Stuffs With Crime

Just lately, I did an essay for English. We needed to include three different new technologies that will or do assist in crime preventation, between 500-750 words. Here's mine...

Cracking Down on Crime
Picture this scenario: You’re walking along the sidewalk with a few other regular citizens, taking part in your customary walk to work. Suddenly, a police car races by, its lights flashing and siren screaming in its high-pitched tones. The City 1 police have been informed of yet another crime, and are currently racing off to the scene. Yet for the police, it’s just another regular day. Most to all big cities are threatened by the ever-going menace of crime, and City 1 is no exception. But in today’s current, advanced age of technology, many people and companies are coming up with technological solutions for many of these dilemmas.

In the past, there have been many cases of criminals and terrorists walking around places, especially airports, undetected, either under false identities, clothes or anything. But with today’s advancing face recognition technology, police are being enabled to crack down on these troublesome fiends. Two popular technologies are already on the table: one by Viisage Inc. and a technology known as Identix. Both technologies take digital photos of the people walking past the camera, and then modifies it to certain dimensions so it matters not if the person’s head is in a tilted position. However, that’s as far as the shared features go. The technology from Viisage then compares the face to certain templates of faces, each with a different expression, facial features, etc. Once it has matched the photo with that, it then finds a match with the identities under that template. Identix, on the other hand, uses up to eighty different measurements found on the face, and then matches the identities. Certain measurements might include distance from eyes to nose, hairline to ears, etc. While Viisage is still only within its company’s grasp, Identix is currently being tested at Fresno Yosemite International Airport, in California.

To get officially true statements out of criminals, governments will sometimes use lie detectors to prove their truth… or their lies. The traditional form of lie detector is known as the polygraph. Invented sixty-nine years ago, it monitors one’s blood pressure, pulse and sweat, assuming that when one lies, they become agitated. While this is often true, it will come up with “false positives”, or lies when the person was actually telling the truth, about one out of ten times. The problem is that just the situation itself, being interrogated for crimes, can be very stressful, and that in itself can be quite stressful, as well as other causes. Lately though, USC psychologist Jennifer Verdemia has been researching new ways to pull a lie right out of the human brain! Currently, she is studying with the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine (fMRI), which uses a strong magnetic field to force molecules in the brain to emit radio signals. With these signals, Verdemia is finding that when someone tells the truth, there is a high amount of activity in the brain’s basic motor functions that control physical actions. But when someone lies, it would appear that as increased activity in the physical functional part of the brain, there is an elevated amount in the front of the brain, where most decision-making is made. In fact, it would actually seem that it takes more effort to lie than to tell the truth. Using this perspective, future lie detectors such as the ones Jennifer is using may use this same technology to detect lies.

Assailants beware! As well as your female victims, you may well have something to fear. The No-Contact Jacket (Females only at the moment, sorry boys.), made by Adam Whiton and Yolita Nugent, is a stylish system of self-defense. If the wearer feels threatened at any way, she can activate a switch located in the palm of the jacket, sending an 80,000-volt electrical pulse throughout the fabric, guaranteeing an immediate reaction from an attacker. The wearer is fully insulated, so she won’t feel a single tingle of the zap. This jacket was a prototype as of November 2003, but the inventors are planning to put it on the mass-market in the near future, so look out!

Technology is a great thing. It aids whatever field it’s meant for, and the named ones here are no exception. There are many other technologies out in the world today, and these are great examples of what already exist, and things that are yet to come. So look out all you doers of dastardly deeds, and prepare to be thwarted!

QUOTE

Assailants beware! As well as your female victims, you may well have something to fear. The No-Contact Jacket (Females only at the moment, sorry boys.), made by Adam Whiton and Yolita Nugent, is a stylish system of self-defense. If the wearer feels threatened at any way, she can activate a switch located in the palm of the jacket, sending an 80,000-volt electrical pulse throughout the fabric, guaranteeing an immediate reaction from an attacker. The wearer is fully insulated, so she won’t feel a single tingle of the zap. This jacket was a prototype as of November 2003, but the inventors are planning to put it on the mass-market in the near future, so look out!

w00t! 80,000 volt shocks!

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