The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence — except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.

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This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals’ defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime — as prosecutors see it — and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore.

The software tries to detect whether, when the crime’s details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions — the areas that, according to the technology’s inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.

When I discussed this openly with Waters in Muddy Waters comments they kindly replied that “customers are loath to be a reference client for a vendor,”  like this fact somehow justifies having 600 people, most who have never actually used the software in practice, vote on how great it is.  

Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

Or, as Mark Adler pointed out in his well written blog post The First Annual Fluffies for CEP , a secretive “panel of renowned judge” is going to tell us, via Jolt, who has the better solution?  Holy Cow Batman!   Let me buy a nice layout in your magazine  or web site,  please, so “my software company” will be on the short list for the “the awards”.  

Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

All this smoke-and-mirrors. share-the-love, marketing reminds me of The Matrix a bit, where the world as we observe it, is a complete artificial construction, where most people in the Matrix believe they are “real” because they do not know that they really just a computer generated program designed to keep humans happy as they sleep in some cold goop with electrodes stuck up their you-know-what, really just bio-batteries insuring the light bill is paid.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

Or better yet, these fluffies are similar to most of the Webinars we see where there are questions from “the audience” but we know that most of these questions did not come from the “audience” - yet we all seem to continue ”the  audience” myth just like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny! 

Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Fluffy Awards are real, if you want them to be real.  Just close your eyes and click your heels three times….

Follow the Yellow Brick Road. Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
Follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
Follow the Yellow Brick, Follow the Yellow Brick,
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

We’re off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
You’ll find he is a whiz of a Wiz! If ever a Wiz! there was.
If ever oh ever a Wiz! there was The Wizard of Oz is one because,
Because, because, because, because, because.
Because of the wonderful things he does.
We’re off to see the Wizard. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz