Inside the Black Mirror World of Polygraph Job Screenings - WIRED

Inside the Black Mirror World of Polygraph Job Screenings - WIRED
The designer baby debate could start a war - Quartz
Global Flexographic Printing Machine Market 2019 Competitor Analysis- Polygraph, Eidos S.P.A., Class-Engineering and A. Carnevalli & Cia. Ltda. - Education Market
Mike Pence Swears His Loyalty on the Sunday Shows - The Atlantic

Posted: 01 Oct 2018 12:00 AM PDT

Christopher Talbot thought he would make a great police officer. He was 29 years old, fit, and had a clean background record. Talbot had military experience, including a tour of Iraq as a US Marine, and his commanding officer had written him a glowing recommendation. In 2014, armed with an associate degree in criminal justice, he felt ready to apply to become an officer with the New Haven Police Department, in his home state of Connecticut.

Talbot sailed through the department's rigorous physical and mental tests, passing speed and agility trials and a written examination—but there was one final test. Like thousands of other law enforcement, fire, paramedic, and federal agencies across the country, the New Haven Police Department insists that each applicant take an assessment that has been rejected by almost every scientific authority: the polygraph test.

Commonly known as lie detectors, polygraphs are virtually unused in civilian life. They're largely inadmissible in court and it's illegal for most private companies to consult them. Over the past century, scientists have debunked the polygraph, proving again and again that the test can't reliably distinguish truth from falsehood. At best, it is a roll of the dice; at worst, it's a vessel for test administrators to project their own beliefs.

Yet Talbot's test was no different from the millions of others conducted annually across the public sector, where the polygraph is commonly used as a last-ditch effort to weed out unsuitable candidates. Hiring managers will ask a range of questions about minor crimes, like marijuana use and vandalism, and major infractions, like kidnapping, child abuse, terrorism, and bestiality. Using a polygraph, these departments believe, increases the likelihood of obtaining facts that potential recruits might prefer not to reveal. And like hundreds of thousands of job candidates each year, Talbot was judged to have lied on the test. He failed.

New Haven allows failed applicants to plead their case in public before the Board of Police Commissioners. So in February 2014, Talbot sat down and recited his experiences with lie detectors. He had first applied to the Connecticut State Police and was failed for deception about occasional marijuana use as a minor. He then tried again with a police department in New Britain, where a polygraph test showed him lying about his criminal and sexual history.

This time he had failed the New Haven polygraph for something cryptically called "inconsistencies." "[But] I'm not hiding anything," he said at the hearing. "I was being straight and honest and I've never been in trouble with the law. I'm not lying about anything."

Electronic lie detection is a peculiarly American obsession. No other country carries out anywhere near the estimated 2.5 million polygraph tests conducted in the US every year, a system that fuels a thriving $2 billion industry. A survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2007 found that around three-quarters of urban sheriff and police departments use polygraphs when hiring. Each test can cost $700 or more. Apply to become a police officer, trooper, firefighter, or paramedic today, and there is a good chance you will find yourself connected to a machine little changed since the 1950s, subject to the judgment of an examiner with just a few weeks' pseudoscientific training.

Last week the technology burst into the news when Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her as a teenager, said that she had taken a privately administered polygraph test to help bolster her account of the incident. "While not admissible in court, they're used by various governmental agencies and many people believe in their abilities," Douglas Wigdor, a former prosecutor who now represents victims in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases against high-profile men, told The Washington Post.

In one of the biggest surveys of law enforcement use of polygraph screening to date, WIRED filed more than 50 public-records requests with America's largest federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, seeking to discover how they use the polygraph during hiring and what safeguards they have in place to prevent abuse. The results were erratic—and discouraging. A quarter failed to respond at all, and nearly half said they had no responsive documents— meaning they do not track the age, gender, race, or disability status of those undergoing examination.

But the results obtained offer a peek inside an outdated system that continues to influence who gets hired—and who doesn't—at some of the most important institutions in the United States. Inconsistent and skewed polygraph screening programs are undermining the very places that are designed to uphold the law—a failure that comes with personal costs.

Illustration by Alex Petrowsky

Lie detection has come a surprisingly short way from its inception a century ago. As a graduate student at Harvard in 1915, American psychologist and proto-feminist William Marston noticed that when his wife "got mad or excited" her blood pressure seemed to climb. He theorized that measuring her blood pressure while asking her questions could reveal deception by pinpointing the answers that caused a spike.

With the United States' entry into World War I, Marston approached various government departments with the idea of developing his system as a tool to trap spies. He eventually secured a position in a medical support unit of the War Department (the precursor to the Department of Defense), where he carried out his initial research, often using women in university sororities as subjects.

After the war, Marston trained his focus on the legal system. In 1921, James Frye, a black man in Washington, DC, was accused of shooting a doctor. Frye confessed the crime to police, then a few days later recanted his confession. Frye's lawyer brought in Marston to test his client's honesty.

At the time, Marston's device was a hack: a basic blood pressure monitor, administered with a medical cuff and stethoscope. After subjecting Frye to an examination, he concluded that his story of innocence was entirely truthful and agreed to testify on his behalf. However, the judge objected to the use of an unknown and unproven tool. An appeals court agreed, writing, "The thing from which [a] deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs." This became known as the Frye standard. Because polygraphs have never convinced the majority of scientists, the Frye standard has excluded them from most courtrooms for almost a century.

The experience only fueled Marston to make his method more sophisticated. He began working with a device, soon dubbed the polygraph, that measured blood pressure, breathing rate, and skin conductance—aka sweatiness. With some electronic and digital upgrades, these are essentially the same devices in operation today. Marston was media-savvy, touting polygraph technology in a public advertising campaign and, ultimately, even in comic books. While working as a consultant to DC Comics in 1940, Marston proposed a female superhero, Wonder Woman. She would be strong and smart, armed with bulletproof bracelets and an unbeatable lie detector—a Lasso of Truth that prevented anyone within its golden orbit from lying.

In reality, Marston's design was far from perfect. Mainstream psychologists were concerned that the physiological responses the polygraph recorded could be caused by a host of things other than deception; the device might capture unrelated emotions, such as nervousness, arousal, anxiety, or fear. And once you have results, their meaning is open to interpretation. A polygraph only records raw data; it is up to an examiner to interpret the data and draw a conclusion about the subject's honesty. One examiner might see a blood pressure peak as a sign of deception, another might dismiss it—and it is in those individual judgments that bias can sneak in.

But regardless of a polygraph's accuracy, some organizations were beginning to find it useful. The polygraph's scientific aura gave police a tool to intimidate suspects and recruiters a convenient way to shape their workforce. By the middle of the 20th century, polygraphs were being used by government agencies, factories, and banks to screen employees and investigate crimes, with little control or oversight. During the Cold War, federal polygraph tests were used to target left-wingers and homosexuals in government agencies.

Eventually, science began pushing back. In 1965, the US Committee on Government Operations evaluated the scientific evidence for polygraphy and concluded: "There is no lie detector, neither man nor machine. People have been deceived by a myth that a metal box in the hands of an investigator can detect truth or falsehood." The next year, the American Polygraph Association was formed to promote polygraphy and provide standards for examiners and technologies.

In 1988, after years of intense lobbying by unions, the Employee Polygraph Protection Act prohibited most private companies from using lie detector tests. But the unions did not get a clean sweep: The Act excluded federal, state, and local government employers, along with private companies whose business is moving cash or drugs.

The American Medical Association had come out against pre-employment screening in 1986, and in 1998 the Supreme Court also chipped in, saying that there was simply no scientific consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable. In 2004 the American Psychological Association said "the lie detector might be better called a fear detector," noting there was virtually no research validating its use in job screening.

In 1999 the Department of Energy asked the National Academies of Science to review the scientific evidence of the validity and reliability of polygraph examinations, particularly as used for screening.

The resulting committee visited governmental polygraph units and reviewed almost a century of scientific papers and data. Its comprehensive report, which took four years to research and write, was damning. "Almost a century of research ... provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy," wrote its authors. "Polygraph testing yields an unacceptable choice between too many loyal employees falsely judged deceptive and too many threats left undetected. Its accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee screening."

In short, the technology was judged to be pseudoscientific hokum.

It was the polygraph's tendency to produce false positives that especially worried the Department of Energy. Imagine using a polygraph in an investigation like the one proposed by US senator Rand Paul to identify the author of a damaging anonymous New York Times op-ed earlier this month. If a polygraph is accurate 85 percent of the time, as some data suggests, an investigation of 100 White House senior officials might well identify the guilty individual, but at the cost of falsely accusing 15 others. Shift that accuracy to 65 percent, a figure many critics suggest, and you couldn't even be certain your culprit would be among the 34 individuals the machine would accuse.

In 2005, the Department of Energy report concluded that "false positives … clearly affect the morale of those for whom such a result is reached. They risk interrupting the careers of valuable contributors to our nation's defense [and] pose a very serious risk of depriving the United States of the vital services of individuals who may not be easily replaced."

Christopher Talbot would never become a New Haven police officer. Despite his heartfelt plea, the commissioners voted unanimously to remove him, and dozens of other candidates, from consideration.

Alex Petrowsky

Of course, Talbot may in fact have been guilty of a lie or crime for which there was no other proof. But evidence amassed by WIRED suggests an equally likely explanation: that he was the victim of a flawed and unreliable technology that is also vulnerable to examiners' own personal prejudices.

Data obtained by WIRED showed vast differences in the outcomes of polygraph tests depending on the examiner each candidate faced. Consider another law enforcement agency that uses polygraphs in its employment process: the Washington State Patrol (WSP). Between late October 2011 and the end of April 2017, the WSP conducted 5,746 polygraph tests on potential recruits. This was the largest data set WIRED received, including copious data on both applicants and examiners. While one examiner failed less than 20 percent of candidates, others failed more than half the applicants they screened. And while two examiners disqualified just four people in more than 1,000 applicants for supposedly having sex with animals, one of their colleagues failed more than 10 times as many for bestiality—around one in 20 of all job seekers. The same examiner was also twice as likely as the rest of his peers to fail applicants on the grounds of child pornography.

There were no further hearings for these supposed crimes, and no jury to convince or judge to adjudicate, just scores of otherwise qualified applicants who would now not become Washington state troopers.

"We don't know which, if any, of the examiners are accurate, but the disparity between them suggests the test is not being used in a way that is at all reliable," says John Allen, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. And tests that are not reliable, Allen says, cannot be valid.

Not only can a failing polygraph test cost you a job, it can also follow you around throughout your career. People who fail a polygraph are usually asked to report that fact if they reapply for law enforcement positions nationwide, and some departments can share polygraph results with other agencies in the same state. "The polygraph's great flaw is the substantial number of false positives that it gives out, especially when you're using it for large-scale screenings," says former CIA director James Woolsey, in a previously unreleased interview from 2009. He believes that polygraphs do not accomplish much more than "seriously damaging a lot of people's lives by having them fail the polygraph when they haven't really done anything."

This is not just a problem in Washington state. Around the US, most police departments use similar test formats and near-identical lists of questions, yet polygraph pass rates vary wildly. According to data supplied to WIRED, the toughest place in the country to take a polygraph could be Houston, whose police department passed just 32 percent of applicants in 2009. More recently, less than half (47 percent) of applicants passed the San Diego Police Department's polygraph test in 2017.

Slightly more lenient is the Texas Department of Public Safety in Austin, which passed 60 percent in 2016. But if you fail there, you could try again down the road at the Dallas Police Department, where 77 percent of test-takers passed last year. And if the thought of all those wires and dials really gets you nervous, head to Baltimore, where more than 91 percent of applicants aced the polygraph in 2017. Despite similar tests and presumably similar applicants (especially in Texas), the departments' pass rates are wildly different—and these rates have varied little over multiple recent years.

But while polygraph examinations can be a lottery, history seems to show that the house can sometimes tip the odds.

Forty years ago, Harold Moon applied for a position as a correctional officer in Cook County, Illinois. After taking a polygraph test, Moon, who was black, was informed that he had failed and was rejected. Moon then brought a class action suit alleging discrimination in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His suit included analysis that there was only a one in 1,000 chance of the high polygraph failure rate among black applicants in Cook County between 1976 and 1978 being random. The Congressional Record in 1987 noted that Moon's case was quietly settled, including an agreement with Cook County to eliminate the polygraph requirement.

That agreement would probably come as news to Donna Bibbs and two other African Americans who filed their own Civil Rights Act lawsuit against Cook County and its Sheriff's Department in 2010. Bibbs and her fellow plaintiffs alleged that they were rejected for employment because of confessions given during their polygraph examinations that were never actually made.

"The Sheriff has not adopted any procedure to allow applicants to dispute the correctness of reports of admissions on the polygraph examination," read their complaint. "A consequence of [this] is to vest the polygraph examiner with the final authority to reject applicants by making false reports of admissions."

This case never made it to court either; the parties eventually reached a settlement in 2016. There is no indication that Cook County has since altered any of its policies, and, in fact, the Sheriff Department's legal department told WIRED that it does not retain polygraph records in an aggregate format, rendering it unable to track systematic racial bias.

From WIRED's public records requests, it appears that few jurisdictions retain these records, making it nearly impossible to systematically identify bias in their programs. That comes as no surprise to William Iacono, professor of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and law at the University of Minnesota. "[Demographic data] sounds like something these organizations don't want to have," he says. "Because if they have it, and someone asks for it, then it might reveal something that they're not comfortable with. The examiner doesn't really use an algorithm to figure out if people are employment worthy. The examiner's decision is probably based primarily on the human interaction that the two people have."

Illustration by Alex Petrowsky

In a survey of Virginia's state licensed polygraphers carried out by University of Virginia researcher Vera Wilde in 2011, roughly 20 percent of respondents said they thought certain groups (for example, black people) tended to fail polygraphs more than others. In a US Senate hearing in 1987, the attorney general for New York said, "The [polygraph] operator's prejudices, moods and feelings can strongly influence and even determine the outcome of the test. For example, we have received complaints about a polygraph operator who consistently fails a much higher percentage of black subjects than white subjects."

A study carried out for the Department of Defense's Polygraph Institute in 1990 showed that innocent black polygraph examinees were more likely to suffer false positives than innocent whites, under mock crime conditions. The National Academy of Sciences report in 2003 worried about possible race, age, and gender biases, but noted that little research had been done in the area. "We know that there's a potential effect of gender [and] race, in terms of [the] mix of polygrapher and subject," said NAS committee chairman Stephen Fienberg in 2009. "We know that context matters. And we know that there can be systematic biases."

In 2007, a federal court observed that black applicants to the Arkansas State Police one year failed polygraphs at twice the rate of white applicants, although the numbers were too small to draw firm conclusions.

Dozens of equal opportunity complaints have been made against the FBI's polygraph screening unit, accusing examiners of racial and other biases. Many of the complaints, released to Wilde under Freedom of Information laws, reveal applicants' frustrations with an opaque and seemingly hostile process.

In 2008, one failed applicant wrote: "Black females are subjected to an entirely different level of scrutiny. I was given a polygraph test in Memphis and told that I failed, which was given by a male white. I requested a retake and was told that I passed the second polygraph test taken in Nashville, TN., which was given by a male black." The FBI recorded her as saying its hiring criteria were "preset for hiring white males." Both her application and her subsequent complaint were denied.

While undergoing a polygraph examination for a position at an FBI field office in New Haven in 2010, a black man was told that his recollection of using marijuana only a few times in high school was showing as deceptive, and that he should change his answer. Later, he wrote: "I was convinced that [the examiner] may have made an assumption, based on a stereotype about African Americans and drug use, and used that stereotype to profile me. I also realized that what [he] was asking of me would reflect negatively either way—if I didn't change my answer I was being deceptive, and if I did change my answer I was lying on my application."

This catch-22 grievance was investigated by the Department of Justice's Complaint Adjudication Office in 2012. That office noted that the FBI had another polygraph examiner review the case blind, with "no information concerning complainant's race." However, the FBI's definition of a blind review demands some scrutiny. The second examiner wrote that "the only personal information available to him when conducting the review was complainant's name, date of birth, social security number, gender, height, weight, and address." The controversy around so-called redlining has shown repeatedly that race and zip code (and even names) are closely linked. The man's complaint was ultimately dismissed, as were all the other complaints obtained by Wilde.

The FBI rejected multiple requests from WIRED under the Freedom of Information Act for the demographics of applicants failing its polygraph screening tests, citing exclusions for law enforcement and national security data. However, the agency accidentally included relevant (but incomplete) data in a response to Wilde in 2012, not published until now.

The New Haven discrimination investigation included a memo stating the racial backgrounds of 130 FBI applicants who had failed preemployment polygraph tests between October 2008 and June 2010. (An additional 2,130 applicants who failed the polygraph were listed as "race unknown.") While 12 percent of FBI staff are black, 19 percent of those failing its polygraph tests were black. Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders were also overrepresented in those failing the polygraph. And although 75 percent of FBI workers are white, they made up just 57 percent of applicants failing the polygraph tests.

New data collected by WIRED show that local police departments fare little better. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department uses a computerized voice stress analyzer (CVSA) in place of a polygraph. This is a machine that supposedly detects deception by analyzing the low frequency audio information from answered questions about sensitive topics—some systems purport to detect "micro tremors" in deceptive answers. The technology is regarded with as much skepticism in the scientific community as polygraphs.

Data supplied to WIRED by the Metro Nashville Police Department show that black applicants are selected at only about half the rate of white applicants, and that Hispanic and Native American officers are also significantly under-selected. Metro Nashville also selects younger candidates (up to age 39) at nearly twice the rate of older ones (40 or older). The department says it has no record of anyone making an age, gender, or race-related complaint about the CVSA test, and that no applicant is ever disqualified based on a CVSA result alone.

Although a voice stress analyzer test is only one part of Metro Nashville's hiring process, there is some evidence that lie detector screening contributes more directly to lopsided hiring practices elsewhere. The Baltimore Police Department might have a relatively lenient polygraph screening system, passing the vast majority of those applying, but black applicants from 2013 through 2017 still failed their polygraph tests at higher rates than their white counterparts. In 2016 and 2017, they failed more than twice as often.

Discrimination can work the other way too, if departments are giving preferred candidates a second shot at passing a test. In a 2014 internal survey of the San Diego Police Department's polygraph unit, supplied to WIRED, one police officer noted: "I feel the examiners do a good job … They always offer to re-test if we want to." This calls into question whether all applicants are treated equally, and suggests that even some police officers suspect the test is not always accurate.

While the 2003 National Academy of Science report removed the last vestiges of polygraphy's scientific credibility, researchers continue to track the technology's real-world use. A 2017 study at Walden University in Minneapolis found no relationship between preemployment polygraph exams and officers' propensity for future misconduct—a purported justification for administering polygraphs—nor any differences in attitude toward misconduct between officers who had or had not undergone such testing.

"The research we've done shows that there's no higher level of misconduct among police departments that don't give polygraphs to applicants [than among] ones that do," says Daryl Turner, president of the Oregon Coalition of Police and Sheriffs, an association of law enforcement professionals that campaigned against a bill last year to introduce preemployment polygraph screening in the state. "We also feel [the polygraph test] is not a fair assessment of a person's truthfulness or integrity."

That is not a view shared by the American Polygraph Association, which certifies polygraph schools across the country. The majority of law enforcement agencies using polygraphy require examiners to be graduates of an association's polygraphy course, which costs around $6,000 and can take 10 weeks to complete.

The Washington State Patrol says that all of its examiners are APA certified, carry out polygraph tests consistently, and check results with colleagues. Despite that, data supplied to WIRED shows that the WSP hires black men at a lower rate than white men, and is more likely to fail older candidates during its polygraph screening.

WSP lieutenant John Matagi could not offer a good reason why its examiners failed applicants or uncovered crimes at different rates, except to say: "They're humans making human decisions [and] as each polygraph examiner gets better at their skill, they will have different results." He also brushes off concerns that older candidates fail more often. "One of the things we speculated is that people who have been alive longer have more opportunity to engage in activity that is disqualifying," he says.

Other departments appear more concerned about possible inequities. The Dallas Police Department supplied WIRED with data on the gender and race of its applicants and their relative success in polygraph tests. It also compared each group to the majority demographic of applicants. (As in every department that gave data to WIRED, this was white males.) Dallas reported more equitable hiring outcomes, and less variation between different groups, than other departments that responded: Both genders and all racial groups passed at similar rates.

So if the polygraph is so unreliable and prone to bias, why does law enforcement continue to use it? WSP's Matheson says that much of the value in polygraph testing comes during the pre-polygraph interview, where "it is not uncommon for us to learn information that disqualifies the candidate. That's a big part of the value of what we hope to gain from the entire process."

In other words, the mere specter of being subjected to a lie-detector test can induce applicants to confess information they might have otherwise withheld.

Between 2010 and 2017, the Phoenix Police Department told WIRED that it conducted 3,711 polygraph tests while recruiting sworn officers, civilian staff, interns, and volunteers. On 96 occasions, applicants admitted to crimes during or after their test, including two confessions of extortion—and four of murder. Although the polygraph cannot reliably detect truth or falsehood itself, its cultural reputation for omniscience can be used by an artful examiner to elicit confessions from nervous or suggestible subjects.

"The one thing that lie detection appears to be good for is tricking naïve people into thinking that the person who's examining them knows more about what's in their mind than they actually ever could," says Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "It's an intimidation device."

The polygraph industry does not always get its way. The ACLU and the Oregon Coalition of Police and Sheriffs succeeded in fighting off the attempt to legalize polygraph screening tests in Oregon last year, and evidence obtained using a polygraph remains inadmissible in most legal settings.

Even the New Haven Police Department, which continues to use the polygraph for screening recruits, has proposed shifting their standards around the test. Earlier this year, the New Haven mayor's Police and Community Task Force noted that minority officers are underrepresented in the department and laid part of the blame for that with the polygraph screening process. "NHPD needs to create a policy prohibiting contact between the psychologist and recruitment staff and the person administering the polygraph test," it wrote in a report.

According to the best available science, polygraph tests are no more reliable at extracting the truth than Wonder Woman's magic lasso. But by the time a new installment of the super hero's story is released, in November 2019, millions more polygraphs will have been administered across the nation.

The consequences of opting out of genetic enhancement

But let's say your country has done all this and become a preserve of non-genetically enhanced people. We've already seen why different states will adopt advanced genetic engineering technologies at different rates based on the significant historical, cultural, and structural differences between them. Imagine you are assessing your country's options in a world where your country has opted out but other countries are moving forward with human genetic enhancement. Here are your general choices:

Option 1: You recognize that your country has made a moral decision based on your collective values and accept facing the consequences, even if this means your country will gradually lose its competitive advantage and future generations will be less healthy, live shorter lives, and have fewer superstars of various sorts. You sit tight in your belief you've made the right choice. With schadenfreude in your heart, you hope your national decision will give you a competitive advantage if and when human genetic enhancement proves to be less beneficial and more dangerous than initially believed. Because your country has taken such a strong and principled stand on human genetic engineering, you feel dutybound to protect this ban against encroachment. You are a progressive in your heart but recognize you'll need some trappings of a police state to maintain your country's genetic purity. How is it, you ask yourself late at night, that an idealist like you is starting to adopt the language of Nazism?

Option 2: You try to hold the line and support your national decision but feel the pressure growing. Many of your most talented people are leaving the country to get the genetic enhancement services they want. Your un-enhanced aspiring Olympic athletes and advanced coders are becoming community organizers, yogis, and nurses instead, pursuing careers that don't require competition with their enhanced counterparts. Parents are having second thoughts about your ban as they hear about kids in other countries who are immune to genetic diseases, doing better on IQ tests, and achieving all sorts of seemingly superhuman feats. Your military is worried your future soldiers will be at a disadvantage compared to their genetically enhanced adversaries. The leaders of your national space program tell you that your un-enhanced astronauts will, unlike their enhanced counterparts from other countries, not be able to withstand the radiation exposure and bone density loss of extended space travel. Opting out is seeming less appealing an option. You need a face-saving alternative. You call for a national referendum. After a heated debate, you cast your vote to opt in.

Option 3: You see the benefits of genetic enhancement, but your citizens still believe meddling with the human genome and rewriting biology is a form of hubris likely to end badly. As a matter of principle, you recognize that societies, like people, are diverse and don't begrudge the many other choices different societies make in all sorts of areas. But this is different. If other societies genetically enhance their populations and yours doesn't, you may not just be at a competitive disadvantage in the future. You may not be able to protect your population from the very thing they have so adamantly opposed. Just like genetically modified crops spread into adjacent fields and gene-drived mosquitoes spread across national boundaries, there will be really no way to protect your population from inheriting what you see as unnatural genetic modifications unless other countries can be prevented from allowing the most egregious modifications. Your only option is not just for your country to opt out but to define, promote, and seek to enforce limits on genetic enhancement for all countries to follow. You ask your top advisers how you can make this happen.

First on their list is trying to use your national powers of persuasion to convince people and countries around the world that the downsides of human genetic enhancement outweigh the benefits. But what are the chances of your being able to convince the whole world to buy into your pessimism, particularly when other societies are enthusiastically racing forward into the genetics age?

Second, you can try to build an alliance of like-minded states to collectively pressure other countries to limit genetic enhancement. Getting an enforceable global treaty to limit genetic enhancement is an appealing option, but it's difficult to do. Most global leaders agree that human-induced climate change is threatening the livability of our planet, but we've not been able to get an enforceable global treaty to turn things around. Could a global effort limiting a technology many people and other states support be more effective than the high-profile efforts to limit climate change?

Third, you identify the enhancing countries you are most concerned about and, if you have the power and influence to do it, try to stop them to set an example. One Central Asian country in particular has become a hub for highly aggressive genetic alterations of pre-implanted embryos designed to create superhuman capabilities. Parents are sending their frozen eggs and sperm, or skin grafts and blood samples from which these sex cells are being generated, to this country for embryo selection, embryo mating, and genetic enhancement. (This is not unthinkable. A 2014 New York Times article described a Chinese parent who sought to have six children born from US-based surrogates to then choose the "pick of the litter" and put the others up for adoption.) For the Central Asian country, building this industry is seen as a moral imperative, a great business opportunity, and a strategic boon. You ask them nicely to stop. They refuse.

Countries in the future might resort to military force to prevent other countries from altering the shared genetic code of humanity.

Perhaps you try getting a group of countries to impose travel, economic, or other sanctions on the offending country. If none of these approaches work, are you willing to use military force to stop the genetic alteration of the human species? It's certainly one option on the list.

Over the course of the 20th century, an estimated 170 countries were invaded by others for a whole host of reasons, ranging from outright theft to ideological differences to pre-emption of a wide range of perceived threats. Is it so outlandish to believe that countries in the future might resort to military force to prevent other countries from altering the shared genetic code of humanity? Many countries have been invaded for far less.

Military force would be an option if advanced genetic enhancement were only being carried out in a relatively weak country or even in international waters or space. But what happens if a powerful country like China takes the lead in deploying advanced genetic and other technology to enhance the capabilities of its populations while another country, say the United States, has entirely opted out for political and other reasons? Would the United States and China be willing to use as much force over the potential transformation of our species as they are now threatening over a few contested reefs in the middle of the South China Sea?

If all of these types of competitive pressures on the personal, communal, and national levels were rare in our human experience, an argument could be made that they could be avoided in the context of the genetics revolution. But because competition has been at the very core of our evolutionary process for almost 4 billion years, the overwhelming odds are that these same drivers will push us, unevenly but collectively, into our brave new world of increasingly sophisticated human genetic engineering.

Both the competitive pressures pushing human genetic engineering forward and the potential conflict scenarios this competition is likely to spark are very real. If we do nothing to apply our best values to influence how the genetic revolution plays out, we will place ourselves on a path to conflict. Avoiding worst-case scenarios will require our species to come together as never before.

That's why we need to take some very practical first steps now. Every individual needs to educate themselves on the revolutionary technologies transforming the world around and within us and join national and global conversations about how these technologies can be most responsibly applied. Government leaders need to stop wasting so much time on nonsense and begin focusing far more on facing the critical challenges of the future. We need to develop global norms that can lead to standards and dynamic international protocols designed to encourage the most beneficial applications of these technologies and prevent the worst abuses.

Figuring out how to deploy genetic technologies in ways that enhance our dignity and respect for each other will require us to draw on the best of our humanist values and double down on our embrace of, respect for, and investment in our diversity, equality, and common humanity. While the genetic engineering technologies are new, the values and philosophies we will need to use them wisely are often very old.

Deploying our best values at this transitional moment for our species demands that we all understand what is happening now, what is coming, what's at stake, and the role we each must play in building a technologically enhanced future that works for all of us.

It will be a difficult, painful, and conflict-ridden process, but we have no alternative. We all need to participate.

We don't have a moment to lose in getting started.

This is an edited excerpt from Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity, which is out now.

Global Flexographic Printing Machine Market 2019 Competitor Analysis- Polygraph, Eidos S.P.A., Class-Engineering and A. Carnevalli & Cia. Ltda. - Education Market

Posted: 17 May 2019 03:31 AM PDT

global Flexographic Printing Machine market

Global Flexographic Printing Machine Market analyses current market bearings along with the future scope and Competitor Analysis 2019 to 2024. Research study helps to analyze the change in market dynamics, regional market volume, technological innovations, and Flexographic Printing Machine business opportunities Equipment Industry in the coming years. The report helps to understand the Flexographic Printing Machine market and meeting you need to the report contents is segmented into market players, drivers and retainers, along with market share analysis, product types, application, revenue and gross margin by regions.

Report Scope

The report provides a basic overview of Flexographic Printing Machine Market includes definition, product classification, applications, and Flexographic Printing Machine market growth rate history from 2013 to 2018. Flexographic Printing Machine market share based on product ( Monochrome and Multi-Color) and applications (Application 1, Application 2, Application 4, Application 5 and Application 3). Product and applications analysis is based on following points such as raw material suppliers, price analysis, product manufacturing Process, cost structure, production, consumption, emerging countries, industry news and policies by regions. Flexographic Printing Machine report discusses details regarding development policies and plans along with Flexographic Printing Machine manufacturing processes, cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions( Europe, The Middle East & Africa, China, Japan, North America, India and South America).

Get Sample Copy of Research Report at http://reporte.us/global-flexographic-printing-machine-market/#request-sample

Key Manufacturers

Polygraph
Eidos S.P.A.
Class-Engineering
A. Carnevalli & Cia. Ltda.
Amaco Ing. Vonach Gmbh
Uteco Converting SpA
Esko-Graphics
Dcm Usimeca

Global Flexographic Printing Machine Market Report Coverage

Business Life Cycle Analysis The report begins with a product definition, classification, application, market size and growth rate history from 2013 to 2018.
Industry Structure Analysis Provides Region wise market supply & consumption analysis, competitor analysis with market size, revenue, cost, and gross margin analysis.
Business Environment Analysis provides information related to requirements for resources, industrial technology development trend and the major impacts in the business process.
Market Key Players Analysis including company profile, product introduction, capacity, and profitability analysis, revenue, cost, and gross margin analysis.
Product and Applications Analysis provides Information related to consumption survey analysis, consumer group structure and characteristics, along with downstream consumer market demands.
Industry Channel Analysis provides information on marketing model and import & export, sales channel analysis, import & export analysis, the regional pattern of import & export market, consumption value with growth rate statistics.
Industry Chain and Manufacturing Cost Analysis Major raw materials suppliers with contact information and price analysis, manufacturing cost structure, labor cost analysis, equipment suppliers with product pictures analysis and downstream consumers analysis by region.
Market Development Trend Analysis The region-wise supply & consumption analysis, strategic analysis of industry opportunities and challenges in forecast years.

Inquire for customization in Report: http://reporte.us/global-flexographic-printing-machine-market/#inquiry

The Flexographic Printing Machine report is the believable source for gaining the market research, focusing opportunities, up-to-date Flexographic Printing Machine market information helps to monitor performance and make the critical decision for growth and profitability.

Website: Market.Biz

:brett@businessgazette.us
:+44 333 450 6118

Brett's experience in the business industry has helped get the knack of how things happen in the world of business, but what keeps him going is the enthusiasm itself. He would not spend a day without taking a look at the business page of popular reporting across the globe.

Mike Pence Swears His Loyalty on the Sunday Shows - The Atlantic

Posted: 10 Sep 2018 12:00 AM PDT

By all rights, Brett Kavanaugh's dramatic confirmation hearings should have been the big story last week. But if the Sunday shows are a reliable barometer, the Senate Democrats' concerted, if mostly ineffectual, assault on the very conservative D.C. appellate-court judge couldn't compete with Bob Woodward's incendiary new book, Fear, or the New York Times op-ed by an anonymous Trump administration official who thinks the president is unfit to govern.

The shows kept wending their way back to the "quiet resistance" inside the administration, from Woodward's report of Defense Secretary James Mattis ignoring President Donald Trump's order to assassinate Syria's dictator to the anonymous op-ed author's description of Trump's sullen resistance to more sanctions after Russia poisoned an ex-spy in Britain. Guests on the shows included Vice President Mike Pence, the Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Democratic Senators Dick Durbin, Mark Warner, and Chris Coons.

Pence predictably condemned the anonymous column as "un-American" and an "assault on our democracy." Speaking on Fox News Sunday, he said he does not know who wrote the piece but suggested that person should leave the administration. His less predictable response came when the host, Chris Wallace, asked whether top officials should submit to lie-detector tests to prove they did not write the op-ed. "I would agree to take it it in a heartbeat," the vice president said.

Let's make note of this moment: The No. 2 elected official in America publicly proclaimed his readiness to take a polygraph test to verify his loyalty to the president. Imagine Joe Biden strapping on a blood-pressure cuff for Barack Obama, or Dick Cheney wearing velcro rings to measure his pulse for George W. Bush.

Pence said on Face the Nation that he was positive the op-ed didn't come from someone on his staff, even without administering lie-detector tests. "I don't have to ask them," he said. "I know their character."

The host, Margaret Brennan, also asked the vice president whether he'd ever been in a conversation about using the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove President Trump from office. (Another moment to take note of.) "No, never. And why would we be?" Pence said before pivoting to tout the administration's accomplishments.

Christie took a different tack on ABC's This Week, where the former governor and Trump-campaign surrogate is now a network contributor. Wearing a bright-pink tie and looking into the camera with a thousand-yard stare, Christie seemed to be performing for the president, whose 18-month-old administration has yet to include him. He argued that the op-ed's author couldn't really be a senior official, since Cabinet members and other top officials have issued denials. (CNN has a list of op-ed deniers, updated as of Saturday.) He seemed to be quibbling over the definition of senior, which could plausibly apply to hundreds of administration officials.

President Trump, in comments and in a one-word tweet last week, has posed the question of whether the author committed treason. Federal law defines treason as going to war against the United States or giving aid to its enemies. Several hosts asked administration officials how the anonymous op-ed could possibly match that description.

When asked by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, the senior counselor and veteran spinmeister Kellyanne Conway offered impossible-to-disprove hypotheticals: "How do we know they haven't promised other things? How do we know they're not taking other documents?" When Todd asked how there could be any broken laws for prosecutors to investigate, she replied, "It depends. There could be, and there could not be." But Conway also said, "Nobody's investigating the op-ed."

Pence didn't defend the idea that anonymous public dissent could constitute treason, but he said the op-ed was an "assault on American democracy" because it showed a government official trying to thwart the will of an elected president. Though Pence chided former President Obama for publicly criticizing his successor in a speech Friday, Obama had voiced a similar view of anonymous Trump administration officials promising a quiet resistance. "That's not how our democracy is supposed to work," Obama said in the same speech. "These people aren't elected. They are not accountable."

The Senate's No. 2 Democrat seemed to concede that there was a problem with an aide undermining a president. Todd asked Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois whether the president deserves a staff that doesn't try to impede his agenda. "Well, of course," Durbin said, before quickly handing blame to Trump for running a dysfunctional White House and leading his own aides to believe "his behavior is going to result in some terrible things for America."

Senator Chris Coons of Delaware agreed with Pence on a key point on Fox News Sunday but framed it differently: "I think the honorable thing to do is to resign and to go public with the author's concerns about the president's fitness to serve."

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed with Republicans that the op-ed author should go public and reveal his or her identity. But he blasted Trump's open criticism of the Department of Justice, including over the recent indictments of two GOP congressmen within a few months of an election: "Does this president not understand that the Justice Department is not a tool of his own personal power?"

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Andrew Kragie is a writer based in Washington, D.C.

Search This Blog

Antipolygraph