The quest for technology that can detect any lie is still plodding on. But while we may not be able to nail every falsehood, science is helping us tell when someone massages the truth. New Scientistreports that experts are now concocting "spin reading" software programs that analyze a person's speech, voice, or facial expressions to sniff out his or her level of truthiness. David Skillicorn, a math and computer science researcher at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, has come up with a particularly timely trick: He developed an algorithm that "evaluates word usage within the text of a conversation or speech to determine when a person 'presents themselves or their content in a way that does not necessarily reflect what they know to be true.'" In other words, he created a Spin Detector. Here's a quick summary of how it works:
The algorithm counts usage of first person nouns - ...
