Self-portrait, July 2010
I was born an raised on Long Island, New York and graduated from Westhampton Beach High School. After a four year stint in the U.S. Army, I moved to Los Angeles, California. I studied at UCLA where I received a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern Studies followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. My dissertation was a study of proverbial and idiomatic language in the context of a modern Persian novel. Since 1997, my wife and I have been living in The Hague, The Netherlands, where I work as a legal translator.
I am a co-founder of AntiPolygraph.org, a non-profit, public interest website dedicated to exposing and ending waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the use of polygraphs and other purported “lie detectors.”
My interests and activities include languages (I have some proficiency in Persian, Arabic, and French), computers, politics, weightlifting, and poetry.
3 Comments
I recently discovered your website and org. through the washington post. wow! it confirms my long standing belief that no machine can determine who is lying and who is not. when i first heard about this machine i did not beleive the B.S sales pitch. before i continue i should point out that i am not nor am i involved in any kind of law enforcement, i am just an ordinary citizen. I do have a question, in California the polygraph test is not admissable in court. are the results admissable?. and my last question, how are employers allowed to use the polygraph and its results against or for and individual if the courts do not ?. i am not sure if i stated this correctly, legal language is almost like latin, hard to read and even harder to understand.
I learned about your belief that the polygraph is deceptive. Have you ever been able to do research on the e-meter, which they use in Scientology? I don’t belong to this religion but I’ve heard incredible things about this and how it works.
Kallie,
With regard to Scientology’s E-meter, “incredible” is the operative word. To learn more about it, see:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/E-Meter/