The Triangle

Issue date: 4/8/05 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: The Triangle Sakulich

Would you ever invest in a device that's supposed to find people buried under wreckage by detecting their psychic emanations? Would you ever invest in a company that you knew absolutely nothing about, and even the name was a secret? If you answered "no" to either of these questions, consider yourself a whole lot more intelligent than a whole lot of other people.

Quadro QRS 250G (the Quadro Tracker) is one of the greatest products ever marketed. It's a plastic box with an antenna on one end that, and I'm not joking or embellishing at all, detects people by a "...frequency chip [that] is oscillated by static electricity produced by the body [of the captive] inhaling and exhaling gases into and out of the lung cavity." Apparently, the technology inside is of a "secret type" not yet "known to modern science." This device, marketed by the Quadro Corporation of Harleyville, South Carolina, was supposed to not only detect people buried by wreckage after an earthquake or terrorist attack, but could be used for just about anything, including (once again, as much as I wish I was, I am not joking) detecting drugs in schools and police units.

Why am I, you ask, so upset about the Quadro tracker? Because when the FBI investigated the device in 1996, they determined that it's an empty plastic box that costs about $2 to make, assemble, and package. Well, I suppose that's nothing to be upset about, unless you're aware that they sold dozens of the Trackers for as much as $8,000.

What's really shocking is who they sold it to. Not your average chump fresh off the turnip truck, but to government agencies, high schools, and police departments. If you've still not caught on, re-read that to say "thousands of the tax dollars you worked so hard to give to the government have been spent on a worthless bit of pseudo-technology."

What's scary is that it was a fairly learned group of people that bought into this thing. Anyone who's been past a freshman chemistry class should know that the tracker's various claims about "static electricity," "molecular vibrations," and so on are completely bogus. And anyone who's been through grade school should know that if you're going to spend $8,000 on a device, you should at least get some idea of how it works. An enormous waste of money and time, money and time that you and I as taxpayers pay for, would have been avoided had people known just a tiny bit more about critical reasoning or, at the very least, been a little more cynical.

Continued...

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