The Des Moines Register, a paper near and dear to me, has a most interesting story about a company that, well, to put it politely, swindled the taxpayers of Iowa out of over $100,000. What makes this interesting is that the company...now sit down for this was involved in "Brain Fingerprinting".

On the outskirts of Fairfield, alongside a gravel driveway marked with a sign that reads "Hermit Haven," sits the National Data Center and Regional Operations Center for Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories Inc.

The centers consist of a small, rented office and an empty laboratory. A few computers with archived experiment data are stashed in the basement behind steel doors, but no workers are there to use them.

"They moved to Seattle," explains a businessman in a neighboring office.

In the months before that move, Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories collected $125,000 in grants and loans from the Iowa Department of Economic Development. The money, state officials said, would create up to 200 high-paying jobs, all linked to a controversial technology that company officials say shows what kind of information is stored in a person's memory.
...
However, a lawyer in the Iowa attorney general's office has said Farwell's so-called brain fingerprinter is no more effective than "a pasta strainer with a chin strap." Another lawyer in the attorney general's office called the state's investment a waste of taxpayer money. A third has said the company's claims are "nonsense."

FARWELL, LAWRENCE A MR
FAIRFIELD,IA 52556

BRAIN FINGERPRINTING LABORATORIES I

8/21/2003 $2,000 Bush, George