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"Employee Theft Hits Retailers"
Employee theft accounts for roughly half of retailers' inventory losses, compared with shoplifting, which only accounts for a third of the losses, according to a new report from the University of Florida. Fraud perpetuated by vendors also accounts for some of the losses, as do administrative errors. Employee theft resulted in $15 billion in losses for retailers during 2002, researchers say. University of Florida Professor Richard Hollinger, who specializes in retail security, advises companies to pay their employees well and treat them well to cut down on incidents of employee theft. Hollinger says that employee morale can suffer when employers obviously position cameras to keep tabs on employees. Security consultant Michael Loey agrees, adding that instead of pointing cameras at employees, businesses should use hidden cameras to guard against employee theft. Security management consultant Charles Sennewald claims that conducting proper background checks and reference checks--especially for temporary holiday-season help--is the best way to cut down on employee theft. Stores should require employees to undergo ethics training and communicate to employees that the store is actively guarding against employee theft, Sennewald says.
www.contracosta.com
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"New Alert System Will Help Police Locate Lost Children, Missing/Wanted Persons"
The Olar, South Carolina, Police Department has announced that it is collaborating with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to implement a new alert system that will give the police department a better chance of locating missing or abducted children. The Lost Child Alert Technology Resource (LOCATER) system can also help find wanted persons and missing adults. "LOCATER was created to provide the computer hardware and software needed to rapidly distribute critical missing child data on a local, statewide, or national basis," says Olar Police Chief Eddie Williams Jr. The NCMEC distributes the LOCATER system at no cost to police departments and other agencies that investigate missing child cases. The NCMEC receives funding from the federal government to distribute the system. Statistics from the NCMEC show that one in six missing children is recovered when pictures of the children or their abductors are shown to the public, with the pictures directly responsible for the recovery, says Williams.
www.thetandd.com
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"City Studies Link Between Crime, Lead Poisoning"
The city of Rochester, New York, is investigating a connection between lead poisoning and criminal behavior in local residents, according to Mayor William A. Johnson Jr. The city will review past cases to gather information about murder victims and perpetrators, he says, to "isolate lead paint poisoning as one of the driving factors in such a high rate of violence." The city will work with the University of Rochester and the Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning. Coalition co-chairman Bryan Hetherington notes that studies have shown a link between lead and delinquency and aggression. He adds that "kids who are lead poisoned have a significantly higher participation rate in juvenile crimes even when you fold in every other socioeconomic variable." Lead poisoning can potentially harm a person's nervous system, reduce attention span, and impair cognitive development. Rochester's efforts will be supported by $5.5 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, $5.9 million in local funds, and $1.3 million in private matching funds.
www.rochesterdandc.com
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"It's in the Algorithms"
Research projects to develop more intuitive search algorithms could offer more personalized alternatives to the "group consensus" algorithms supporting Google's search engine. Kaltix's technology apparently aims to recalculate search results on a per-user basis by accelerating the computation of PageRank--a critical component of Google's search algorithm--by 30 percent, while Kaltix co-founder Taher Haveliwala suggests several personalized search algorithms in the Stanford University Technical Report. A Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS)-funded project in Canada is exploring the possibilities of a "focused crawler" that roams the Web following page-to-page links but only indexes pages and documents that correlate with particular subjects; the crawler could take note of how users browse online and imitate their browsing patterns. "What we're hoping to be able to do is to take the research that [MITACS is] doing and improve it in such a way that we won't have to wait for you to search," says IT Interactive Services CEO Barbara Manning. "We will be able to track your pattern of searches and return information that will be useful to you based on that pattern." Google could also face competition from several other emergent search service providers developing personalized search algorithms. IBM's WebFountain project will collate, archive, and study data from Web sites, news feeds, Weblogs, bulletin boards, and other unstructured and semi-structured sources, and will predict gestating trends and "buzz" through the use of natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, Netnose promotes itself as the first "people-powered" search engine; the voting public, not a computer algorithm, will influence search accuracy via a process in which people vote to define word-Web site matches.
www.econtentinstitute.org
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Study says federal bioterrorism spending not preparing states
Despite nearly $2 billion of federal bioterrorism funding to states over the past two years, states are largely unprepared for a major public health emergency, according to a report released Thursday by the Trust for America's Health. The yearlong study outlines 10 criteria, including state funding levels and infrastructure readiness, to gauge states' readiness to respond to a health crisis. Seventy-five percent of states failed to meet at least half of those criteria, with five states?Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico and Wisconsin?meeting only two of the 10 indicators. Even the four states at the top of the list?California, Florida, Maryland and Tennessee?still satisfy only seven of the study's indicators. Trust for America's Health Executive Director Shelley Hearne said state budget cuts for public health programs mean that much of the federal money is being used to replace state funding, not to supplement it. Additionally, she said, bureaucratic obstacles such as state hiring freezes often leave the federal funds in limbo. Also, despite the national focus on emergency preparedness in the past two years, health emergency response programs at the state level face a history of inadequate attention and funding, Hearne said.
www.govexec.com
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"The Worst That Could Happen"
With much at stake, insurance companies must be prepared when disaster strikes. Be they man-made or natural, disasters can wreak havoc on computer systems. Hurricane Isabel is a recent example of why it is crucial that insurance companies have a line of defense in place to protect their data warehouses from the unexpected. Virginia Farm Bureau Insurance assumed it was a safe distance away from the gale force winds of Hurricane Isabel, but the hurricane came far enough inland to knock out power for days. That power outage came only a month after the massive blackout that left millions in the dark in the northeast and Canada. In the case of Isabel, Virginia Farm Bureau had power generators to power its building, but not enough to fuel air conditioning. But data warehouse expert Ron Barker, senior principal and insurance practice leader for Knightsbridge Solutions, maintains that insurance companies need to do more. "Companies will need a backup and disaster recovery plan in place for each of their operational systems, which will be some strategy to back the data up nightly, weekly, monthly, and annualized backups," Barker says. Some insurers also make backup tapes to preserve their data; these tapes are often stored offsite in fireproof cabinets.
www.technologydecisions.com
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"Finding the Real Silver Bullet for Cargo Security"
More than anything else, the cargo security industry is in need of a solution that is capable of verifying the contents of cargo containers and making sure that the contents remain undisturbed. This process must begin by ensuring the integrity of all data concerning a container's contents, starting with the warehouse data and proceeding to the booking information, shipping information, and cargo information. The sum of this tracking data must provide a complete view of the cargo's movement, from inception to end point. Information sources that can be incorporated into this process include data taken from electronic tags and seals, terminal employment access cards, and rail event messages. One of the most important steps of ensuring the integrity of the content is comparing real-time cargo data with the scheduled information. Decision matrix rules should be set up to identify irregularities and issue alerts.
www.inboundlogistics.com
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"In Season of Giving, Some Take"
Police officers and criminologists say that crimes such as shoplifting, street robbery, burglary, and other forms of theft rise dramatically during the December holiday season. Statistics from the FBI also bear this out. Some law enforcement officials believe that the number of thefts and robberies increase in December because criminals are stealing money and merchandise so they can give holiday gifts to their friends and families. But some police officers do not buy this explanation, saying that the increase in crime occurs simply because there are more opportunities for criminals to take advantage of around this time of year. Shopping malls have prepared for the increase in theft by taking measures like increasing the number of roaming security personnel. Rhett Asher of the International Mass Retail Association states that shoplifting becomes easier during the holiday season because store clerks are often distracted by the large number of shoppers, allowing thieves to remove security tags from merchandise. Experts also say that incidents of domestic violence increase during the holidays.
www.washingtonpost.com
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"The Eyes Have It"
Machine vision--and its ramifications for security both inside and outside the enterprise--is on the cusp of widescale implementation thanks to advancements in camera, lighting, and processor technology primarily sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Unlike flesh-and-blood security staff, machine vision technology is free from distraction, does not forget or become exhausted, and is scalable, easily upgradeable, searchable, archivable, and network-compatible; furthermore, the technology is becoming more and more affordable. The machine vision application with the most momentum is intelligent optical character recognition, which can recognize characters emblazoned on physical objects, and its most critical application seems to be license plate recognition. Machine vision's biggest potential application is centered around object and behavior recognition, which could be employed to detect signs of tampering and damage. The U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection has upgraded its security by installing people recognition systems, and bureau representative Bill Anthony reports that the number of false positives along the Mexican border has dropped to zero thanks to the upgrade. People recognition systems can also be deployed to identify incidences of tailgating and piggybacking. One of the ways in which machine vision is expected to revolutionize corporate security is to make CSOs more cognizant of signs of unusual activities, or flags, rather than outright violations. The enterprise-wide perspective afforded by machine vision could also benefit departments and divisions outside of security: For instance, observations of employees working overtime could be useful to the personnel department, while the detection of an odd vibration might tip off facilities management that a key piece of equipment is about to malfunction.
www.csoonline.com
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"Renovating E-Mail With Identity in Mind"
Internet firms are beginning to coalesce around a technical solution to spam that would involve setting up an identity verification scheme, possibly tied to a reputation rating. Yahoo! recently proposed a system called DomainKeys that would link digital signatures generated by private keys to every email, allowing recipients to verify the signatures with public keys stored on a public server; Yahoo! is in discussions with major ISPs and email providers, and is expected to provide more details about DomainKeys soon. Another proposal comes from email infrastructure firm IronPort Systems, which is in partnership with the Network Advertising Initiative's Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC). IronPort proposed SMTPi (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with identity features added), a scheme that matches the last sending server's IP address with a registry whitelist. Spammers can forge every part of the email header except the IP address of the last server used to route the message. Similar to DomainKeys, SMTPi would also use digital identity certificates generated with a private key into the email header, which would then be used to validate the message sender. SMTPi is the first practical step in a more ambitious ESPC proposal called Project Lumos first fielded in September; under that system, IronPort would become a "federated registry" used to record identity and reputation of email senders. ESPC technology committee co-chair Margaret Olson says Yahoo!'s DomainKeys system is "completely consistent" with her group's plan and that the entire industry is quickly converging on this type of technical solution. She says the road forward will see several more proposals and perhaps some balkanization among standards, but that eventually common interests will converge around the same protocols.
www.esecurityplanet.com
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Bush signs new homeland security directives
President Bush on Wednesday signed landmark directives establishing new policies on assessing the vulnerability of critical infrastructure and the nation's preparedness to respond to a terrorist attack. "These are foundational documents for our homeland security strategy," said a senior administration official during a conference call. The first directive requires federal agencies to coordinate with state and local officials as well as the private sector to identify critical infrastructure vulnerabilities across all sectors, including information technology, telecommunications, chemical and transportation systems.
www.govexec.com
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