dcemancipation.org

An antitheft coup

MMR, Oct 6, 2008 by John DeGaspari

NEW YORK — New computer vision technology may help retailers curtail “sweethearting” losses, an insidious form of theft that accounts for an estimated $13 billion in losses each year.

Sweethearting occurs when dishonest cashiers pretend to scan merchandise but actually bypass the scanner, not charging the customer for the item. The shopper is very often a friend, a family member or a fellow employee working in tandem with the cashier.

As noted by Richard Hollinger, a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of Florida, Gainesville, sweethearting is a difficult problem because it is easy to do, hard to detect and can be performed by anyone with access to a point-of-sale terminal.

According to the National Retail Security Survey, produced by the National Retail Federation and the University of Florida, about 50% of inventory shrinkage is due to internal theft, and many loss prevention executives attribute as much as 60% to 80% of that theft to fraud occurring at front- end registers.

Retailers have long relied on technology to control theft and have had some success. Many stores have installed closed-circuit TV cameras to catch employees in the act of stealing.

Transaction monitoring, which synchronizes point-of-sale transactions with video recordings, can be used to detect sweethearting after it has occurred by having someone visually observe that an item has bypassed the scanner. Unfortunately the technology requires laborious manual identification.

New software introduced by StopLift Checkout Systems offers new capabilities by analyzing pixels of digitized video to determine whether or not an item was properly scanned.

Malay Kundu, StopLift’s founder, is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who has a background developing real-time facial recognition systems for identifying terrorists in airports.

The idea for StopLift’s anti-sweethearting software grew out of his Harvard Business School research study of retail loss prevention

Ingredient sequence may affect bread in machines.(Country conversation & feedback)(Letter to the Editor)

Countryside & Small Stock Journal, January, 2005 by R., Shawna

COUNTRYSIDE: I have to write in about the article “Sourdough Revisited” submitted by D. L. Salsbury, DVM, and say “wow” and “thank you.” I learned a great deal from the article, and was able to make sense of some of my recent mistakes with my sourdough. I have been dabbling in sourdough for a few years, and really haven’t felt like I mastered the art