Smart Economy

Each person on earth may have a unique human 'odorprint'

Each of the 6.7 billion people on earth has a signature body odor -- the chemical counterpart to fingerprints -- and scientists are tracking down those  "human odorprints" for purposes ranging from disease diagnosis to crime prevention, according to the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

 

One interesting application from the Chemical & Engineering News story is smelling/ detecting deception:

"Back in March, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate floated a research solicitation that presages the kinds of information the security community hopes to glean from odorprint detection and surveillance. “The DHS S&T Directorate is requesting approval for a contracted, outsourced, proof-of-principle study to determine if human odor signatures can serve as an indicator of deception,” the solicitation states."

[…]

"Police have long have used trained dogs to sniff out these uniquely personal scents in pursuing criminals.

Scientists now are trying to decipher the chemistry of human odor to develop technology that can detect and classify smells. That's a difficult task, the article says, noting that each person's odorprint is a complex mixture impacted by multiple environmental factors, including diet and cosmetics.

scientists already have identified odors in human breath and skin associated with diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. Scientists are even trying to detect the "smell of deception," or chemical changes that occur with heightened stress that may help screen and identify, for example, terrorists planning to blow up an airplane and criminals intending to rob a bank.

In theory, this should be possible. “Anything that causes physiological changes is likely to change body odor,” Beauchamp notes. And stress, including stress associated with lying, has physiological effects.

Experimental psychologist Pamela Dalton of Monell, along with Preti and others, has found that the composition of underarm sweat is altered by stressful experiences, such as being tasked to count backward by intervals of 13 quickly and without error lest you need to start over. “It is a humbling experience, and our experiments show that particular kinds of stressors will make levels of stress hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, increase rapidly,” Dalton says.

This stress response does not require a GC/MS to detect. A human nose will do. “We found that people can readily distinguish the smell of someone who is stressed versus the same person when not stressed,” Dalton tells C&EN. “Slightly oniony, where you have left an onion out awhile, and you get a lot of those sulfur volatiles emanating from it” is how she describes the smell of stress.

Dalton can’t say precisely what chemicals are responsible or whether these are normally at indiscernible levels in the odorprint baseline or are unique signals produced under stress. Even if she can uncover the chemical details, it will be tricky to put such findings to use for, say, security applications. “There are people who go to the airport every day who are terrified of flying,” yet they might smell stressed out, like a person planning to blow up the plane, Dalton cautions."

Full story http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8741sci2.html

Networked car horns warn against natural disasters

In the past, sirens howled to warn the population against floods, large fires or chemical accidents. Today, however, there is no extensive warning system in Germany, as most sirens were dismantled after the Cold War...[..]…However, after the end of the Cold War, most sirens were dismantled in the mid-nineties to be replaced by the satellite-based warning system SatWaS, which informs the population only via radio and television. But if power is lost and if TV and radio are switched off, the warning goes unheard.

In recent years, different individual solutions for warning systems have been developed. Cell-broadcast systems can send mass SMS messages to mobile phones. Smoke detectors, radio-controlled clocks and weather stations equipped with radio receivers can also trigger alarm. Despite the high distribution rate of some of these devices, it cannot be ensured that a warning reaches the entire population. Only individual persons or households would be warned, and only if the devices are on standby 24/7/365.

Researchers of the Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis INT in Euskirchen want the population to be warned by car horns in the future.

In January 2009, researchers of the INT applied for a patent for a technology which allows the horns of parked cars to be activated in case of disaster. The technology is based on the eCall emergency system, which new cars are going to be equipped with as from September 2010

 

See full story from the Fraunhofer Institute

Walter Derzko

 

What in the world is going on? Part 16 Gaza and Israel

The front page news headlines , “Israel Invades Gaza. “ that we see this weekend cannot be blamed entirely on just Israel or the Hamas fighters in Palestine. America, Russia and China have to shoulder as much culpability as the two direct combatant countries. Politicians, diplomats, analysts, newspaper readers and  the tragic victims themselves often forget to ask the question: Who is arming each side and fueling the conflict?

The global arms industry is alive and well (better then the auto sector, in any case) and you won't likely see them  asking for a government bailout any time soon. It seems that during recessions /depression or banking crisis conflicts and geopolitical hotspots increase too.

The American arms industry has been selling annually almost 2 billion dollars worth of arms to Israel since the 1980’s. Not to be outdone, Russia and China gladly reciprocate arming Hamas fighters to  even out and thus prolong the dispute. The other top  arms supplier countries are guilty of complicity here too. They include France, The UK, Germany, Italy and surprisingly Sweden. Ironically, the top five countries profiting from the arms trade are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China.

Initiate a global  embargo on arms sales into geopolitical hotspots such as Palestine and Israel and a good deal of the tensions will be mitigated. The logic is simple. No arms-no war. Look at any market in most Gaza villages and you'll see small children selling AK 47's and the bullets to go with it.

Increase efforts to reduce arms smuggling into Gaza, often from tertiary  arms suppliers, and you plug a secondary loophole, here as well

If we use annual arms sales as a proxy forward indicator of pending global hot spots, where can we expect hotspots in 2009? ...top contenders?: Israel, Gaza, Pakistan, India, China-Tiawan, Saudi Arabia, UEA, Egypt, South Korea, Syria, Suddan, Somalia, Venezuala. (You can't fight, attack or defend if you don't have weapons.) 

N.B

The United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts;

More than half of the top 25 recipients of  U.S.arms transfers in the developing world (13) were defined as undemocratic by the State Department;

© 2005-2009

Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together

• ".....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"-old Japanese proverb
• ".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." -- H. Mumford Jones
• ".......Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought."  --A. Einstein
• ".......Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are surefire showstoppers..." --Walter Derzko

• ".......Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."  -- Margaret Mead

• ".......Small minds discuss people; Average minds discuss events; Great minds discuss ideas; --Anon

P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page

Tree power fuels remote, maintenance-free, meshed-network of sensors

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have been working on a system that uses energy from trees themselves to power a network of temperature and humidity sensors that act as remote weather stations to aid in fire detection and management. (other sensor applications are possible-see below)

From a recent Gizmag story

"While the odd phenomenon of "tree-power", or a sustained voltage difference between many plants and their surrounding soil has long been observed, the scientific basis for this effect has been the subject of debate. In a recently published paper on the subject, researchers from MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering  believe they have found the answer, postulating that the effect is mainly due to a difference in pH between parts of trees and the surrounding soil and ruling out other theories such as an electrochemical redox reaction (think 'potato batteries').

The practical application of this power source envisioned by researchers is to provide enough trickle-charge to self-sustaining temperature and humidity sensors in remote locations where replacement of batteries is costly and impractical. The energy produced would slowly charge an off-the-shelf battery within the sensors enable wireless transmission of signals four times a day. These signals would jump from one sensor to the next until they reached an existing weather station  linked by satellite to a forestry command center and would transmit data immediately in the event of a forest fire.

Voltree Power is in the final stages of prototyping such a system with trials set for the spring on a 10-acre plot of land provided by the US Forest Service. The company also sees applications beyond fire monitoring for its “bioenergy converter”, including remote environmental and agricultural sensing, climate science research and even Homeland Security and border protection, where trees could be fitted with sensors to detect potential threats like smuggled radioactive materials."

ETA: Spring 2009 for field prototype

Original Story > here

MIT press release> here

 

© 2005-2008

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Guest Speaker on emerging Smart Technologies, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me

.....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"

- old Japanese proverb

P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page

Top 10 smart technologies for Obama and Harper to consider for their infrastructure / cyberstructure / cognistructure program

Both US president elect Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper have promised "New Deal" like infrastructure programs for the USA and Canada to spend their way out of a depression / recession (pick one). A new term is needed to describe this type of new intelligence-infused infrastructure. I call it the cognistructure-an infrastructure that thinks for itself.

Here's my list of top 10 smart technologies that both Olbama and Harper should have their eye on and on their planning radar screens; (Niche applications 10-6, more ubiquitous applications 5-1)

10. Smart home fabrication (supersized 3D printer that prints your home on site) to improve construction efficiency and effectiveness and waste reduction in conventional house building (but there is little chance of seeing North American building codes reformed any time soon)

9. Smart sensors in bridges, levees, roads, buildings, vehicles, satellites  etc (smart dust) to provide a dynamic sense and respond environment- eco cities-earth with a fast track  nervous system

8. Move toward the electrification of transportation (GM, Ford, Chysler shifts production to electric cars and trucks)and smart road networks (ie smart retractable speed bumps, movable road mediums that adjust to traffic flow and congestion)

7.Biomimicry -- designing systems, objects and surfaces  based on natural biological models

6. Smart "emergent and self-organizing" traffic congestion systems that deal with natural complexity in unconventional ways

5.Infrastructure / congnistructure for Smart cities, that address and enforce  "system resilience" and mitigates the consequences future potential catastrophies (climate change, severe weather, man-made disasters, riots, etc)

4.Modermizing the electrical grid to accept consumer and commercial inputs from alternate energy and reducing power loss during distribution ( via super conductors and nanowires)

3.Adoption of smart alternate energy technologies (wind, water and sun) that approach price parity with gas, coal, nuclear and electricity. Move toward distributed and diversified energy production vs centralised energy production.

2. Energy harvesting- various smart technologies that convert latent heat, all light spectra and mechanical vibration into electricity. Objects that create their own energy

1. Internet of things (IofT) (or ObjectNet or O-Net) & the Internet of Services (IofS) or S-Net -Intelligent objects, systems and environments have their own unique IP address and are connected together, just like web pages are linked on the web today.

© 2005-2008

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Guest Speaker on emerging Smart Technologies, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me

.....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"

- old Japanese proverb

P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page

Will a World War pull us out of a depression again?

Major wars have historically followed major economic depressions. The logic has been-We've tried everything else - let the military industrial complex get the economy humming again. Some countries like Russia, the USA,  the UK and China rely on it in both war time and peace time.

With that thought in mind, it’s interesting to take note of what former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari said today in accepting the Nobel peace prize in Oslo.

"Peace is a question of will. Wars and conflicts are not inevitable," he said, arguing that they are caused by people who have something to gain from them. "All conflicts can be settled."

....well they can be, but do the vested interests want them to be settled?

"Ahtisaari was modest about the role of mediators in ending conflicts, saying only the parties themselves could end bloodshed. "The only people that can make peace are the parties to the conflict," he said.

He said his own experience as a child, when his hometown in Finland became part of the Soviet Union under a "spheres-of-influence" agreement between German leader Adolf Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, had influenced his determination to work towards peace."

Walter Derzko

Country	2006 Total Arms Exports1
USA	$14,008m
Russia	$5,800m
UK	$3,300m
Germany	$1,000m
China	$700m
Canada	$600m
France	$400m
Netherlands	$300m
Israel	$200m
Spain	$200m
Sweden	$200m

 

IBM endorses smart technology and a smarter planet

A while back when I was at the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange, I remember sitting over a coffee and exploring a thought exercise with some clients.

The question under debate was: What are  the generic elements or activities that would accelerate any new technology platform, (such as smart technologies) and overcome the initial market interia. Simply put, Is there a generic technology evolution matrix?

We came up with over 25 items. (see related Post-Do you know how to spot opportunities?)

One was having cartoonists make fun of your technology ( No, smart technologies aren't on Dilbert's radar screen yet, but any day now I hope)  Another key event would be to have some influential CEO highlight the benefits of your technology in a milestone keynote speech (act as a complimentor-in business strategy terms. )

Well for smart technologies, that breakthrough event may have happened this month on November 6^th, when IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, outlined a new agenda for building a smarter planet - during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relation. (hat tip to Adam Christensen at IBM HQ)

 

 

From IBM's blog:

"In the speech, he outlines a number of the challenges faced today by people, governments, businesses and organizations. A lack of clean water for a fifth of the world’s population. Energy systems that waste more energy than they produce. Traffic in our cities that clogs roads and chokes economic growth. 

Clearly there are no simple solutions for these problems.

Technology can play a big role in helping find answers to these problems. While the Internet currently connects more than a billion people, in just a few years, it will connect more than a trillion objects. Everything from cell phones, cars, roads, buildings, and even objects in nature itself, will have embedded technology and be connected to one another, enabling tremendous advances in how we understand how the world works and make smarter decisions to make it work better. 

But technology is just part of the solution. Without the people, policies and culture to inspire and execute the change, nothing ultimately gets done."

From Sam’s speech:

[...]   These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected—economically, technically and socially. But we're also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get "flatter." And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.

This isn't just a metaphor.I mean infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works—the systems and processes that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold… services to be delivered… everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move… and billions of people to work and live.

 What's making this possible?

• First, our world is becoming instrumented: The transistor, invented 60 years ago, is the basic building block of the digital age. Now, consider a world in which there are a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent. We'll have that by 2010. There will likely be 4 billion mobile phone subscribers by the end of this year… and 30 billion Radio Frequency Identification tags produced globally within two years. Sensors are being embedded across entire ecosystems—supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities… even natural systems like rivers.
• Second, our world is becoming interconnected: Very soon there will be 2 billion people on the Internet. But in an instrumented world, systems and objects can now "speak" to one another, too. Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and intelligent things—cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines… even pharmaceuticals and livestock. The amount of information produced by the interaction of all those things will be unprecedented.
• Third, all things are becoming intelligent: New computing models can handle the proliferation of end-user devices, sensors and actuators and connect them with back-end systems. Combined with advanced analytics, those supercomputers can turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive—in a word, smarter.

What this means is that the digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging. Computational power is being put into things we wouldn't recognize as computers. Indeed, almost anything—any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small—can become digitally aware and networked.

With so much technology and networking abundantly available at such low cost, what wouldn't you enhance? What service wouldn't you provide a customer, citizen, student or patient? What wouldn't you connect? What information wouldn't you mine for insight?

The answer is, you or your competitor—another company, or another city or nation—will do all of that. You will do it because you can—the technology is available and affordable.

But there is another reason we will make our companies, institutions and industries smarter. Because we must. Not just at moments of widespread shock, but integrated into our day-to-day operations. These mundane processes of business, government and life—which are ultimately the source of those "surprising" crises—are not smart enough to be sustainable.

[...]

Leaders will need to hone their collaboration skills, because we will need leadership that pulls across systems. We will need to bring together stakeholders and experts from across business, government and academia, and all of them will need to move outside their traditional comfort zones.

I’m struck by the questions this raises. What investments need to be made by both public and private institutions? What policy issues need to be debated and resolved? What role can individual citizens and employees play in helping bring about meaningful change?

I’m also struck by the potential opportunities inherent in finding solutions to these problems. 

see full text of Sam Palmisano's speech

Walter Derzko

 

From IBM's blog:

"In the speech, he outlines a number of the challenges faced today by people, governments, businesses and organizations. A lack of clean water for a fifth of the world’s population. Energy systems that waste more energy than they produce. Traffic in our cities that clogs roads and chokes economic growth. 

Clearly there are no simple solutions for these problems.

Technology can play a big role in helping find answers to these problems. While the Internet currently connects more than a billion people, in just a few years, it will connect more than a trillion objects. Everything from cell phones, cars, roads, buildings, and even objects in nature itself, will have embedded technology and be connected to one another, enabling tremendous advances in how we understand how the world works and make smarter decisions to make it work better. 

But technology is just part of the solution. Without the people, policies and culture to inspire and execute the change, nothing ultimately gets done."

From Sam’s speech:

[...]   These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected—economically, technically and socially. But we're also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get "flatter." And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.

This isn't just a metaphor.I mean infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works—the systems and processes that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold… services to be delivered… everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move… and billions of people to work and live.

 What's making this possible?

• First, our world is becoming instrumented: The transistor, invented 60 years ago, is the basic building block of the digital age. Now, consider a world in which there are a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent. We'll have that by 2010. There will likely be 4 billion mobile phone subscribers by the end of this year… and 30 billion Radio Frequency Identification tags produced globally within two years. Sensors are being embedded across entire ecosystems—supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities… even natural systems like rivers.
• Second, our world is becoming interconnected: Very soon there will be 2 billion people on the Internet. But in an instrumented world, systems and objects can now "speak" to one another, too. Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and intelligent things—cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines… even pharmaceuticals and livestock. The amount of information produced by the interaction of all those things will be unprecedented.
• Third, all things are becoming intelligent: New computing models can handle the proliferation of end-user devices, sensors and actuators and connect them with back-end systems. Combined with advanced analytics, those supercomputers can turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive—in a word, smarter.

What this means is that the digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging. Computational power is being put into things we wouldn't recognize as computers. Indeed, almost anything—any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small—can become digitally aware and networked.

With so much technology and networking abundantly available at such low cost, what wouldn't you enhance? What service wouldn't you provide a customer, citizen, student or patient? What wouldn't you connect? What information wouldn't you mine for insight?

The answer is, you or your competitor—another company, or another city or nation—will do all of that. You will do it because you can—the technology is available and affordable.

But there is another reason we will make our companies, institutions and industries smarter. Because we must. Not just at moments of widespread shock, but integrated into our day-to-day operations. These mundane processes of business, government and life—which are ultimately the source of those "surprising" crises—are not smart enough to be sustainable.

[...]

Leaders will need to hone their collaboration skills, because we will need leadership that pulls across systems. We will need to bring together stakeholders and experts from across business, government and academia, and all of them will need to move outside their traditional comfort zones.

I’m struck by the questions this raises. What investments need to be made by both public and private institutions? What policy issues need to be debated and resolved? What role can individual citizens and employees play in helping bring about meaningful change?

I’m also struck by the potential opportunities inherent in finding solutions to these problems. 

see full text of Sam Palmisano's speech

Walter Derzko

Threat of Nuclear Terrorism still a Serious Risk

In October I posted a story about an alleged Iranian dirty nuclear bomb that was ment for Israel but intercepted by Somali pirates. The risk of nuclear terrorism is still  high though.

  A new report, called "Securing the Bomb 2008," says major progress has been made to reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism, but the report warns, however, there are still major gaps in these efforts and says the risk of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon remains unacceptably high.

The author of the report, Harvard professor Matthew Bunn, says the potential for a disastrous attack is very real.

"That would incinerate the heart of a major city," he said. "It could turn the center of Washington, D.C.or the center of Manhattan into a smoking, radioactive ruin that would be unusable for decades to come. That would have profound and catastrophic affects on our society, really reverberating around the world."

The report details a series of events around the world in recent years it says highlights the risk of poor security at nuclear installations.

These include an armed break-in at a South African site with hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, the arrest of a Russian colonel for soliciting bribes to overlook violations of nuclear security rules and the increasing terrorist threats amid the ongoing strife in Pakistan.

The report says the materials for a nuclear bomb exist in hundreds of buildings in dozens of countries.

Professor Bunn says there are currently about 130 research reactors around the world that still use highly enriched uranium for fuel

Full story and Harvard Report  and related Story: US Govt searching for miss nuclear sites in Nigeria

The Recession and Elderly Crime (by and not against)

Guess which country  I’m describing?  

 

20 years of stagnant or falling wages, a decade of falling housing prices, threadbare social safety nets, and zero  returns on savings ?

 

No it’s not a developing country or the Former Soviet Union such as Ukraine  or Russia…it’s Japan

Surprised ?

Now if I mention the two words -crime and the elderly, you probably be thinking crime against the elderly (and not necessarily crime by the elderly). -Wrong again

These steadily  worsening conditions have produced a retirement class in Japan that is struggling and is turning to crime to make ends meet. Is this a precursor for North America if the government is forced to cut back on entitlements? Increasing our  health care costs or reducing  social welfare or pensions?

Bloomberg reports yesterday:

 

"More senior citizens are picking pockets and shoplifting in Japan to cope with cuts in government welfare spending and rising health-care costs in a fast-ageing society.

Criminal offences by people 65 or older doubled to 48,605 in the five years to 2008, the most since police began compiling national statistics in 1978, a Ministry of Justice report said.

Theft is the most common crime of senior citizens, many of whom face declining health, low incomes and a sense of isolation, the report said. Elderly crime may increase in parallel with poverty rates as Japan enters another recession and the budget deficit makes it harder for the government to provide a safety net for people on the fringes of society.

``The elderly are turning to shoplifting as an increasing number of them lack assets and children to depend on,'' Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor at Chuo University in Tokyo and an author of books on income disparity in Japan, said in an interview yesterday. ``We won't see the decline of elderly crimes as long as the income gap continues to rise.''

Crime rates among the elderly are rising as the overall rate for Japan has fallen for five consecutive years after peaking in 2002. Over 60s accounted for 18.9 percent of all crimes last year compared with 3.1 percent in 1978, with shoplifting accounting for 80 percent of the total, the report said....

``Elderly crime is a serious problem that our society must shoulder in the years to come,'' the government report said. ``With baby boomers becoming elderly within five years, we have reached a state where we must make a fundamental review of anti- crime measures in a fast-ageing society.''

.

About a fifth of Japanese are 65 or older, almost twice the proportion in the  U.S.and three times China's rate. That figure will double to more than 40 percent by 2050, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research....

The government aims to cut 220 billion yen ($2.3 billion) from social welfare spending in each of the five years starting 2006 as it seeks to balance the budget by 2011. As part of this plan, the government introduced a new health insurance system that would raise premiums for some elderly patients.

The initiative has stirred anxiety about pensions and health care, and Japan's economic situation is doing little to help...

The number of households on welfare reached 1.1 million last year, an increase of 300,000 since 2001, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.

Japan ranks behind the U.S. at fourth-worst among 30 developed countries in terms of the number of people living on less than half the country's median income, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last month.

``Some elderly, particularly men who lost their wives, even turn to crimes to be put in jail so they can be fed three times a day,'' Yamada said."

Ukrainian and Chinese hackers use Obama election as hook

Tuesday's historic acceptance speech by President-Elect Obama is already being used by cyber criminals to commit fraud, according to Gary Warner, the Director of Computer Forensics Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). These cyber criminals are using the President-Elect’s popularity to perpetuate fraud as others have recently done by using popular media, banking and employment Web sites. Warner's team of Computer Science and Criminal Justice students analyze spam, phishing, and malware as part of their research.

"We've already seen more than 300 copies of this spam e-mail", says Warner, "and we're very concerned that people who missed Tuesday night's speech may follow the link and infect their computer."

The spam points to five separate Web site domains, each registered Tuesday in China. Visiting the Web site requires the user to install an "Adobe Flash Player" in order to watch the speech. The program offered is actually a "keystroke logger." Installing it will cause all user IDs and passwords, whether for online banking, online stores, email, or even chat programs, to be sent to the criminal’s computer.

Warner's students have identified the criminal's IP address (91.203.93.57 ) and his name in  Ukraine, (Mark Liberman in Kyiv) as well as the Chinese domain names, and have shared that data with appropriate authorities. More details are available on Warner's blog, CyberCrime & Doing Time