The Supply Chain Information Technology blog

I’ve enjoyed reading Supply Chain Digest, with Dan Gilmore as the editor, for years. His topics are always timely and interesting. If you haven’t checked him out yet, add his site to your favorites and make it part of your required weekly reading. 

(While I’m at it, I’ll also plug Jim Tompkins’ Supply Chain and Logistics Issues blog. Although I may be a little biased, it’s also a great resource with lots of good information.) 

One of the features in Supply Chain Digest is the “Weekly Supply Chain and Logistics Stock Report.” Although it hasn’t been officially updated recently, this page shows the stock prices and trends for a solid cross section of the major (and publicly traded) players in the supply chain world. They are grouped by Software, AIDC/RFID, and Transportation/Logistics/3PL companies. In my opinion, this market segment can be an indicator of future economic realities, especially for the supply chain information technology businesses (Software and AIDC/RFID).

When the stocks of these businesses increase, it is typically a sign that other organizations – manufacturing, retail, and services – are investing in capital improvement projects and purchasing their products. Over the past two years, this market has been particularly soft due to the Great Recession and lack of confidence in the recent direction of the U.S. economic policies and regulations. 

I’m not an economist by trade, but I think that I have a decent portion of common sense. And it often amazes me when the expert economists are surprised. (How frequently do you see the headlines such as ‘New Jobless Claims Shock the Experts’ or ‘Retail Sales Are Far Lower than Expected’?) 

The numbers don’t always tell the full story. It’s also important to know what others in your industry are doing and to be prepared for change.

In any case, the strength of some of the earlier numbers that Dan shows is encouraging. Even the later numbers give reason to be optimistic:

 

But don’t look solely at the numbers, give some thought to the circumstances surrounding these numbers. Think about what causes them to increase or decrease.

-- David

 

 

Photo Credit: Bracketing Life 

The PBS NewsHour ran an interesting series on cyber security, with a final installment that focused on online banking and Internet thievery. The piece interviewed several security experts discussing and demonstrating how easy it is to steal someone’s financial and personal information online. 

As a sidebar, one expert demonstrated that the Internet wasn’t the only avenue to purloin private data. This expert had set up a powerful radio transmitter and a high-gain antenna on the 29th floor of the Las Vegas hotel so he could read RFID tags carried by ground-level passersby. He observed that these tags are being embedded into credit cards and government issued IDs. He also said that these tags are being attached to the items you buy in stores. 

I appreciated the point on the potential security issues presented by credit cards and government IDs with RFID tags, as these tags can store sensitive information such as credit card and social security numbers. But, I must admit, I wasn’t too worried about the thought of an unknown third party capturing electronic product codes (EPC) from items carried or worn by unsuspecting people. 

I suppose there is the prospect that crooks and unscrupulous folks using my information for their benefit driving by my house could find out what I own via item-level RFID tags. At the same time, I’m not too worried about big brother keeping tabs on my movements using EPC encoded tags. There are a lot of scarier ways to keep track of me than rather anemic, passive RFID tags storing a serialized product code. To me, the most disconcerting aspect of unsolicited scans of my property is the thought that a store clerk might know what brand of underwear I have on when I walk into a store.

The PBS piece I mentioned was broadcast after Walmart’s announcement that they were going to start item-level tagging of jeans and underwear at selected stores. As Paul Faber pointed out in his recent blog, Walmart will be using removable tags to address privacy concerns. Tags that can be erased at checkout have also been proposed to address privacy concerns. Of course both of these approaches will only add to the cost of item-level tagging through more complicated packaging or store systems. 

It is easy for me to scoff at the privacy concerns surrounding RFID item-level tagging. We live in a world filled with a gazillion cameras and video recognition software that keeps increasing in sophistication. We all carry cell phones everywhere we go. We transmit our credit card numbers and other sensitive information over the cloud with little thought to whom else is looking at our communication. Anyway, half of the population appears to want to broadcast their real-time location to the world through social networking applications. So, what’s the big deal with item level RFID tagging? Why all the hype?

Part of the publicity surrounding RFID and privacy is that it makes a good story. This story is partially fed by people eager to see a sinister conspiracy in a technology that has actually been around for quite a while and is relatively commonplace. 

Conceptually passive RFID tags are merely a variation on a theme shared by high-density bar codes and magnetic stripe technology. However, there is a big difference between these auto-ID technologies. Generally, I have to present a bar code or magnetic stripe card in my possession to anyone who wants to read it. But someone can read an RFID tag I am carrying without my knowledge.

Walmart and other advocates of item-level tagging are keenly aware of privacy concerns. There are approaches for dealing with the issue. Cost, performance and infrastructure are bigger stumbling blocks to the adoption of item-level RFID tagging in the supply chain. Once these factors have diminished, I’m not sure that privacy will be much more than an afterthought. 

I see it as a legitimate but hardly a defining issue in RFID’s potential across the supply chain. This doesn’t mean that I think all retailers will embrace the controls needed to make privacy a non-issue by the time RFID item-level tracking is ready for prime time. I just think that it won’t matter that much in a world where our privacy is constantly intruded upon by more pernicious forces. 

So I can definitely foresee a time when a sales clerk may be able to discern the brand of underwear I am wearing by an RFID scan as I walk into a store. However, if the clerk is smart, he/she will keep his/her mouth shut. 

-- Tom

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Saxon

I stumbled across this topic for this week’s blog by accident while browsing the web. Although this is not related to supply chain technology, I thought it was sufficiently high-tech to merit some general interest. I hope you find the topic as interesting as I do.

To begin, let’s review how color photographs are produced by digital cameras. The sensor in a camera cannot directly see color – it can only see intensity of light. When you see a camera advertised as “10 megapixels,” it means there are 10 million light-sensitive photoreceptors on the camera’s “digital film” chip. These photoreceptors record the intensity of the light that falls on them, from zero (black) to high intensity (white). Left to themselves, they produce a black and white image.

But for color, light needs to be broken into primary wavelengths of red, green, and blue (RGB). Combining these three colors in varying intensities creates the full spectrum of color. This is how a digital camera produces a color image. Each photoreceptor in the camera is fitted with an individual red, green, or blue lens that filters the light that falls onto the sensor. 

With this RGB filter in place, the digital information records varying intensities of red, green, and blue light at discrete points in the image. Powerful image-processing algorithms scan this information into the onboard microprocessor’s memory.

 

On high-end digital cameras, you can change the behavior of the algorithm by setting values for hue, intensity, white balance, contrast, and other variables. The electronics in the camera then go to work to produce a color image from individual pixels of red, green, and blue light intensity information. 

The scientific fact that color can be generated from red, green, and blue light has been known since well before the invention of photography. Since the late 1800s, there have been laboratory experiments in color photography. Technological factors, however, limited the practical majority of photographic images to black and white up until the late 1930s (and it was not until the 1960s that color came to the mass market, as immortalized by the Simon and Garfunkel song “Kodachrome”). 

Here’s the really interesting part: On my web search, I found that there was one early photographer who developed an elegant approach to color photography. He was a Russian named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. He was familiar with theories that one could create a color image by taking successive black and white images through red, green, and blue filters.

 

The three black and white images would show the same scene, but differ in shading and light intensity according to the filter used. 

Ahead of his time, in the early 1900s, Prokudin-Gorskii built a custom camera to accomplish this task.

He also built a projector that would allow him to show audiences color images projected on a screen. He was successful enough that the Tsar commissioned him to go on a photographic expedition to document the Russian Empire. These trips occurred from 1905–1915. 

The expedition produced thousands of glass plate negatives. These could be printed and displayed as conventional black and white images for publication and exhibition. However, the projection apparatus needed for producing the color images limited the practical extent to which the images could be published in full color.

Then came the Russian Revolution, which was a disaster for Prokudin-Gorskii and all other friends of the Tsar. He fled Russia. His collection of glass plate negatives ultimately wound up in the archives of the US Library of Congress, where they sat in obscurity.

With the advent of digital photography, a curator in the Library of Congress realized that the Prokudin-Gorskii photographs could be displayed in a manner never before possible. In 2004, the Library of Congress commissioned a restoration project. Each set of negatives was scanned into a computer, aligned, and color-adjusted in exactly the same manner as an image is produced within a digital camera.

 

The results were glorious. They are viewable at the Library of Congress website at the following link: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

These photographs represent a treasure trove of historical documentary images. They also represent the perfect combination of scholarship, luck, and high-tech restoration.

-- Paul

 

Photo Credit: Library of Congress