When an outbreak of food borne illness from salmonella or E.coli contamination happens, it scares consumers and farmers alike. That’s partly due to the fact that finding the source of the bacteria can take weeks, months, even years.

Spinach, jalapenos, peanuts, pistachios are all foods that share a bad reputation due to outbreaks of bacteria like E.coli and salmonella. But some food safety experts say their problems could be solved by using barcodes.

“This is not rocket science and there are companies in the U.S. who are doing that kind of tracing system today. It’s just not required. Its not mandated,” said Caroline DeWaal, Center for the Science in the Public Interest.

DeWaal says barcodes are used for different farms and manufacturers anyway, so why not connect them from farm to fork?
Story continues below
Advertisement

“If this barcode had a code that FDA standardized and made recognizable across the industry, the agency could more easily trace these products,” said DeWaal.

Outgoing FDA director David Acheson agrees.

“We get piles of records — it’s pieces of paper, it’s invoices. And we bring them back here and it literally is a paper and pencil exercise. And I think one of the challenges right now that we all have to face is what can we do to make this more automated?” explains David Acheson, FDA.

The answer might be to look to overseas where they’re already doing it.

“Tesco which is the third largest retailer in the world actually has a bullet proof system over in Europe and it’s going to come here,” said Phil Lempert, market analyst.

Lempert says everything the company sells is connected to a computerized barcode system.

“In a matter of seconds you’ll know everything about that product: what truck it was on, who were the names of the employees that were working in that field that day, when it was produced,” said Lempert.

But when a food borne illness breakout occurs, we look to the government for help. Establishing such a barcode tracking system will cost millions if not billions of dollars, something the government would prefer the food industry pay for.

“I would not see the federal government paying for that. The industry needs to step up to the plate and seriously look at what could they do to introduce these systems? Now I don’t think that comment will be popular because it’s going to cost,” said Acheson.

A popular technology overseas that links mobile users to the ever-evolving world of advertising is gearing up for its debut here in the U.S. NY1’s Adam Balkin filed the following report.

It’s a use for the mobile phone that’s taken off in Japan, and now Microsoft is hoping to bring the same excitement to the United States. In Japan, they’re black and white and called “quick response” or QR Codes. Here they’re color and called Tags. Tags are kinda like high-tech barcodes that you take a picture of with your cell phone’s camera. The image then immediately takes you to wherever the creator of that tag wants to take you online.

“Using the camera on your phone, you can read a Tag and be taken to a website for information, you can get contact information, you can be provided text information,” said Kevin Kerr, Microsoft. “So imagine reading a Tag at a movie theater and being able to play the trailer for that particular movie, or reading a Tag for a particular product at a store or a sign at a bus stop to understand when the next bus in coming for that particular bus stop. So these Tags can exist in magazines, you can put them in posters, on websites, digital signage.”

While these types of technologies have been tried in the past with little success, those who own a G1 Google phone have recently warmed to the idea thanks to an application that lets you snap shots of barcodes on products and instantly comparison shop online.

In fact, those QR Codes started a test run a year ago in San Francisco. So why do Tag developers think their concept is the one that will finally take hold? And the other obvious question — why not just link to barcodes that are already all over the place?

“The QR Code and those other things are black and white. They were designed for industrial usage. These are colors, so we have the ability to do logos and other things that are much more interesting,” said Kerr. “If you want to target demographics with this new type of mobile technology you have to do something interesting as well as functional.”

Tags work on just about any phone with a camera, including iPhones. Go to www.gettag.mobi for the free download to make it work.

Right now, Tags are in beta, or development, which means anyone can go to www.tag.microsoft.com and create a Tag for free. What that Tag points to can be updated every day, or even every hour if you want. Microsoft says if, down the line, it does start charging to create tags, any created during the beta period will be grandfathered in and remain free forever.

Natural ‘barcodes’ of information, built into human faces for recognition of other people, may also help improve face recognition software, according to a study.

Faces convey a vast range of information about people, including their gender, age and mood. For humans, the ability to locate a face is important as this is where we pick up many of our cues for social interactions.

While recognising a person’s face is a complex process, the first steps to processing visual information in the brain are thought to be more basic and to rely on the orientation of features such as lines.

By manipulating images of celebrities like Chris Martin and George Clooney, Steven Dakin from University College London (UCL) and Roger Watt, professor, University of Stirling, showed that nearly all the information we need to recognise faces is contained in horizontal lines, such as the line of the eyebrows, the eyes and the lips.

Further analysis revealed that these features could be simplified into black and white lines of information- in other words, barcodes.

Dakin believes the research may have implications for improving face recognition software, for example, for use at an airport where police may need to locate a suspect in a crowd on CCTV cameras.

The ability of such software to recognise individuals has improved vastly, but is still poor at the first step: locating faces in complex scenes.

“Exposed skin on our forehead and cheeks tends to be shiny whilst our eyebrows and lips and the shadows cast in the eye sockets and under the nose tend to be darker,” said Dakin, an opthalmalogist. “The resulting horizontal stripes of information are reminiscent of a supermarket barcode.”

Supermarket barcodes were developed as an efficient way of providing information: straight, one-dimensional lines are far easier to process than two-dimensional characters such as numbers.

In a similar way, our faces may have evolved to allow us to convey effectively the information needed to recognise them, said an UCL release.

We have heard that a new type of barcode is being introduced. When is this happening and what do we need to do to prepare for it?

A: Global standards organisation GS1 has been working on the introduction of its DataBar (which is about half the size of a normal barcode) for several years. The DataBar will exist alongside present barcodes, rather than being a replacement for them.

The new barcode standard was due to become an open global standard in 2010 – meaning that all retailers would have needed equipment that was capable of scanning them by then. However, GS1 has revised this date to 2014 to give retailers more time to adopt appropriate scanning technology.

GS1 UK solutions manager Tim Brown says: “Scanners supplied from 2000 onwards generally can scan the DataBar.” So most major UK retailers will already have scanners at their tills that are compliant with the standard. However, he says retailers should still check, as their systems might require an upgrade or need the functionality turned on.

However, UK retailers are already investigating how they can best use the DataBar because it carries more information than a traditional barcode. Information on batch or serial numbers, expiry dates and price can be encoded in a DataBar.

Retailers that choose to adopt the new barcode earlier than 2014 can benefit if they introduce functionality to their EPoS systems to make use of this extra data.

Brown said that Wal-Mart is already using the DataBar on a lot of its fresh produce in the US, and Tesco has investigated its use on fresh produce.

WASHINGTON — Encouraged by a 90 percent customer approval rating, the U.S. Postal Service today announced that it would make the recent Intelligent Mail University Symposiums available through its RIBBS website: ribbs.usps.gov.

About 90 percent of the 1,000 attending the webinar symposiums rated the sessions as “Excellent” or “Good,” according to Pritha Mehra, vice president, Business Mail Entry and Payment Technologies.

The Postal Service facilitated the four symposiums — in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York — to help its business customers prepare for the launch of Intelligent Mail services on May 18.

“We credit the success of the symposiums to so many of our customers whose input helped drive the content,” said Mehra. “We look forward to our continued working relationship with the industry through implementation and beyond.”

By signing up for the services, and depending on the specific services selected, business mailers can receive automated address correction, enabling greater returns on investment for their direct mail campaigns. When combined with print production and logistics systems, Intelligent Mail services will provide mailers with the ability to track their mailings in the portion of the supply chain prior to the Postal Service. For example, they’ll know whether the mailing is still at the printer’s facility or has been inducted into the postal network.

The key technology behind the services is the Intelligent Mail barcode for letters and flats (large envelopes, magazines, catalogs, and circulars). The barcode’s enhanced data capacity allows it to hold all routing and sorting information as well as to provide each mail piece with the ability to be identified uniquely within a mailing.

The Postal Service also has developed Intelligent Mail barcodes for trays, sacks, and containers.

“The ability to track the status of a mailing will help business mailers respond more quickly and more accurately when their customers call,” said Tom Day, senior vice president, Intelligent Mail and Address Quality. “Since the Intelligent Mail barcode also enables the tracking of envelopes from a recipient back to the mailer, it can help finance departments monitor and predict payments more easily.”

Intelligent Mail University Symposiums Receive High Scores

Tokyo based creative agency SET is adding style to the standard QR code. Teaming up with Takashi Murakami, they have created a custom code that mixes one of Takashi Murakami characters with the Louis Vuitton pattern.

 

Toronto-headquartered National Post Tuesday said it has become the first North American newspaper to adopt a 2D barcode system that allows readers to scan the printed paper with a mobile device to get updated digital content.

The National Post is using Scanbuy’s ScanLife client application and Code Management Platform for the system.

Readers with data-enabled camera phones, such as a BlackBerry, can scan the or take a snapshot of the digital-looking barcode found alongside a Post story. Updated content from the newspaper’s mobile site is then uploaded to the mobile device.

“The brilliant thing about ScanLife is how it ties our newspaper and our mobile site together,” Post Vice-President/Digital Media Jonathan Harris said in a statement. “With ScanLife, our readers can use their smartphones to dig deeper into the story on our mobile site while they are reading the paper. At the Post, we are always searching for new and innovative ways that make it easier for our readers to connect with our stories. This new technology helps us do just that.”

The ScanLife application can be downloaded for free from www.getscanlife.com, and used to take a photo or scan any 2D barcode in the Post.

In addition to updating news, the Post said the 2D barcode technology could be used for contests and advertisements.

“We are very excited that a national daily newspaper is embracing this technology to seamlessly connect one media platform to another,” Scanbuy CEO Jonathan Bulkeley said in the announcement. “This represents a more holistic approach to media which we believe 2D barcode technology can help facilitate.”

You might not know what the new generation of bar codes looks like: a blocky collection of little pixel-like squares within a larger square in a manner that faintly resembles static on a television set. Even if you’ve noticed one, it might still be surprising to learn that they’re kind of trendy, which is a strange thing for a bar code to be. Yet when a scarf that prominently includes such a pattern appeared a few months ago, it quickly made the blog rounds, and was often labeled “geek chic.”

Read complete Style Decoder in the New York Times