LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 107 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

LPRC & UF Researchers Partner to Develop a Virtual Reality Environment! The Crypto Market Suffers Signifcantly! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the Newest Patch for a Dangerous Vulnerability, the state of the global economy with the latest declining forecast for USA and Europe, the evolving nature of anti viral medication to combat the Coronavirus strains. and the surprising start and success of Loss Prevention Technologies including CCTV Cameras, EAS, and cash registers. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 107 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-s sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to

improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. Today, we're going to be joined for our weekly update by Tony D'Onofrio, Tom Meehan, our producer, Diego Rodriguez, and we're going to take a quick trip around the world, update everybody here from the LPRC on our Crime Science Podcast Network. So first, we'll just touch a bit, less and less, you might notice, on SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting COVID-19 disease. Celebrities, we seem to see a

lot of reporting on when celebrities or politicians or others of significant fame or infamy or contract, uh, COVID-19. We see that, uh, I've seen a lot of play around. You can't get what you want. In other words, that Mick Jagger, um, has COVID-19. They canceled at least two shows so far. Um, We'll stand by and see how everything goes. Hopes and prayers there. Hugh Jackman, another celebrity who's been stricken by this virus. Here we go to looking a little bit about, you know, this chronic COVID or long COVID seems to appear in a very small but significant minority of those of us that become infected and come down with COVID-19 disease. So, what they're trying to do is culture and look at, you know, different breakdowns of the individual, breakdowns of the actual virus that's causing the infection to see if there's something going on here. I know with SARS-CoV-2 recombinant, there's been some looking at this chronic or long COVID. So, I think it's still, believe it or not, early days on that to try and understand that differential breakdown. It's interesting, too,

on surveillance, we know that there's home testing, there's government testing going on. Now, the government also is supplying free home tests, and then the idea is with these tests, how can we get them home tests that will look at whether an illness is in fact a virus, and if it is a particular SARS-CoV, in other words, a coronavirus, or is this some form of influenza, or maybe what they call RSV, another respiratory virus, or something else that people could more rapidly know. But we also know that there's a breakdown, too, though, that the infection, daily infection rate seems to be dramatically up in 2022 at this point. You know, here we are in early June, heading into mid-June 2022, than it was the same time period last year, dramatically up, and that's with

significantly less known positive tests. So, we know that the virus is in heavy circulation amongst us, but what are ways that better surveillance, early warning can be put in place around the world in individual communities and so on? We know that there's been a lot of wastewater surveillance. Now, the CDC reports that over 1,000 or just about 1,000 United States, U.S. communities have signed up for the program, are now regularly surveilling. up for the program are now regularly surveilling. I know, again, from early, early days here at the University of Florida with dorms, they were able to isolate infections very rapidly as the disease was, or the viral spread was ramping up pretty quickly here in this area of the country. So, we'll stay tuned on that. But I think, you know, that, again, plays well into what, again, we're trying to do with the LPRC. We'll talk about it a little bit later.

But surveillance is something that's important. Detection and then surveillance. Are we knowing about and are we paying attention to the right things? And what are ways that we can do that? Looking at, again, going back to the seriousness that people can get from influenza and from coronaviruses. So, obesity particularly heavily related to the severity of COVID-19 disease that seems to just be something that maybe helps to retain, to spread, or suppress immunoresponse. I'll leave that to the biological researchers to find out more about that.

Smoking, heavily related, but much more related, it looks like, relatively speaking, to seriousness of influenza. And there was an interesting study where they compared, let's just call it roughly 150 coronavirus and 150 influenza patients that had to be hospitalized. They saw similar seriousness of the disease. They saw similar fatal outcomes as well. So it looks like if you get really sick, you get really sick, regardless of the virus. And so now they're looking at, you know, what is it about the individual, about us, and maybe the particular strain of influenza or, of course, coronavirus that we've got. And there's always that interaction. It's things about the strain. It's things about the amount of that strain that we onboarded our bodies.

It's things about how our body initially and then successfully worked on as far as detection and response. Did we over-respond? Did we under-respond our bodies in this case? Were we somewhat prepared by natural infection and or vaccines and things like that? So again, as criminologists, as socio-behavioral scientists, we're very interested in differential exposure to a problem or to others that are problematic, differential exposure to the things that we do out there situationally, our crime prevention efforts, things that are different about us as far as how we may or may not notice them, see it, right, how we might recognize, in other words, the get part, and then finally how we are likely maybe differentially to respond that that fear response.

In other words, we don't launch or we retreat. We desist. So a lot of tie ins. That's why we spent a lot of time over the last couple of years. It seems like now going through and trying to understand these disease states. And I thought it was interesting to see a little bit about let's go go back to, let's look at antivirals that they've come out with. There are now two or three available, but they're trying to understand how do those work and work better and how they were developed. And so I guess there are signaling

pathways that the virus needs to move through our bodies. And so a couple of these that, this is not my area of expertise, but IL-6 and IL-1 beta. So, IL-6 and IL-1 beta, those signaling pathways or routes seem to be aiming points for some of these antivirals to shut those down or choke them down or reduce the capacity of them to transmit so that the virus may not be able to replicate and move around and spread and create more and more serious disease and more and more severe immune response by us. They can sometimes also get us in trouble. We hear about these cytokine storms and other things. But just understanding that and then, again, interpreting that back over to what we all do in asset protection or loss prevention, security, crime prevention, and that is trying to understand how are people differentially exposed to threats and then how do these threats maybe communicate if there's more than one online, in person, and so forth.

is another interesting study on the COVID-19 is looking at severe disease markers that they found that TH17 cells, the more those were present in individuals that were infected, the more likely those people were, those of us that were to progress to a much more serious critical disease state, maybe even fatal. So that kind of early warning is something that looks like if now physicians say, okay, I've got a higher than normal or a critical level, whatever that they might use their diagnosis to say, this person is much more likely. I need to get them on this, some sort of antiviral therapy and other supportive care more rapidly than maybe others of us so that they can reduce the likelihood of a critical outcome. So the same thing again with our LPRC research I mentioned to you all, we're talking to at least six, maybe end up being eight major retailers who have active assailant or serious crime threat analysis,

an individual or a team program going on and gather from them systematically. I mentioned this before, four types of active assailant events or very critical crime events that occur in a specific place, maybe in a specific time, but specific place. And so, again, it's because the threat is works there. It's an insider threat. They're energized or radicalized or activated in their minds because of something that workplace, before and after the workplace, and so on that we can leverage to our advantage. So that's a relationship for them, but they're an outsider threat, but they come to that specific place because of a specific individual or something about that's going on there. The third type, again, is they are going there for some other reason. It's an outsider threat. They're coming there because of maybe it's the brand and

experience they had there or their loved one or somebody there or a similar store within that brand, let's say in this case. And then again, the fourth one is sort of this random. They appeared there. Their car broke down. They wandered over. They got off of that mass transit stop. They were they were looking around and for something else, but they stumbled on this opportunity and so on. So what are the signals? What are the signatures, the physical behaviors, the utterances, whether they're posted online somewhere or made in front of others, corrective actions that have been made against them, complaints that they've made, possible employment termination there or elsewhere or similar place and so on through the five zones of influence before they get to that location as they're approaching, as they're entering that location's parking lot, zone four, as they are approaching the entry point, as they

pass through, as they're in the zone three, we call it, the interior space of whatever their target is and so on. That's kind of the systematic way that we want to look at this and you can see some of the similarities there. So stay tuned. We're excited to conduct this research. We're aiming for the 27th of June for our first initial tele survey that we'll be doing with the first group of participants. And these are all experts, mind you, so we're expecting some pretty interesting things. Body-worn cameras and other potential sensor, whether it's recording or live streaming or both. What should it look like? Where do we place it? How do we best attach it? You know, how do we best keep it charged? When do we turn it on and off? How do we store the data?

How do we stream to whom? How do we screen things? How do we protect our data? There are probably 50 to 100 logistical things we want to learn together, as well as better deterrence and disruption and documentation. How do we use the collected video to train individuals to get better at their store upkeep, at serving customers, at interpersonal relations, things like that, de-escalating if there's something, somebody has escalated. So we've got some cool research going on right there. In the virtual reality world, in that virtual environment, Rochelle Ross, a research associate here, working with Dr. Kong at the university of florida's digital worlds dr ryan sharston over the college of architecture grad students and others are working on a way on continually to enhance a virtual environment where we can again adjust lighting and other factors and create very realistic environments to better test and understand what we should be doing out there to comfort the green to deter the red individual. So, stay tuned for that. By the time this podcast is released, this episode, unfortunately, the LPRC's annual Product Protection Working Group Summit will have taken place, but Dr. Corey Lowe, Senior Research Scientist here at LPRC,

is facilitating the event with a series of product protection working group discussions. There was voting by retailers only on different solutions across the five zones affecting different things, but primarily along the track to and from to and while you're on scene to steal. So we're pretty excited about that. That's going to be occurring tomorrow as we speak on the 15th of June. So we'll update on that later. The Supply Chain Protection Summit looks still to be in Philadelphia. I know that working group is trying to find the best location and timing.

They've got the content. They've got the people. They're just working on the location and timing. They've got the content. They've got the people. They're just working on the location and timing specific on that. We'll stay tuned. The Violent Crime Working Group, we move that to deconflict with any other summits that might be out there and to, quite frankly, make sure that our team, our research team, our operations team, that they are able to, with the bandwidth we have, which is pretty slow with eight full-time people, to accommodate all of these events. So we've moved that, it looks like, to November 7th in Philadelphia. And so working with CapIndex,

it looks like five below, to host and to facilitate that event with one of our research team and a whole bunch of retailers that are interested in reducing violent crime. We'll get out more specific information. Again, the agenda is ready for that impact conference. Heavy planning continues. We're earlier than ever. It will be held, it looks like, at the University of Florida's J. Wayne Rights Student Union, which is a brand spanking new remodel, a rehab of this building. It's just absolutely beautiful, spectacular. We've held at least eight impact conferences there. People absolutely love it.

It's so different than the normal conference center, hotel complex that they're used to. It's a really neat environment. complex that they're used to. It's a really neat environment. We take over most of the third floor and you're right there in the middle of a very beautiful Southeastern Conference campus, 56,000 students. We've got football games before and after the event. So more to come, but that's that October 3rd through 5th. We've got some retailers now bringing anywhere from five to 20 of their people. This conference is pretty special. Those that have ever come to an impact, the way it's put on, the content that's there is all research science based. So we'd love to get you there. We've got

some super cool social events and more to do there than you're going to believe. So that's October 3rd through 5th. Go to the LPRC website or operations at lpresearch.org and check us out, see what's going on. We appreciate all of you, all the retailers participating in this year's version of the National Retail Security Survey that the LPRC is conducting with the National Retail Federation and the University of Florida, the NRSS. Here we are in something like year 34. Dr. Weitz and myself and Dr. Hollinger started the study back then. And really in 89, the planning began. In 90 and 91, we finally ended up launching the project to try and do it right. And here it continues, the largest retail security survey in the world. NRSS, if you're a retailer, you haven't participated, reach out to Corey, C-O-R-Y, at lpresearch.org.

We'll get you an instrument or a questionnaire. And it's not that heavy of a lift, but we really want complete and accurate information. It's best for everybody. Also, the LPRC ARCS program is another way for retailers. And we've now got I'm not sure the number. It's going to be probably a couple dozen now that are contributing very detailed data to allow themselves and others to map and understand and get much better, more relevant information to add to police information, to the valuable cap index and other scores come out. add to police information to the valuable cap index and other scores that come out. So participate in the ARCS program, A-R-C-C-S. Again, cory at lpresearch.org or operations at lpresearch.org. So that's it for me. Let me turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, if you could take it away. Thank you, Reid, and good update. Let me start this week with the latest economic forecast

for Q2 2022 from Euromonitor. The global economic outlook has worsened substantially since February 2022, with lower expected growth and higher uncertainty. Global real GDP growth is expected to decline to 1.8 to 3.6% in 2022 and to 1.8 to 4% in 2023 after 6% growth in 2021. Global inflation is expected to increase to 6.8 to 9% globally, and that's a big number in 2022, before declining to 3.8 to 6.3 in 2023. Global supply

chain constraints have tightened substantially since the Russia invasion of Ukraine with big increases in energy and commodity prices worsened by stronger pandemic restriction in China and in the businesses that I'm involved with I am directly feeling a lot of this that I'm talking about. For the US the economic outlook is also worsened significantly since the start of the war in Ukraine. In the baseline scenario US real GDP growth is expected to increase only 1.8% to 3.6% in 2022, and by just 0.5% to 2.8% in 2023. Several positive factors in the U.S. economy continue to support it. Economic activities are still below the pre-pandemic forecast, providing ongoing recovery potential labor market remains strong with low unemployment and employment rate approaching the pre COVID pandemic

level the US large oil and gas production partly offsets a negative economic effects of higher global energy prices. Although, if you look at, we just crossed over $5 a gallon, I'm not sure I believe that anymore. However, negative forecasters have become more dominant. Energy and food prices have increased sharply in the U.S. due to lower supplies from Russia and Ukraine. The rise in uncertainty and the increase in the financial market risk is reducing both

domestic and global demand. Consumer confidence is now lower than the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tighter monetary supply is expected to cause a larger increase in borrowing costs, further reducing consumer spending and business investment. Spillovers from the war in Ukraine have led to also a sharp deterioration in the eurozone economic outlook. The eurozone economy is extremely vulnerable to the rise in energy and food prices due to the cuts from the supply from Russia and Ukraine. cuts from the supply from Russia and Ukraine. It is also highly sensitive to rising geopolitical risks from the war and to general increase in global uncertainty and worsening global exports demand. After a fast 5.4% recovery in 2021,

the Eurozone real GDP growth is expected to decline by 1.7 to 3.5 percent in 2022 uh and to 0.8 to 3.2 percent in 2023 that's a rough rough uh start to the first half of the year and there's a lot of uncertainty in the bank and the back end of the year it's really exemplified to what's happening in the stock market let me switch now to one of my favorite topics which is innovation and technology a multiple platforms I've been running a series of articles looking at how technology started and where it is today for today's podcast let me summarize the surprising start and current state of three major loss prevention technology let's start with the cash register

it might be surprising to you but the original purpose of the cash register was to stop theft. The inventor was James Riddick, a saloon keeper in Dayton, Ohio. Watching his employees in 1879 taking cash from patrons really began to wonder how they separated what belonged to the business versus what they potentially were stealing for their own profits. to the business versus what they potentially were stealing from their own profits. Having observed counters on a steamship that kept track on the number of Propeller Revolution, with the help of his brother, he patented the first cash register in 1883. John H. Patterson, a storekeeper, bought the rights to Riddie's patent for $6,500 in 1884 and created what became the National Cash Register Company, or NCR. His interest in the technology was sparked by losses from one of his oldest retail clerks that was favoring friends by selling goods below regular prices. Patterson was also a master

salesman, and I actually went to that school school and it was really, really great training. And to NCRE brought highly professional sales training, which was later adopted by IBM that included the loss prevention concepts that are still in use today. Foremost in the selling process of the cash register was the TEF triangle which focused on the balance of risk opportunity and need rationalization the cash register decreased the opportunity to steal by accurately counting transaction and the loud noise which was by design and later the head of the bell that it made during a transaction increased the risk of getting caught. In 1973, IBM developed the first computer-powered cash register. It was also the first network point of sale allowing for the cancellation of data from 128 cash registers. A later decades introduced touchscreens, customized variation industries such as the food sector, and by early 2000, cloud POS made an appearance.

Today, you can check out on your smartphone in multiple retailers, but the ultimate evolution of the cash register was delivered by Amazon, which opened their first fully automated checkout store to the public in 2018. As of this year, as of right now, there's over 40 Amazon Go stores now open in the United States and the United Kingdom. Let's switch to cameras. The first recorded use of CCTV technology was in Germany in 1942. The system was designed by an engineer, Walter Brook, and was set for the monitoring of rockets. And these were the rockets that were being shot, especially the London, which were the first long-range ballistic missile that were launched from mobile platforms during World War II. The German military used the cameras to absorb rocket launches from inside a bunker at a safe distance. Commercial use of CCTV for basic live public and home

security monitoring emerged in 1949. In 1953, CCTV systems were used during the crowning of Queen Elizabeth in the United Kingdom. Cameras also started appearing on the streets of London and New York during this time. London is now the number two most CCTV surveilled city in the world, with just over 1,100 cameras installed per square mile. Fast forward to 72 years ago to today, and in 2021, the world crossed over one billion CCTV cameras installed worldwide. Through computer vision, the CCTV cameras become one of the most powerful data collection and solution execution solutions. And finally, let me summarize EAS

and its innovation journey. EAS has its origin in 1964, when Ron Ace, a store employee for Kroger, working in Ohio became frustrated with the ongoing problem of shoplifting. The idea of a technology to address it was sparked by the unsuccessful, I might say, cautious chase of a shoplifter of spirits. With the aid of his cousin, weeks later, the first cardboard mock-up of a tag that alarm was brought to the store. Fast forward to two years and the official library inventing ESSecurity ethical to Arthur Manassi.

He is inventor credited in creating and patenting a security device that could be attached to items for sale. Manassi system was based on RF radio frequency and became on the company called NOGO. By the end of that year, security tags were widely marketed to retail. On multiple levels, if you think about it, EAS was the first item level technology applied

to consumer products. As we see the video, it was a foundation of technology whose evolution of greater intelligence still continues today. Billions of EAS tags continue to be applied worldwide in many, many stores. So we have come full circle in this loss prevention edition. Our loss prevention technology is at the core of the success of EAS is again the test triangle. First introduced with the cash register. People will steal consumer

items if the opportunity is available and if they're rationalized they need it. The EAS alarm at the exit through multiple variations of EAS technologies increases the risk that you will get caught. So that's this week. With that let me turn turn it over to Tom. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Reid. Today, we're taping on Tuesday, and it is Patch Tuesday. So Microsoft has released its June patches, and it does address the zero-day vulnerability for O'Neill that we spoke about in the past couple weeks. It's a really nasty zero-day vulnerability that allows an Afores actor to access your remote capabilities by simply just having an attached document to a file. So this is an interesting patch because it does disable some of the remote diagnostics capabilities,

but I think it's a, it's a really important, important patch. And then up until recently, there wasn't a lot of conversation about when the patch was coming. So serves as a reminder. And I say it often because I think education is an awareness is about often and repetitiveness. Please patch your computers,

do your updates. It will save you in the long run. I think it's ultra important that you're doing that. So if you're listening to this podcast, by the time you're listening to it, the patch will have been out for at least two days. Go ahead and update your Microsoft Windows machines to make sure that you're safe from this zero-day vulnerability. And just as a brief reminder, what it allowed is if there was an attached And just as a brief reminder, what it allowed is if there was an attached document or Excel document, it allowed remote code to be executed. And it was kind of a really interesting one, but basically on its own, open up the ability to remote into a computer. And unlike other or past vulnerabilities, this one, you didn't actually have to click and open the file.

You could just the way your previous use your preview settings were there could actually really helped. So really helped them get into your computer. So this one's a bad one. Go ahead and patch. That's the easy one. There are a couple of interesting kind of ransomware, uh, things out there. You may have heard of, there are a couple of sites, uh, for you to search whether you are part of a ransomware attack or a breach. So there is a ransomware group, um,

AKA black cat is what they're called that actually um created a method that you could search to see if you were your encrypted data or your data was uh your corporate data was stolen so there's this element of ransomware where someone encrypts your file and then additionally as i always say don't call a cyber incident one specific thing because it generally molds into other things. So a breach isn't a breach. Ransomware isn't a ransomware. There's usually a crossover. So a lot of the more prolific ransomware attacks involve data theft.

So this is a really interesting kind of spin on the blackmail side of it. So, yeah, you might get an email. blackmail side of it. So yeah, you might get an email. Actually, I've seen a couple of real emails where the headline is, your personal data has been stolen and you will be published. And then it goes, the body of the email, I'm actually reading a real email is, good day. If you receive this letter, you are a customer, buyer, partner, or employee of blank company, which is at this web address. blank company, which is at this web address. Perhaps you bought something there and left your personal data, such as phone email address and credentials, and the email goes on. And basically what the ransomware folks are doing is they're taking this to the next level and attacking individuals that are a part of this to say, if you don't make a payment, we'll go ahead and release your

specific information. So as we talk about the dangers of ransomware, it is evolving. It's no longer about just encrypting the file and stopping people to get it. It's now getting into a blackmail level. And there are groups like Black Cat that have actually created a database so that you can go after they send that email and validate that they actually have your information. We talk all the time about the evolution of kind of crime and cyber incidents and what we're seeing today in the cyber space, which isn't much different than the physical space, is that you have a nexus occurring where criminals are combining different types of nefarious acts to monetize them. So a traditional ransomware attack, which was to lock your files and get you to pay a ransom to unlock them, has now morphed into a continuous of stealing data and then going to the end user level.

So if you think about a ransomware breach, and I'll just use anecdotal information, there's a ransomware that occurs that there is a breach component of it. Maybe you know that, maybe you don't, but it is someone that has millions, 10 million records that allows them, if they have emails, to go ahead and send 10 million opportunities to get information. And the unfortunate part about a lot of these type of attacks is what we've seen in the past is that these are not bluffs. These are attacks where there's full intention to execute what they say. There's also full intention to not execute if you don't, if you do pay them. And so there was some interesting studies about ransomware, specifically

about 60% of the people that pay the ransomware get their files opened up. So that still leaves that 4 to 10 that don't. So there is no easy answer here, but we're going to continue to watch it. I see a lot of blackhead activity in Australia right now. of black activity in Australia right now. But there are basically ransomware attacks happening at about the rate of every six to 11 seconds globally. So we're all susceptible to it. And it reminds me, it starts me to remind you of making sure that you're patching and doing all the things that we talk about on each of the calls. I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of just general technology and what

we're seeing out there. There was some interesting information that was released on Google, released kind of what their viewership was on YouTube. And I just want to throw this out there for context that a 1.5 billion people watch YouTube shorts monthly. So the short videos on YouTube. And if you're wondering kind of what that means to TikTok, because we've heard so much about TikTok in September of last year, there was about a billion monthly active users on TikTok. I think it's important to note that they're talking about active users doesn't really talk to what they're watching, where YouTube is actually saying there's 1.5 billion people watching videos. Meta and Facebook, for both Facebook Reels and Instagram, they're not releasing that data. But when we talk about the magnitude of social media,

I just want everybody to take a step back and think of 1.5 billion people, 1.5 billion people watch YouTube, and there's 330 some odd million people in the United States. So the sheer volume of video. And for all of us here listening, we know that there's a lot of great content to learn on YouTube, but there's also a lot of content of how to defeat and defraud. So YouTube is a great resource to learn what the red shoppers are talking about. And it's also a great research to read as you learn different ways to prevent both cyber and physical pieces of it. I also would say that as someone that's heavily involved in social media, TikTok is also a really great place, although it's not as necessarily easy to search to see what is being said.

So I think it's very interesting stuff. This week, kind of the last two weeks really, have been very volatile in the crypto market. And so Bitcoin and all of the – really all of the cryptocurrencies have suffered some significant losses. One of the things that we're starting to see is that there's a new trend that crypto is starting to follow the normal market conditions. This is somewhat of a logical assumption if you looked at it, but it was not necessarily intended to be the case. There's something called stablecoins. Stablecoins aren't backed by fiat currencies, but they use different algorithms to help keep stability. They also crashed. So it kind of shows the volatility overall. And to kind of further move on, there are a couple networks that are lenders based on cryptocurrency that have actually stopped

funding because of this. So Celsius is one of the larger cryptocurrency banks where to oversimplify this, you put deposit of money and you have a high interest yield based on cryptocurrency exchange. They've actually paused all withdrawals and transfers and swaps because of the extreme market condition. So when we talk about volatility and how these are not traditional banks and this is not FDIC insured. We're starting to see some of that. And this is a very interesting time for crypto because at the same time, we're seeing retailers announcing that on their online channel that they'll accept Bitcoin as a payment.

As someone that spends a ton of time in the financial market, I'm not suggesting that you run away from cryptocurrency. I'm not here to give and none of us are here to give advice on it. It's just simply reporting that what is occurring today. In more financial news, by the time this podcast is published, we should see another Fed rate hike. It's interesting. There was a Wall Street Journal article that said that there was a 50% likelihood that it would be a half a percent versus three quarters of a percent. Again, I think we'll see it on the higher side, closer to three quarters of a percent, but that 50-50% is what the Wall Street Journal is protecting. So by the time you're listening to

this, we'll probably already have heard about that. So just something to keep around. Just switching gears a little bit back to YouTube. YouTube has actually announced a new feature called Corrections, which will let a creator add info cards to the top right of a video at a specific time span. So I think this is a great, you know, great addition for folks in our space that are doing videos and need to add things later on. I know that I do a lot of YouTube videos and see a lot. And as you do these videos, you might need to add some context. And this is a good way to add a note later and allow it actually to expand. And then last, but certainly not least,

talking just a lot about automation and things out there, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released data on the number of crashes involving autonomous vehicles and level two vehicles with advanced driver assist systems. We don't have time today to talk about level one, two, three, four, and five, but basically the levels associated with how much of the autonomous is happening. Today, most of autonomous vehicles that you're seeing are driver-assisted. Anything that's commercially available is certainly driver-assisted. Fully autonomous is tested in very small fronts, but this is a really interesting, it's the first time this report was out. You may have seen it, it was all over the news, but

it takes data from July of 2021 through May of 2022. And what it shows is there's a total of 392 crashes reported, six that resulted in serious injury, five that resulted in fatalities, and only 25% of the crashes reported included information about the severity. So it's important to note that this data is somewhat flawed because we didn't get all of the information in it. And this is just factual data, right? Tesla accounts for 69% of those reports, followed by Honda with 23 percent followed by super with 2.5 percent it's really important to note that this report lacks a lot of detail on the number of vehicles with these systems manufactured in operation overall uh the use of them so while i think this is interesting data and we're going to continue to watch it because it's about automation and we

are starting to see in the LPRC lab some similar technologies used, obviously not to drive a car, but I think it's indicative to follow kind of the technology stream. This uses LIDAR and radar technology. We know that there are solutions in the LPRC. What will that mean for those solutions? I also think it's important to note that there is no, again, and I'll be a little repetitive here, there is no real supported data to show the number of vehicles in use. So we don't know if the sample size for Tesla was larger, and that's why the percentage is more. We can make anecdotal results. machine learning in the area where really a lot of these imaging autonomous and anti-collision technology started. And primarily their image-based sensors, their time of flight,

whether it be in the form of infrared, LIDAR, other laser-based, they are also a radar-based as well as a computer vision with actual what we would probably consider traditional video-based. But I felt that it was pertinent to our group because we use so much video and so many image sensors. So I'll continue to monitor that because I do actually think this will affect the implementation of some of these technologies as we're starting to get standardizations. My belief is that this data being shared will actually improve some of these technologies as we're starting to get standardizations. My belief is that this data being shared will actually improve some of the other use cases because the algorithms will have to get better. And some of the same people detection algorithms that are used in autonomous

vehicles are used in computer vision today in retail. So there is crossover with a lot of this technology, and that's really why I thought to mention it. Also, it's important to note, specific to LiDAR, that most modern cell phones have LiDAR sensors in them. So these sensors are becoming much more widely available and will continue to play a role in what we do here at the LPRC. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Reid. All right. Thanks so much to both of you, Tom and Tony, to Diego, our producer. Amazing, amazing information. We want, again, like to ask you all to contribute.

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Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.