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Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly.

That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.

And even if the ads don’t shift based on which people are watching, the technology’s ability to determine the viewers’ demographics is golden for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience.

While the technology remains in limited use for now, advertising industry analysts say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined.

The concept is reminiscent of the science-fiction movie “Minority Report,” in which Tom Cruise’s character enters a mall and finds that retinal scanners identify him and prompt personalized ads that greet him by name.

But this technology doesn’t go nearly that far. It doesn’t identify people individually — it simply categorizes them by outward appearances.

So a video screen might show a motorcycle ad for a group of men, but switch to a minivan ad when women and children join them, said Vicki Rabenou, the chief measurement officer of Tampa, Fla.-based TruMedia Technologies Inc., one of the leaders in developing the technology.

“This is proactive merchandising,” Rabenou said. “You’re targeting people with smart ads.”

Because the tracking industry is still in its infancy, there isn’t yet consensus on how to refer to the technology. Some call it face reading, face counting, gaze tracking or, more generally, face-based audience measurement.

Whatever it’s called, advertisers are finally ready to try it, said advertising consultant Jack Sullivan, a senior vice president of Starcom USA in Chicago. “I think you’re going to see a lot of movement toward it by the end of this year in the top 10 markets,” he said.

Because face tracking might feel reminiscent of Big Brother, manufacturers are racing to offer reassurances. When the systems capture an image of who’s watching the screen, a computer instantly analyzes it. The systems’ manufacturers insist, however, that nothing is ever stored and no identifying information is ever associated with the pictures. That makes the system less intrusive than a surveillance camera that records what it sees, the developers say.

First, the rapid expansion of the monetary base that the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England and others have engineered in the last several months would have to continue and, importantly, would have to feed into a more rapid and sustained expansion of money in the hands of the general public.

Money supply M1 (consisting of currency in circulation and sight/checking deposits by non-banks) has gained momentum recently, especially in the US. We will be watching closely how this measure of money will evolve in the coming months.

Second, governments would have to face difficulties in financing rapidly rising expenditures on the various stimulus and bailout packages through taxes and selling bonds to the general public. In such circumstances, political pressures on central banks to monetise government spending would probably rise. This could be done through central bank loans to the government, central bank buying of government bonds at auction, outright unsterilised purchases of government bonds in the open market or additional lending to banks against government collateral.

Last, but not least, a combination of sustained monetary growth and high fiscal deficits would have to undermine the general public’s confidence in both the government’s ability to service the debt without taking resort to the printing press, and in the central bank’s ability or willingness to resist such pressures. A sudden surge in inflation expectations on the back of such a loss in confidence would induce people to reduce their deposits and cash holdings and pile into real assets. The velocity of money and inflation would rise, and the government/central bank would have to keep printing ever more money to finance government spending.

Clearly, this is an extreme scenario. Governments and central banks would have to jettison their commitment to long-term fiscal sustainability and keeping inflation low, and the public would have to lose confidence in their credibility. Given the reputation that central banks have built up, and given the commitment of central bankers to maintaining low inflation, a return to high inflation or even hyperinflation would seem to us to be no more than a distant possibility.

But the best part of the project might be its acronym. The demonstration is called “One Box, One Wire” — OB1, for short. Use the Force, sysadmins!

The key to OB1, retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger tells Waterman, is the “separation kernel,” a piece of software “guaranteed to keep the different networks separate.”

The software… creates “what we call security domains … in essence virtual machines or virtual servers … each one of them is impregnable. Even viruses that operate at the very deepest level of the operating system cannot get around the new software,” he said.

“We sit literally on the bare metal … on the microprocessor. What we create is a secure platform, and on top of that platform you can run Windows or Linux … inside of a securely separated domain, where … your top-secret or confidential corporate data … can be protected and cannot be accessed by an intruder” from any one of the other domains.

According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to “complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012.”

“It wouldn’t be logical to withdraw the investment from where we’re growing, and our goal is to protect investments in emerging markets,” he said in a statement published by the business daily Gazeta Mercantil.

Meanwhile, he cut the company’s revenue forecast for this year by 14% to $9.5 billion from $11 billion, as the economic crisis began to cause rapid slowdowns in sales.

GM already announced three programs of paid leave, and Ardila added that GM Brazil “is going to wait and see how the market behaves in order to know what decision to take” with regard to possible layoffs.

For Ardila, the injection in Brazil’s automobile sector of 8 billion reais ($3.51 billion) recently announced by the federal and state governments of Sao Paulo “has already begun to revive sales,” which fell by 12% in October.

The executive said that the company will operate a “conservative” scenario in 2009 with an estimated production of 2.6 million units, and another more “optimistic” that contemplates sales of 2.9 million.

That’s why, as oil markets attempt to calibrate in the face of this recession, some traders, refiners, big oil companies and other interests have been buying cheap oil in recent weeks and squirreling it away in storage tanks and ships with plans to unload it months from now when prices are higher.

It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much oil is being stored in ships, but Frontline LTD, which runs one of the largest crude supertanker fleets, estimates 80 million barrels of oil are drifting slowly on the high seas—roughly equal to a day’s oil consumption for the entire world.

Storage space for oil has become so tight in the U.S. it’s tough to find room onshore.

According to the latest report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 339 million barrels of crude are in commercial stocks — a 16 percent increase over this time last year and well above the U.S. average.

As oil demand drops, crude has filled tank farms in storage hubs like Cushing, Okla., and packed an underground network of pipelines.

The demand slump and supply glut are forcing some domestic producers to pull back on exploration for new oil and production of existing reserves.

In the last four months, 807 drilling rigs have been taken out of commission — a third of the total that were operating during drilling’s peak at the end of September, says Jeff Dietert, an analyst with Simmons & Company International.

In addition to dropping 70 percent since its record high closing price of $145.29 a barrel on July 3, the oil market has gone into contango, a condition in which the current price of crude is less than contracts for future delivery of oil months from now. That’s motivating players in the energy market to stockpile.

Here’s why: Oil purchased Friday for $41.68 a barrel could immediately be sold through a forward contract for September delivery at a price of $52.85 a barrel. That’s a gross profit of more than $11 per barrel before storage costs.

Those costs vary, but tanker rates have been dropping and Dietert says chartering a vessel that holds up to 2 million barrels of oil is running about $60,000 a day. That means storing oil at sea for six months would cost roughly $1 per barrel per month, leaving a profit of more than $5 per barrel.

Investors rushed headlong into the contango, as the spread between 1-month and 12-month crude futures widened to $17 in early December. That gap between current and future prices narrowed recently to as little as $10 per barrel, although on Friday the one-year spread was $14.70 a barrel.

Dietert says that when the gap in price between oil contracts closes, the incentive to store oil will disappear. “For now the contango is still sufficiently wide to justify continued storage on tankers,” he says, “but probably not good enough for new players to start doing this.

Dietert says the gap in oil prices is beginning to close because the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is cutting its production, taking oil off the market in the hopes of stopping the price slide.

“This could signal we’re near a bottom in terms of prices,” he says.

Phil Flynn of Alaron Trading Corp. thinks the oil market’s contango is far from over. He’s projecting a vicious cycle of sorts for the next several months. As oil prices rise, stored crude will be released into the market, causing a glut that will drive the price of oil back down again and motivating some players to store more of it.

Reports surfaced that some supertankers that had been used to store oil were being unloaded, he says, which resulted in weaker oil prices for a few days. “This could be the market saying these guys are dumping oil now but we still think we need to store it.”

For now, some vessels are idling in the Gulf of Mexico until they get directions to unload at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Loop. Others are doing slow circles around Scotland’s Orkney Islands in the North Sea. Still more are waiting off the coasts of once booming Asian economies.

The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere.

Experts believe the recession will tighten the state’s grip still further as benefit handouts soar and Labour directs public sector organisations to create jobs to soak up unemployment.

In the northeast of England the state is expected to be responsible for 66.4% of the economy this year, up from 58.7% when a similar study was carried out four years ago. When Labour came to power, the figure was 53.8%.

The northwest has seen a similarly relentless advance by the state, according to the research commissioned by The Sunday Times from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).

“Labour has failed to encourage private sector investment across the country. Instead of supporting enterprise and small businesses, Gordon Brown has used the public sector to cover up his failures,” said Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary.

The CEBR reached its estimates for 2008-9 by applying the 6.68% state spending increase announced in November’s prebudget report evenly across the country, although in practice some regions will receive more than others.

Across the whole of the UK, 49% of the economy will consist of state spending, while in Wales, the figure will be 71.6% – up from 59% in 2004-5. Nowhere in mainland Britain, however, comes close to Northern Ireland, where the state is responsible for 77.6% of spending, despite the supposed resurgence of the economy after the end of the Troubles.

Even in southern England, the government’s share of spending is growing relentlessly. In the southeast, it has gone up from 33% to 36% of the economy in four years.

The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.

Large-scale layoffs in the northeast will mean a rise in benefit payments. Newcastle-based Northern Rock was nationalised last year and has shed 1,500 jobs. Nissan announced three weeks ago that it was to cut its workforce in Sunderland by 1,200.

Many are finding new jobs in the public sector, according to One North East, the state development agency.

One of the biggest public sector employers in the northeast is the Department of Work and Pensions, which employs 13,400 there, hundreds of them in jobcentres.

“It’s not that the public sector in the northeast is too big, it is that the private sector is too small,” said Malcolm Page, deputy chief executive of One North East. “The decline of traditional industries in the past means we need to establish more big private-sector companies in the region.”

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that since Labour came into power in 1997 jobs in the public sector have swelled by more than 500,000. In 1997, more than 5.1m people were employed in the public sector. The figure for 2008 is 5.7m.

However, Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said that the state’s grip on the regions was likely to soften the impact of recession there.

“Newcastle and areas like that have a large public sector which will at least shield traditionally very depressed areas from the battering that southeast England is going to get.

Michael G Michael from the University of Wollongong’s School of Information Systems and Technology, has coined the term “uberveillance” to describe the emerging trend of all-encompassing surveillance.

“Uberveillance is not on the outside looking down, but on the inside looking out through a microchip that is embedded in our bodies,” Dr Michael told ninemsn.

Microchips are commonly implanted into animals to reveal identification details when scanned and similar devices have been used with Alzheimers patients.

US company VeriChip is already using implantable microchips, which store a 16-digit unique identification number, on humans for medical purposes.

“Our focus is on high-risk patients, and our product’s ability to identify them and their medical records in an emergency,” spokesperson Allison Tomek said.

“We do not know when or if someone will develop an implantable microchip with GPS technology, but it is not an application we are pursuing.”

Another form of uberveillance is the use of bracelets worn by dangerous prisoners which use global positioning systems to pinpoint their movements.

But Dr Michael said the technology behind uberveillance would eventually lead to a black box small enough to fit on a tiny microchip and implanted in our bodies.

This could also allow someone to be located in an emergency or for the identification of corpses after a large scale disaster or terrorist attack.

“This black box will then be a witness to our actual movements, words — perhaps even our thoughts —-and play a similar role to the black box placed in an aircraft,” he said.

He also predicted that microchip implants and their infrastructure could eliminate the need for e-passports, e-tags, and secure ID cards.

“Microchipping I think will eventually become compulsory in the context of identification within the frame of national security,” he said.

Although uberveillance was only in its early phases, Dr Michael’s wife, Katina Michael — a senior lecturer from UOW’s School of Information Systems and Technology — said the ability to track and identify any individual was already possible.

“Anyone with a mobile phone can be tracked to 15m now,” she said, pointing out that most mobile phone handsets now contained GPS receivers and radio frequency identification (RFID) readers.

“The worst scenario is the absolute loss of human rights,” she said.

Wisconsin, North Dakota and four other states in the US have already outlawed the use of enforced microchipping.

“Australia hasn’t got specific regulations addressing these applications,” she said.

Universities (even those with enormous endowments) have historically taken advantage of recessions to bring austerity to teaching. There will be hiring freezes and early retirements. Rather than replacements, more adjuncts will be hired, and more graduate students will be recruited, eventually flooding the market with even more fully qualified teacher-scholars who will work for almost nothing. When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members.

Nearly every humanities field was already desperately competitive, with hundreds of applications from qualified candidates for every tenure-track position. Now the situation is becoming even worse. For example, the American Historical Association’s job listings are down 15 percent and the Modern Languae’s listings are down 21 percent, the steepest annual decline ever recorded. Apparently, many already-launched candidate searches are being called off; some responsible observers expect that hiring may be down 40 percent this year.

What is 40 percent worse than desperate?

The majority of job seekers who emerge empty-handed this year will return next year, and for several years after that, and so the competition will snowball, with more and more people chasing fewer and fewer full-time positions.

Meanwhile, more and more students are flattered to find themselves admitted to graduate programs; many are taking on considerable debt to do so. According to the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, about 23 percent of humanities students end up owing more than $30,000, and more than 14 percent owe more than $50,000.

As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities:

* You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.

* You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.

* You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.

* You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

Those are the only people who can safely undertake doctoral education in the humanities. Everyone else who does so is taking an enormous personal risk, the full consequences of which they cannot assess because they do not understand how the academic-labor system works and will not listen to people who try to tell them.

The move is seen by some as an initial step towards fulfilling president Obama’s promise to form a civilian national security force as powerful as the U.S. military.

The intent of the program “is to maximize the use of the civilian workforce to allow military personnel to be fully utilized for operational requirements,” according to a Defense Department report.

The program was officially implemented one week ago, on the 23rd January, when Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed Defense Department Directive 1404.10 (PDF), which provides a summation of the duties the workforce will undertake.

The directive, which is effective immediately, states that civilian employees of the DoD will be asked to sign agreements stating that they will deploy in support of military missions for up to two years if needed.

Workforce members, who are divided into different designations under the directive, will serve overseas in support of humanitarian, reconstruction and, if necessary, combat-support missions.

“If the employee does not wish to deploy, every effort will be made to reassign the employee to a nondeploying position.” the DoD report states.

While the directive suggests that the DoD will at first seek volunteers to serve in the civilian workforce, section 4, subsection (e) paragraph (2) states:

Management retains the authority to direct and assign civilian employees, either voluntarily, involuntarily, or on an unexpected basis to accomplish the DoD mission.

In addition, the directive states that all workforce members will be subject to physical and psychological testing, both before and after deployment.