Helping the homeless in Detroit

The Bob Pritchard Column 

Tiny homes, from 250 to 400 square feet, are being built around the United States for a variety of reasons. Some are designed for affordability, others to be constructed quickly, and some for people who choose to live a minimalist lifestyle.

 

 

In Detroit, an entire neighborhood of tiny houses is under construction, with one primary goal: giving homeless and low-income people the opportunity to own a house.  The first  homes were completed in late 2016.

 

Half of the houses will be occupied by formerly homeless people, with seniors and college students making up the rest of the population. The concept of providing tiny houses for low-income people isn’t new — San Jose, California Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon have created villages of tiny homes for the homeless.  Research shows the most efficient way to combat homelessness is to provide those living on the streets with homes. 

 

But the Detroit model is different for an important reason: It's the only tiny house community in the country where residents rent to own.  This is not only about about ending homelessness, but ending poverty for these families.

 

When they move in, residents sign a one-year lease with a rent that amounts to no more than one third of their monthly income. They sign new annual leases for their first three years in the home while they comply with the terms.  After three years, they are invited to sign a contract that amounts to the total rent for four subsequent years. After paying that off (seven years after moving in), the resident will legally become the owner of the land and home. Their rent will have bought them the house. 

 

The houses are available for individuals or couples, and are being built by a combination of professional construction workers and volunteers.

 

The neighborhood is also exceptional for another reason: Each tiny home will look unique with 25 individual sets of architectural plans, ranging from Cape Cod to Victorian to Modern styles.  Everything is very different so people have a pride in their home.  Each home requires five weeks of construction and costs an estimated $40,000.

 

The development is completely funded by private money, and grants from organizations like the Ford Motor Company  and the RNR Foundation.

 

The tenants are now part of a homeowners association, which will be involved in the process of choosing future residents. They'll also take part in mandatory monthly classes about financial literacy and home ownership.

 

Unlike many similar residential projects, this Tiny Homes community won't feature communal space for cooking or doing laundry, since that could make it more complicated for residents to sell their homes later. 

 

Locating the homes in a central area of Detroit also sets it apart. They become part of the life of the city, tucked into an existing neighborhood.

 

A brilliant idea to be applauded

2050 - less jobs or more jobs ??

How many and what kind of jobs will be replaced by automation is one of the big debates of our time. Some projections seem dire: About 7.1 million jobs, with two-thirds of them in office and administration, will be lost because of labor market changes in coming years, according to the World Economic Forum. 

Yet some economists suggest that automation can actually increase employment in the industries it transforms.

Less jobs or more jobs - one can be certain - they will be different jobs ..... and with the rate of new knowledge - the key is to be able to learn how to learn - and accept change.

What do you think? 

Have Hackers have won the Cyberwar? Does privacy exist?

The chances are is that your details are sitting on a list that you don't know about . 

You may not know that person...... but they know you !!!!

• At Equifax names and personal details  (including credit cards , emails etc ) of up to 143 million people in the United States (half the USA population) U.K. and Canada have been hacked ,
• One of Britain's largest retail franchises, CEX, disclosed it has been hit by a data breach that could have compromised the information of as many as 2 million customers – including personal details like names and addresses.
• Online spam bot - A security researcher in Paris has unearthed an open web server hosted in the Netherlands that contains as many as 711 million usernames and passwords
• London healthcare group - Bupa has suffered a data breach (13 July 2017) affecting 500,000 customers on its international health insurance plan.
• Zomato, which provides users with an online guide to restaurants, cafes and clubs, reported that data from 17 million users had been stolen, including email addresses and hashed passwords.
• Security researchers at the Kromtech Security Research Center discovered a massive database of 560 million login credentials which is believed to come from up to 10 popular online services such as LinkedIn and Dropbox, obtained during previous data breaches
• Payday loan company Wonga has fallen victim to a large data breach that could have hit as many as 245,000 of its customers including bank account numbers and sort codes
• A major breach of Three network customer upgrade database revealed last November is worse than the network operator initially thought, when their network was accessed using an employee login. They said 200,000 of their 9 million  was compromised.
• Sportswear retailer Sports Direct failed to tell its entire workforce that they might have had their personal credentials stolen in an internal security breach
• Tesco Bank, the consumer finance wing of the British supermarket giant, froze its online operations – after as many as 20,000 customers had money stolen from their accounts.(up to 40'000 accounts compromised 
• Accounting software provider , Sage could turn out to be one of the most important in UK data breach history if its scale is confirmed. According to the firm, the employee data of up to 280 UK customers representing a large number of individual users could be at risk - this could represent the entire UK population! 
• Kiddicare's customers were getting spammy Sms's - and they realised their data was compromised - they   played down the fact it had let names, addresses and contact details of up to 800,000 people
• CEO of TalkTalk initially struggled to confirm how many of its four million customers were affected after hackers exploited a reported weakness in the firm's website - the ceo said it was only a mere 157,000 (was one of them you?)
• A serious attack in which a hacker was able to get his or her hands on 1,163,996 credit and debit card records from online holiday firm Think W3
• two breaches at Yahoo -- the bigger one involved 1 billion accounts, the lesser impacted 500 million 
• a hack at Myspace that involved 360 million accounts

And the list goes on!!!!

In my view, knowledge is no longer a valuable commodity. It's out there in abundance. It's how you use it that's valuable.

What do you think? 

12 key takeouts of why Steve Jobs was successful

Why Steve Jobs  was successful:- 

  

1. Focus
2. Simplify - Make it simple - UX is key
3. Create an ecosystem - end to end
4. When behind, leapfrog - No CDS - straight to iTunes 
5. Put products before profit - r and d and innovation is key
6. Don't be a slave to focus groups - trust your intuition 
7. Bend reality - make the impossible possible - find a way
8. Push for perfection
9. Have the brightest and the best - and work as a team 
10. Engage face to face - collaboration is key - shit happens when you connect and KLT
11. Know the big picture and the tiniest details 
12. Be human and humourous - liberal arts:science and technology - the crazy ones that can think they can change the world are the ones that they invariably do 

Productivity and technology

The AI pacman is gobbling up the medical and finance industries

The Bob Pritchard Column 

The most exciting, far reaching and awe-inspiring technology advances in recent times have been in healthcare, the financial area and artificial intelligence which is driving much of this dramatic change.   AI is impacting nearly every industry imaginable. Intelligence and consciousness are prerogatives of the living, and the inevitability of their existence in machines is hard for most of us to understand.

 

We need to understand that AI is dramatically altering both medicine and finance. 

While the industries are indispensable to our economies and to our lives, many people that work in them, however, are replaceable with AI guided robots performing everything from routine medical functions to major operations and Blockchain absolutely decimating the finance, insurance, banking, share trading and associated industries.

 

 

Let’s begin with the automated diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. IBM’s artificial intelligence machine, Watson, is now as good as a professional radiologist when it comes to diagnosis, and it’s also been compiling 30 billion medical images to aid in specialized treatment for image heavy fields like pathology and dermatology.  Cardiology is also being overhauled with the advent of artificial intelligence. It used to take doctors nearly an hour to quantify the amount of blood transported with each heart contraction, and it now takes only 15 seconds.  With these computers in major hospitals and clinics, doctors can process almost 260 million images a day in their respective fields, which means finding skin cancers, blood clots, and infections all with unprecedented speed and accuracy, not to mention billions of dollars saved in research and maintenance.

 

Currently, aside from Blockchain, there are almost 15,000 startups working to actively disrupt finance. They are creating computer-generated trading and investment models that blow those crafted by their human counterparts out of the water. Many major hedge funds are already cutting staff. The 100 expensive senior executives in the even more expensive suits who can’t talk business except in expensive, elite restaurants are just 5 minutes from being replaced by one scruffy, personality deprived techie whose normal lunch is coffee and a bag of crisps.

 

The result is billions of dollars made with fewer people, greater certainty, and much more comfortable work attire.

 

So where do we go from here?  At least 40% of U.S. jobs can be swallowed by artificial intelligence machines and if we aren’t careful about the degree to which we automate them, we are looking at an incredibly serious domestic threat.   

Get excited about what AI can do for us, and think very deeply about how it can integrate with us, otherwise we could have major issues.

A hotel run almost entirely by robots is expanding internationally

The Bob Pritchard Byte

In Sasebo, Japan, a hotel run almost entirely by robots has been so successful in the last two years that owners are to open 100 more locations. The initial aptly named Weird Hotel is part of an amusement park but business has been so good that they plan to expand internationally within the next five years.
 
The huge saving in labor cost keeps the hotel affordable. They plan to add 1,000 more similar hotels in the future with robots making up 90% of the total staff.
 

 

 

Having robots in charge throughout the hotel makes it the most efficient hotel in the world.  To check in, arriving guests can either talk with a humanoid robot who speaks Japanese or a dinosaur who speaks English. To make sure no one steals the prehistoric receptionist — or any other robot — humans are also on staff as security, making beds and monitoring the hotel at all times.

 

Apart from the  life-sized dinosaur in the lobby there is  a roving recycling bin for guests to keep the hotel tidy.

 

The hotel staff waits patiently for guests to complete the check-in process. (They have to. They are robots.)   Floor robots, also becoming very popular in Japanese airports to assist weaker travelers, carry guests' luggage to their rooms. Guests can leave their luggage in a cloak room, manned by a cloak room robot who can store unused luggage until checkout.  

 

Each room comes stocked with Tuly, a hotel concierge robot that can help guests find nearby restaurants, recommend events, can control room temperature, change channels on the TV and answer any other question you may have.

 

For just $80, the general public can spend a night with the dinosaurs and the robots.

 

No one thought a supermarket could be run entirely by robots  and AI until Amazon Go, then insurance companies came along, autonomous public transportation and now the hospitality industry is joining the long list.

 

We're going to become caretakers for the robots. That's what the next generation of work is going to be. Let's not kid ourselves here, robots already run most of our world. We'll be their butlers soon enough