3D Printing: Make anything you want

This is Crazy, Cool and Awesome. Yes, it's TECHNOLOGY. 

Technology and jobs: Coming to an office near you

The effect of today’s technology on tomorrow’s jobs will be immense—and no country is ready for it

By: The Economist

Technology and Your Job

INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.

For those, including this newspaper, who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was employed on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. The millions freed from the land were not consigned to joblessness, but found better-paid work as the economy grew more sophisticated. Today the pool of secretaries has shrunk, but there are ever more computer programmers and web designers.

Remember Ironbridge

Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits (see article). Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.

Why be worried? It is partly just a matter of history repeating itself. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution the rewards of increasing productivity went disproportionately to capital; later on, labour reaped most of the benefits. The pattern today is similar. The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.

Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.

Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information (“big data”), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people. Clever industrial robots can quickly “learn” a set of human actions. Services may be even more vulnerable. Computers can already detect intruders in a closed-circuit camera picture more reliably than a human can. By comparing reams of financial or biometric data, they can often diagnose fraud or illness more accurately than any number of accountants or doctors. One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.

At the same time, the digital revolution is transforming the process of innovation itself, as our special report explains. Thanks to off-the-shelf code from the internet and platforms that host services (such as Amazon’s cloud computing), provide distribution (Apple’s app store) and offer marketing (Facebook), the number of digital startups has exploded. Just as computer-games designers invented a product that humanity never knew it needed but now cannot do without, so these firms will no doubt dream up new goods and services to employ millions. But for now they are singularly light on workers. When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30m customers and employed 13 people. Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed 145,000 people in its heyday.

The problem is one of timing as much as anything. Google now employs 46,000 people. But it takes years for new industries to grow, whereas the disruption a startup causes to incumbents is felt sooner. Airbnb may turn homeowners with spare rooms into entrepreneurs, but it poses a direct threat to the lower end of the hotel business—a massive employer.

No time to be timid

If this analysis is halfway correct, the social effects will be huge. Many of the jobs most at risk are lower down the ladder (logistics, haulage), whereas the skills that are least vulnerable to automation (creativity, managerial expertise) tend to be higher up, so median wages are likely to remain stagnant for some time and income gaps are likely to widen.

Anger about rising inequality is bound to grow, but politicians will find it hard to address the problem. Shunning progress would be as futile now as the Luddites’ protests against mechanised looms were in the 1810s, because any country that tried to stop would be left behind by competitors eager to embrace new technology. The freedom to raise taxes on the rich to punitive levels will be similarly constrained by the mobility of capital and highly skilled labour.

The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems. One of the reasons for the improvement in workers’ fortunes in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution was because schools were built to educate them—a dramatic change at the time. Now those schools themselves need to be changed, to foster the creativity that humans will need to set them apart from computers. There should be less rote-learning and more critical thinking. Technology itself will help, whether through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or even video games that simulate the skills needed for work.

The definition of “a state education” may also change. Far more money should be spent on pre-schooling, since the cognitive abilities and social skills that children learn in their first few years define much of their future potential. And adults will need continuous education. State education may well involve a year of study to be taken later in life, perhaps in stages.

Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed. The best way of helping them is not, as many on the left seem to think, to push up minimum wages. Jacking up the floor too far would accelerate the shift from human workers to computers. Better to top up low wages with public money so that anyone who works has a reasonable income, through a bold expansion of the tax credits that countries such as America and Britain use.

Innovation has brought great benefits to humanity. Nobody in their right mind would want to return to the world of handloom weavers. But the benefits of technological progress are unevenly distributed, especially in the early stages of each new wave, and it is up to governments to spread them. In the 19th century it took the threat of revolution to bring about progressive reforms. Today’s governments would do well to start making the changes needed before their people get angry.

From the print edition: Leaders

EDMONTON

THINGS TO DO IN EDMONTON, ALBERTA

Reblog from travelalberta.com

 

Eskimos

Pro sports mania

Join the local fan frenzy at a live Oilers hockey game, or an Eskimos football game, or catch the best of bull riding and steer wrestling at the Canadian Finals Rodeo. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retail therapy

West Edmonton Mall is the largest shopping centre in North America with 800+ shops and services, a waterpark, skating rink, marine park, hotel and the world’s biggest indoor amusement park. For eclectic shops and cafes, hit historic Old Strathcona or the 124th Street area. 

Golf until the cows come home – and then some

With 17 hours of daylight in high summer, you can golf in Edmonton long after the cows have gone to bed!

Paintings, plants and people

The triumphant architecture of the Art Gallery of Alberta is a masterpiece in itself, housing local and international exhibitions. Explore the unique collections of the Royal Alberta Museum. Travel back in time at historic Fort Edmonton Park, where many feature films set in the old west have been shot.

 

It’s a jungle in there
Escape winter chills in the tropical gardens of the Muttart Conservatory. 








Get outta town!
Less than an hour away, Elk Island National Park is a sanctuary of aspen parkland. Watch for the bison that roam the park. Camp in the summer and cross country ski here in winter. If you’re looking for a blast from the past, be sure to visit the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village. Twenty-five minutes east of Edmonton.
You’re this close to more authentic Alberta experiences. Explore the towns and counties in Edmonton’s countryside.

Tablets as the New Ordering Servers In The Near Future

Chili's And Applebee's To Install Tablets At Every Table: The Ordering of the Future

Ordering of the future: dessert by tablet. (Credit: Ziosk)

Get ready to order dessert at Chili’s on a tablet–just look out for your sticky fingers. Brinker, which owns and operates the Chili’s and Maggiano’s brands, will be installing tablets on each table in its 823 operated Chili’s restaurants by March 2014, though the company says its servers will play a critical role in its new wireless experience.

Those tablets, provided by Texas firm Ziosk, will allow customers to order drink refills and desserts as well as play interactive games in what is an overall “reimaging” of Chili’s restaurants’ design, says Krista Gibson, senior vice president of brand strategy at Brinker International.
What you can’t do, at least initially, is order appetizers and your main course. For that, you still need a server and a host or hostess to seat you at your table. “The way we are positioning this with servers is we have a team-service approach where each server is assigned to each section, and we are thinking of this as a third server,” Gibson says. “In no way are we looking at this as a replacement for servers.”

According to Ziosk chief executive Austen Mulinder, the tablet’s business model isn’t aimed at cutting labor costs. The Microsoft MSFT +0.33% veteran instead has helped build a tool that uses a freemium model for revenue based, surprisingly, on gaming.
Restaurants make more money when customers can order dessert and coffee and then get out of there faster, and the Ziosk allows customers to pay by credit card on the tablet. A green LED light then notifies the serving staff that a group has paid and can leave without fuss. In tests, Chili’s found that half of customers opted to pay through the device and even more during busy workweek lunch hours.

But the device is supposed to really make money when groups, especially families, pay $0.99 to play games like trivia on the device while they sit. The system pays for itself, Mulinder says, if enough guests, at least a tenth of customers, opt into such “premium” content.
Servers can see more tips as the system increases the spending on their shift, Gibson says. In six months of testing, Chili’s locations saw an increase in per-person spend per check, translating to higher revenue for both the restaurant and the wait staff. The company is also more likely to get guests to fill out surveys and thus sign up for future email marketing from Brinker.
What’s to keep people from breaking the tablets, or simply walking off with them? As you can see in the image above, Ziosk designed its tablets to only work within a restaurant’s walls and without utility for thieves who wiped the device clean. The five-year-old company’s only lost two devices across over 100 million transactions to date. Mulinder says the device is also designed to be spill proof and safe to accidentally knock onto the ground should things get rowdy at happy hour.
As for the potential moneymakers, the games, Ziosk connected to Android’s app stores and then curates game selections to have kid-friendly and group options, with nothing rated above an “E for everyone” rating.

The systems are only being installed in Brinker-operated Chili’s locations. Brinker approves technologies like Ziosk that can then be offered in separate deals to franchisees.
There are other payment systems out there like EMN8 , which works with fast-serve restaurants like Burger King, Carls Jr. and Taco Bell to enable mobile and kiosk-based systems. Ziosk bills itself as different because of its focus on engagement and revenue sharing model for its premium content.
The elephant in the room remains labor costs. Like many restaurant operators, labor accounts for the single biggest bump in corporate expenses, $890 million off fiscal 2013 revenues of about $2.8 billion, the bulk of that from Chili’s.

Even if Ziosk won’t admit it, the company’s system would work for all courses, not just desserts. Other Ziosk partners already use it for appetizer and drink ordering. Should a major partner demand to use it for main courses as well, allowing it to trim wait staff on the floor, it might not make sense for Ziosk to say no. And a system that allows servers to simply look for payment and bring orders as they flow into the main point-of-sale system, if run well, means that companies like Brinker would be deliberating increasing their cost to maintain a close server relationship with clientele (something Gibson says is a priority for Chili’s).

Ziosk and Brinker wouldn’t disclose details of the deal beyond the revenue sharing model, but Gibson calls the installation “a huge initiative for us in this fiscal year.” Mulinder says this is by far Ziosk’s biggest partnership to date but that the system works for small chains as well. Bars would be a natural extension for the system, if a bit messier.

Technology: To Change Delivery Drivers Soon.

 Amazon To Introduce Flying Drone Delivery Service In 2015

 AMAZON PRIME AIR

Founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has announced a game-changing service in the works: a delivery service carried out by automated, flying drones.

The innovative service, to be called ‘Amazon Prime Air’, features product delivery by actual flying machines—the ‘octocopter’ drones pick up packages directly from the warehouse, and fly out to deliver them.

“I know this looks like science fiction, but it’s not,” said Bezos. Each drone can deliver a five-pound package in about half-an-hour, directly to the recipient’s doorstep.

The drones are powered by electricity, and are a greener alternative to driving trucks. “You give them coordinates and which GPS locations to fly to, and they take off and fly,” said Bezos, who is optimistic about finalizing this project by 2015. 

 Frequently Asked Questions 

 Q: Is this science fiction or is this real? A: It looks like science fiction, but it's real. From a technology point of view, we'll be ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively working on rules for unmanned aerial vehicles. 

Q: One day we'll see a fleet of Prime Air vehicles in the sky? A: Yes. One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today. 

Q: When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option? A: We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time. 

Q: How are you going to ensure public safety? A: The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritize public safety. Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards. 

These services will blow your mind on the coming years. Better keep up with trends and technology if you have that willingness to plug in to this Generation: The Information Age. 
Source: Amazon 

What is a Pyramid Scheme?

pyr·a·mid scheme

noun

1. 1.

   a form of investment (illegal in the US and elsewhere) in which each paying participant recruits two further participants, with returns being given to early participants using money contributed by later ones.
   
   
   
   

   
   

According to Federal Trade Commision, it goes this way:

Here are more guidelines to look out for

Multi-level Marketing and Pyramid Selling in Canada

What Is the Competition Bureau?

The Competition Bureau is an independent law enforcement agency responsible for the administration and enforcement of theCompetition Act, the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act, the Textile Labelling Act and the Precious Metals Marking Act. Its role is to promote and maintain fair competition so that Canadians can benefit from competitive prices, product choice and quality services. Headed by the Commissioner of Competition, the organization investigates anti-competitive practices and promotes compliance with the laws under its jurisdiction.

What Is the Competition Act?

The Competition Act is a federal law governing most business conduct in Canada. It contains both criminal and civil provisions aimed at preventing anti-competitive practices in the marketplace.

Multi-level Marketing Plans and Schemes of Pyramid Selling

The Competition Act explains the differences between multi-level marketing plans and schemes of pyramid selling, and sets out the responsibilities for operators and participants in these types of plans.Multi-level marketing, when it operates within the limits set by the Competition Act, is a legal business activity, while a scheme of pyramid selling is illegal as defined by the law.

What Is Multi-level Marketing?

Multi-level marketing is a plan for the distribution of products whereby participants earn money by supplying products to other participants in the same plan. They, in turn, make their money by supplying the same products to other participants.

What Should I Look Out For?

Although multi-level marketing plans, as defined in the Competition Act, are a legal business activity, there are certain things you should be aware of before joining such a plan.

It is illegal for operators or participants in a multi-level marketing plan to make representations relating to compensation or earnings under the plan unless they include the amount of compensation actually or likely to be received by a typical participant of the plan. Such representations can mislead potential recruits to believe that it will be easy to make large amounts of money.

As well, operators of, and participants in, a multi-level marketing plan should ensure that any representations made about the plan are — or include information that is — fair, reasonable and timely as the plan relates to:

• the different levels of earnings or compensation received by participants in the plan;
• the amount of money earned by a typical participant; and
• the time and effort required to reach specific levels of income.

What Is a Scheme of Pyramid Selling?

A scheme of pyramid selling is a multi-level marketing plan that incorporates any one of a number of specified marketing practices that make it a criminal offence under the Competition Act.

It is illegal if:

• participants pay money for the right to receive compensation for recruiting new participants;
• a participant is required to buy a specific quantity of products, other than at cost price for the purpose of advertising, before the participant is allowed to join the plan or advance within the plan;
• participants are knowingly sold commercially unreasonable quantities of the product or products (this practice is called inventory loading); or
• participants are not allowed to return products on reasonable commercial terms.

What Are the Possible Penalties?

People who contravene the multi-level marketing or scheme of pyramid selling provisions of the Competition Act can be convicted and sentenced to a fine at the discretion of the court or a prison term of up to five years, or both.

How Do I File a Complaint?

If you believe that someone has in some way contravened any of the legislation enforced and administered by the Bureau and you want to complain, you can telephone, fax, e-mail or write the Bureau at the numbers listed at the end of this publication.

The Bureau conducts its investigations in private and keeps confidential the identity of the source and the information provided. However, if someone has important evidence about a contravention of any of the acts the Bureau administers, that person may be asked to testify in court.

Written opinions

The Competition Bureau facilitates compliance with the law by providing various types of written opinions subject to fees. Company officials, lawyers and others are encouraged to request an opinion on whether the implementation of a proposed business plan or practice would raise an issue under the Competition Act. These written opinions are binding on the Commissioner of Competition when all the material facts have been submitted by or on behalf of an applicant for an opinion and when they are accurate. A specific written opinion will be based on information provided by the requestor and will take into account previous case law, prior opinions and the stated policies of the Bureau.

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The Bureau produces CD-ROMS and publications on various aspects of the Competition Act, the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act, the Textile Labelling Act and the Precious Metals Marking Act. To find out more about our CD-ROMs and publications, contact the Information Centre:

Information Centre
Competition Bureau
50 Victoria Street
Gatineau QC K1A 0C9

Toll-free:  1-800-348-5358
National Capital Region: 819-997-4282
TDD (for hearing impaired):  1-800-642-3844
Fax: 819-997-0324
En ligne: Enquiries/Complaints
Web site: www.competitionbureau.gc.ca

This publication is only a guide. It provides basic information about the Competition Bureau and the acts it administers. For further information, you should refer to the full text of the acts or contact the Competition Bureau at one of the numbers listed above.