Open up your mind and say, ahh...

With the rumors churning about Google’s potential “heads-up display glasses” coming out at the end of the year, we thought it was important to look back at the history of this technlogy.

Heads-up displays allow users to receive data on a screen in front of them, so they don’t have to look somewhere else, thus disrupting what they’re concentrating on. Each HUD has three parts: the combiner, which is the surface the data is projected on — like a windshield or lens; the projector unit, which puts out the image; and a video generation computer, which creates the images.

Part of an unpublished appendix for The End of Business as Usual…

The mystique of Twitter, Facebook and Google+ causes a momentary lapse of reason where businesses are surprisingly acting first and addressing “the why” at a later point in time, if at all. Without careful consideration and strategy, a great wave of stream fatigue, social blindness or far worse, customer unlikes and unfollows in will befall unsuspecting businesses en masse in social media. It will come down to a vital, but fixable disconnect. Businesses are interacting with consumers to socialize rather than learn about customer expectations to in turn, deliver tangible value, improve product experiences, and invest in long-term relationships.

While many brands are designing editorial and engagement programs to encourage consumers to “Like” and follow profiles, view videos, submit user generated content, consumers are simultaneously struggling to find signal against the noise, grappling with stream fatigue and sometimes an overwhelming sense of over connectedness.

The more discerning consumers are learning that tuning out is merely temporary relief for misdiagnosed symptoms and not a fix to their bigger problems. Once they realize that streams are programmable, that social content and relationships require thoughtful curation, and more importantly, recognize when inbound streams no longer offer usefulness, they’ll find that the only cure rests in unLikes and unFollows.

Consumers, like businesses, are learning how to navigate social streams as they go. As experience matures however, building relationships within social networks will become a quiet, but important art of curation. People will select and fine-tune the relationships they deem worthy to improve the content that flows through their streams. People, brands, products, and apps will come and go. This constant modification sets the stage for an important shift in the balance of power between brands and consumers. In social media, it’s less about caveat emptor and now about caveat venditor, let the seller beware.

This is more true than ever before, especially in light of Facebook’s chatty OpenGraph development platform. Mark Zuckerberg refers to the new movement as Frictionless Sharing. Others worry that it will spark frictionless frustration. As brands and developers experiment with sending automatic updates into the stream, friends and friends of friends will be subjected to a relentless series of action verbs in their News Feeds…

“Sarah Perez listened to Foster the People on Spotify”

“Robert Scoble read Whoops I didn’t mean for you to read this on Washtington Post Social Reader.”

The first reaction on the business side is unfortunately that of excitement. Strategists are huddling right now devising ways to send updates to trigger the social effect to expand adoption, reach, and Likes!

The first reaction on the consumer side is a mixture of concern and annoyance. People are genuinely worried that they’re going to either spam or be spammed and of course the temporary debate about privacy emerges once again.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a bold move by Facebook and executed properly, it will increase interaction around common interests and ignite peer-to-peer commerce simply by sharing or reacting to activities. The first update to many of these Frictionless Sharing apps will be that of a mute button until developers and consumers can find the balance of what’s worthy of sharing and consuming.

Even before the OpenGraph, stream fatigue was already endemic among friends and also their favorite businesses. A friend of mine conducted an interesting social experiment earlier in the year. What Andrew Blakeley wound up uncovering were signs that brands are in fact not considering consumer experiences outside of direct brand engagement. Blakeley assumed the role of a consumer and set out to Like every brand that presented an opportunity to connect on Facebook. Ranging from email requests and web sties to TV and print advertising and real world shopping, Blakeley Liked a total of 46 brands in one week.

Out of the gate, Blakeley observed that only 10 out of the 46 brands offered a reason why consumers should Like them. Once liked, the experience only degraded. Aside from an occasional contest, he felt largely unrewarded. Most notably, he learned that the online experience for consumers was undefined or uncharted, leaving consumers to fend for themselves to find relevance within the engagement without any reinforcement to brand value or story.

Andrew summed up his experience quite humbly, “My week as a social consumer left me tired and confused. It left my Facebook newsfeed so crammed with nonsense to the point that I could scroll entire pages without seeing my friends.”

Andrew experienced stream fatigue first hand and the inability to keep up with the information that populates one’s social stream.

While brands are learning in public, it’s important to realize that earning a Like is far simpler than re-earning a Like once it’s lost. Similar to traditional online advertising, consumers can ignore marketing messages once in the stream. They can merely become immune to updates or worse, they will resort to unLiking and unfriending anyone who is taking away from the social experience.

In a study published by Exact Target in June 2011, the meanings of Fan and Like in Facebook were scrutinized. The company found that while businesses believed that consumers Like brand pages were truly fans of the company, only 42% of consumers agreed that marketers could interpret a Like as such. In fact, 33% are indecisive and 25% disagree that Likes mean that they are fans or advocates of the brand.

May I Have Your Intention Please?

With each day that passes, the social-savvy consumer will start asking brands for their intentions as requests for their allegiance escalates. Accordingly brands will have to give reasons upfront for why consumers should Like or follow them into social frontiers. Customers will want to know what’s in it for them before they open up their stream beyond family and friends. For brands, engagement comes down to understanding how to best deliver value to consumers in social networks.

The reality is that customers can and will cut ties with brands that do not take their best interests into account. Consumers are realizing that they have the power to reduce or eliminate stream fatigue by tailoring the relationships they maintain in each network. This is a new kind of power because in the past, they couldn’t manage/curate these brand relationships in the media they consumed.

Every business will eventually realize that the hype driving today’s social media is only momentary. It’s not a miracle drug that cures the ails of faceless broadcast marketing. Customers are already demanding a more useful and beneficial approach to engagement. The question is, can you deliver it in and around of your strategic campaigns?

Image credit: Shutterstock

HOLLISTER, California — Mike Corbin fiddles with his coffee cup as he sits in his ’50s-style diner, a bit of kitsch he added to his warehouse on the outskirts of town. This is not the Hollister you see advertised on the shirts and sweatpants worn by teenagers. It’s industrial, gritty, a little run down. But for Corbin it is heaven, a place where his dreams once came true.

And might yet again.

Corbin built this diner so customers could grab a bite after wheeling their motorcycles into his garage for a new saddle. This is what he’s famous for, what got him inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame more than a decade ago. Corbin, 68, made his name stitching custom motorcycle saddles and selling custom motorcycle parts.

But for about 10 minutes a long time ago, Corbin was famous for something else: The Sparrow, a funky, futuristic electric car that he hopes to see fly once again.

Photo: Courtesy Corbin Motors

Corbin was in the right place at the right time with the Sparrow. The place was the San Francisco Auto Show. The time was 1996. Corbin, who by this time had amassed a fortune selling motorcycle seats, showed up with the Sparrow. It was an odd little car, not unlike an Ugg on wheels. Three wheels, to be exact. It looked like something you might see in The Smurfs. Corbin was pretty sure he would be laughed out of the show. The exact opposite happened.

“We took a million dollars worth of orders,” Corbin says, smiling. The years melt from his face as he tells the story for what must be the 10,000th time. You get the impression he never grows tired of this tale.

It was the car enviros had been dreaming of. Small. Electric. Relatively affordable. So what if it could seat just one person and was ugly as hell? Those who loved it saw only the beauty of a car that didn’t burn gasoline. General Motors had just introduced the EV1, whetting greenies’ appetites for an electric car.

“It looked like the world was going to change,” well-known EV advocate Chelsea Sexton said of the mood at the time. And here was Corbin, one of the first entrepreneurs with a plan to feed them.

Corbin had done what his father had told him he should never do. He had built a car, a dream he’d chased since he was a teenager. Here was his golden opportunity. Battery electric vehicles were in their infancy. Bay Area “treehuggers” (Corbin’s word) were ready, willing and able to plunk down almost 14 grand to drive an electric bean. It was emissions-free, after all.

The window was wide open. All Corbin Motors had to do was shove some electric cars through it.

There was just one problem.

“We had no possibility of delivering a second car,” says Corbin. “We had no employees.”

Corbin Motors had no factory, no parts, no assembly line and no idea how to mass-produce cars.

Standing in his warehouse now, his voice trailing off, Corbin is obliged to continue his rags-to-riches-to-rags tale. It’s the only way to get to the latest chapter, about the rebirth, or re-hatching, if you will, of the Sparrow. He lovingly, if not ironically, calls it Sparrow 2. But we’re getting ahead of the story.

After the unexpected and overwhelming response to the Sparrow, it took Corbin another year to deliver four more cars. “We painted them all a different color to make it seem like we were a big deal,” he says.

Meanwhile, the phone was ringing. And ringing. And ringing. At one point Corbin Motors had $40 millions in orders. People were rabid to get their piece of the green dream. But Corbin couldn’t deliver.

“We bit off more apple than we could chew,” said Corbin. “We were under-capitalized from day one. Our single biggest problem was everybody loved the car, but then we didn’t give to them.”

Production slowly ramped up, and Corbin started delivering cars in 1998. They cost $13,999. Chad Wells fell in love.

“I first saw them for sale on the cover of the Gadget Universe catalog that came to my house in 1999,” said Wells, who now owns not one but two Sparrows. “I wanted to buy one.”

Buyers loved them. But problems at the factory piled up almost immediately. First and foremost was the battery technology. In a word, it sucked. A lot of people found themselves stranded on the side of the road.

Remember, this was long before lithium-ion batteries, smartphone-enabled battery management systems and public charging stations. The EV1 and Toyota RAV4 EV had only recently hit the road. Corbin was using lead-acid batteries, the same kind under the hood of your hoopty right now. They’re heavy, they don’t offer much range and they aren’t very durable in an EV application. When one battery in the pack goes down, the whole system goes haywire and you’re left with a zero-emissions paperweight.

Photo: Courtesy Corbin Motors

Mechanical issues, particularly with the motor controllers, didn’t help things any. And then there were management issues, complicated by the fact Mike Corbin wasn’t actually an officer in Corbin Motors. The way Corbin tells it, Corbin Motors was a separate entity from the motorcycle accessories company, and it licensed the Sparrow from Mike Corbin. It’s all very confusing, but suffice to say it wasn’t a good way to run a business.

“I think the fairest thing to say is they weren’t able to figure out how to take a good idea to market and make it profitable,” Corbin said. “They were in over their heads.”

Throw in an economic downturn and you can see where the story leads even before Corbin mentions the 2003 bankruptcy that finally killed Corbin Motors.

“We lost our personal wealth” said Corbin, pointing to his longtime business partner and current CEO of Corbin Motors Anthony Luzi. “We lost everything.”

All told, Corbin Motors delivered 289 cars before it all went bad. Another 75 were in various stages of completion. But even as the company was crashing and burning, people were lining up for cars. Wells finally got his first Sparrow in 2004.

“The attention was ridiculous,” he said of the reaction he got to the car. “It was almost dangerous. Then, and still now, people would do anything to get a picture of it. That includes anything from being cut off and forced to stop to having other drivers taking photos while they drive next to you, while not paying attention to the road and almost killing both of us.”

It is interesting to note the company with which ended up with the remnants of the Sparrow, Myers Motors, claims it will have a an electric three-wheeler ready for delivery this year.

Fast forward to the modern day. Selling motorcycle seats made Corbin a very wealthy man, but he remains equally proud of the Sparrow. He thinks its time has come. Again.

He isn’t entirely wrong. Electric vehicles, once on the fringe, are now, well, at least approaching mainstream with cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt. Tesla Motors has proven that commodity lithium-ion cells can make a damn fine battery pack. Hell — even Aptera Motors almost made a run at it with a teardrop-shaped electric three-wheeler that looked more like a Cessna than a Civic.

If they can do it, Corbin reasons, so can he.

“The Sparrow was my best idea,” he said. “And all of sudden the world is ready. What are we gonna do, let it pass us by? We have proven we can sell a three-wheel electric car, and now the technology is there.”

Corbin is serious. But not everyone sees the Sparrow flying again. And it’s hard to see who’d buy one when you can get an electric car with four doors, five seats and a warranty backed by a company that actually knows how to build cars.

“It remains to be seen whether the public is ready for a three-wheeled vehicle, let alone a one-seater,” Sexton said. “I can go get a new Mitsubishi iMiev that seats five for $19,000 after incentives. I want to root for them all, but there is a bit of a reality check involved.”

Corbin is not deterred. He hopes to have the Sparrow ready to roll by the end of the year. Never mind that he doesn’t have the final specs or even a drawing to show us, let alone a running prototype. But no matter — he’s got a website!

We’ve seen this before, of course. History is littered with the shattered dreams of automotive entrepreneurs who thought they had A Great Idea. More than a few of those entrepreneurs thought they could sell electric vehicles. Corbin knows this. Yet he insists he will succeed.

The way he sees it, he doesn’t have to start over. He just has to pick up where he left off.

Vincenzo Cosenza is a new media strategist living in Italy who has over the years, designed some of the industry’s most comprehensive infographics on social media’s global footprint. Recently, he asked if I would write the foreword for his new book, Social Media ROI. And, as I’m a fan of his work, it was an easy decision. As usual however, I asked for permission to share it with you here and his publisher agreed. This is the only place where you can read this in English…

For the record, I also wrote the foreword for Olivier Blanchard’s book, Social Media ROI in early 2011.  Yes…same name. I’m not a supporter of the fact that the publisher of this latest book did not take Olivier’s title into account. But for the purpose of this post, I’d like to focus on the evolution off the topic. In Olivier’s book, I concentrated on the disconnect in POVs between executives and social strategies, where ROI for all intents and purposes represents Return on Ignorance. His book makes a compelling case for convincing the c-suite and also empowers social strategists to design meaningful ROI initiatives.

In Vincenzo’s book, I look at ROI through a different lens, exploring its relationship to influence. It’s a complementary approach and here, a bit more theoretical as I try to raise the bar for strategies overall.

In the book Engage, I introduced a metric that tracked Return on Influence. Here, I wanted to expand on the methodology of that metric to better define the relationship between cause and effect and the role you play in it. Thus, ROI in this context becomes the Realization of Influence. The idea was to raise the stakes in the equation, to design desired actions and conversion into our strategies so that ROI measured real change, outcomes, and the progress of transformation. While similar, it’s a subtle nuance that’s powerful.

Influence: To cause effect or change behavior

New ROI: Measure caused effect and outcomes and/or the tracked change in behavior over a fixed period of time

In the development of new ROI strategies, the result is a truly a measurement of influence. No, it’s not a score. It’s a metric of cause and effect. As such, you become an architect of influence as you define the change or actions you wish to see. In the strategies that you develop over time as by definition, you introduce initiatives that cause effect or change behavior and you can measure it. While you still calculate return on investment, you are also measuring the realization of influence. And, it’s far more accurate than a traditional influence score.

When ROI Represents the Realization of Influence

In social media, one of the most often asked questions is what’s the ROI? Surprisingly, this question is voiced without an understanding of why it’s asked in the first place. If the answer is “I don’t know,” it makes it a simple and grounded decision to either minimally invest in social media pilot programs or not invest in any new media efforts whatsoever. If the answer is, “this is the ROI we can expect from the following initiatives,” you’ll witness an incredible transformation of doubt or skepticism into curiosity and eagerness.

Indeed, new media represents a necessary change in direction to improve customer relationships and experiences, develop more significant products and services, and increase overall reach and market share. But remember, what you know and what decision makers need to know are on two different sides of the same coin. Both seek relevance and success for the organization. The difference is that only one side will attempt to unite everyone around a common vision for the future. And in this book, Vincenzo Cosenza will help you address one of the most important questions hindering the evolution of modern business, “what’s the ROI?”

The reality is that no matter how creative the idea or however brilliant the strategy, it is the responsibility of decision makers to evaluate proposals based on merit, thoughtfulness and impact to the organization. People, time, capital, technology, are finite resources. It really comes down to opportunity costs. If the organization invests in new media initially, it either must “create” new resources and funds or it must borrow from elsewhere. For you to realize your vision and to bring your plan to life, you must tie everything to Business objectives and priorities or demonstrate how your strategy will push the organization forward.

It comes down to numbers and core values. Will your ideas perform against or exceed existing business metrics and KPIs? And, do they align with or improve the values of the organization and the universal aspiration for building customer relationships. Performance metrics are a key part in measuring progress and communicating whether or not you’re on plan. They also force us to think through strategies at the beginning of the process, so that initiatives unfold as designed or intended.

In many ways, performance metrics are a subset of influence. And, influence is an underestimated or misunderstood business purpose. Influence is the ability to cause effect or change behavior. And as you think about ROI, think beyond numbers. Become an architect of relevance where cause and effect become the foundation for how you build the business of the future. Developing strategies where cause and effect are the catalysts for performance inspires strategies rooted in significance whereas metrics and KPIs document real transformation. I like to think about ROI in this regard as Realization of Influence…tracking the relationship between cause and effect or the change in behavior.

As such, packaging raw numbers requires deeper consideration to demonstrate progress toward business objectives and priorities.

These can include:

- Brand Lift/Awareness
- Brand Resonance
- Advocacy
- Sales/Referrals
- Endorsements
- Sentiment/Perception Shift
- Thought Leadership
- Demand
- Trends
- Audience/Community
- Behavior
- Influence

Photo: Sonex

A pair of new single-seat airplanes promise a lot of performance for the dollar, offering speeds topping 150 mph for less than $30,000 with engine.

There is, however, some assembly required.

The two single-seater, kit-built planes are aimed squarely at DIY pilots looking for the biggest bang for the buck.

The Onex from Sonex, based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is the latest in a long line of inexpensive kit planes offering relatively high performance. The aluminum airplane is capable of aerobatics and manages a 155 mph cruise speed on just 80 horsepower.

An interesting, and attractive, design feature is the foldable wings. They can be folded in minutes and the sporty airplane loaded onto a trailer. The ability to keep your plane at home eliminates parking or hangar costs at the airport and makes maintenance (or long stares of admiration) much easier.

After the first flight a year ago, Sonex recently announced the Federal Aviation Administration has approved the company’s building checklists for the Onex. This gives current and future builders the green light to complete their aircraft in accordance to FAA rules. More than 50 Onex kits have already been shipped to builders.

The second of the new single-seaters got smooth composite lines from the hands of a surfboard maker.

Photo: Aerochia

The Aerochia LT-1 has been in development a few years. The carbon-fiber composite fuselage looks like it might hide a tiny radial engine, but the LT-1 is powered by a two-cylinder, four-stroke HKS engine producing just 60 horsepower. Aerochia expects to get speeds as great as 160 mph from the engine, according to the Experimental Aviation Association.

The LT-1 was designed by a surfboard maker who worked with multi-time Reno air racing champion Darryl Greenamyer on some of the pilot’s most recent composite airplanes. They expect the plane, which has a 21-foot wingspan, to have a maximum weight of less than 800 pounds and burn just three gallons per hour at cruise speed.

The airplane is still in flight testing mode, but the company expects to have the LT-1 at Airventure in Oshkosh, Wisconsin this summer.

The first time I wrote about Twitter was March 2007. My, how time and Tweets literally fly. With 500 million registered users and 33 billion Tweets flying across the Twitterverse every day, Twitter has become a fabric of our digital culture. Twitter is now ingrained in our digital DNA and is reflected in our lifestyle and how we connect and communicate with one another.

While many struggle to understand its utility or its significance in the greater world of media, it is the most efficient global information network in existence today. News no longer breaks, it Tweets. People have demonstrated the speed and efficacy of social networking by connecting to one another based on interests (interest graph) rather then limiting connections to relationships (social graph).  Twitter represents a promising intersection of new media, relationships, traditional media and information to form one highly human network.

I recently stumbled upon a well done infographic created by Infographic Labs to communicate the state of of the Twitterverse. It’s quite grand in its design. So, to help get the most out of it, I’ve dissected it into smaller byte-sized portions.

A Brief History of Twitter

July 2006 – Twttr’s hatched (Yes that’s how it was originally spelled), by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone

July 2007 – Raises $1 million, valued at $5 million

November 2008 – President-elect Barack Obama thanks his Twitter followers

2009 – 2 billion Tweets per day, Twitter raises $35 million

Dec 2010 – Raises $200 million, now valued at $3.7 billion

2011 – 100 million active users sending 33 billion Tweets per day

The Top 3 Countries for Twitter

1. United States – 107.7 million

2. Brasil – 33.3 million

3. Japan – 29.9 million

The Top 5 Moments in Tweets

1. “Castle in the Sky” TV Screening – 25,088 Tweets per second (TPS)

2. Superbowl XLVI Last Minutes – 10,245 TPS

3. (Tied) Madonna at the Superbowl – 10,245 TPS

4. Tim Tebow’s Win – 9,420 TPS

5. Beyonce at the VMAs – 8,869 TPS

Top 6 Reasons for Retweeting

1. Interesting content – 92%

2. Personal connection – 84%

3. Humor – 66%

4. Incentive – 32%

5. Retweet requests – 26%

6. Celebrity status – 21%

Top 4 Ways People Decide to Follow You

1.Suggested by friends – 69%

2. Online search – 47%

3. Suggested by Twitter – 44%

4. Promotions – 31%

Top Factoids You Didn’t Know About Twitter

1. Twitter’s projected ad revenue in 2012 is $259 million

2. Projected ad revenue by 2014 is $540 million

3. 11 Twitter accounts created every second

4. 1 million accounts opened every day

Last week Foxconn pushed its starting salaries up from 900 yuan ($143) to 1,800 yuan per month, the latest and biggest in wage upticks that began in 2010. Foxconn did this for one main reason: international attention focused on the firm and associated ethical questions surrounding its treatment of workers. The lens through which this attention was focused bears just one name–Apple–because the iPhone seller is one of the biggest companies in the world, and has recently made very bold steps to improve worker conditions. But Foxconn is actually a key supplier for a laundry list of international electronics firms, from Samsung to numerous household American names. Now two of those firms, tech giants HP and Dell, have warned that rising costs in their Chinese supply chain may result in increased in-store prices for their wares.

Just think about that for a minute, let it simmer in your mind. While it’s cooking, here’re a few spicy facts to add to the flavor.

1. Apple, facing enormous criticism about unfair treatment of workers in its supply chain–who technically work for a totally different company, in a different nation with a vastly different social and economic background–has tried to improve the situation, and has admitted errors publicly.

2. Foxconn faced controversy in the past over its supposed suicide problem. As a harsh statistic it’s worth pointing out its actually much lower than the Chinese average. Infer from this what you like about worker conditions. And remember that many potential employees are battling to work at Foxconn compared to its competitors.

3. In early 2011 it was noted that China already had the third highest labor costs in the emerging Asian economies.

4. China’s work ethics, worker conditions, and economic situation are radically different than those in the U.S., influenced by Chinese politics, history, local economic effects, laws, social habits, and tradition.

5. Raw global economics and relative currency values mean that the local equivalent of a dollar can go further in many nations than you may expect it to go in the U.S. Anecdotally a can of Coke costs $0.34 at equivalent rates.

Now, here’s more to chew on: Thanks to rising Chinese wages, brought on partly by economic booms caused by Western revenues at firms like Foxconn, partly thanks to recent events, Dell and HP have said they’ll have to pass on the costs to the consumers. That means many consumers in the U.S., a vocal number among which have recently taken to pressing Apple, and Apple alone, for improvements and an “ethical iPhone.”

Let’s ignore the odd idea of looking at Chinese work ethics through glasses tinted with Western experience, let’s skip merrily past complex global politics and economics, and brush over how critics ignore the fact economies in countries outside the U.S. work very differently, including with different value associated with cash.

Ignoring all this, we can say many Western consumers may be happy to pay more for a premium device if they knew it was produced under more comfortable–Western-like, natch–situations.

But Apple hasn’t said it’ll raise its prices because of all these moves. In a way it doesn’t have to, it can eat any increased costs passed onto it by Foxconn thanks to its high profit margin. Good business planning there.

Dell and HP aren’t doing so well financially, and losing increased production costs in their thinner profit margins may not be so easy. But these firms have kept their head below the parapet in the Foxconn battle thus far, and now their bold move is to say “folks must pay more.” That’s at the least incredibly uninspiring, and the opposite of innovative.

No one’s apologizing for Apple, nor saying Foxconn’s employees enjoy the very best of conditions. But maybe it’s time to suggest other computing giants like Michael Dell’s outfit, Korea’s government-intertwined big name, and Meg Whitman’s new gig start thinking differently. That means applying their innovative, creative thinkers into changing their supply chain dynamics, improving worker conditions, being open about their suppliers, actually adapting their behavior from make-it-low-cost/stack-it-high/sell-it-cheap. Think of all the lovely positive PR.

Related: Apple’s Tim Cook on Foxconn: Data Transparency, Work Hours

Related: The Foxconn Effect: Where Will Electronics Be Made If China’s Wages Rise?

Image: Flickr user ttstam

Bot Vid: Truss-Climber

Cornell boffins have put together an autonomous truss-climbing robot. It’s not something you’ll find navigating the inner clothing of William Shatner, instead being a demonstration of a machine that can climb up structures like scaffolding and actually reconfigure it as it goes. In the future swarms of robots like this may be useful for actually building the structure of habitable buildings.

In her sophomore year at Chicago’s ACE Technical Charter High School, Kewauna Lerma had a 2.25 GPA. Yet when Jeff Nelson met Kewauna, he knew she was capable of getting into and graduating from a four-year college. Nelson is the cofounder and Executive Director of Urban Students Empowered (US Empowered), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to college preparedness and college persistence (keeping students in college once they have enrolled) for low-income high school students.

“If you spent 10 minutes talking with one of our students, you would be absolutely convinced that they have everything it takes to get to and through college,” Nelson says. But, “If you look at the data, you’ll see that the reality of the trajectory for them to get there is incredibly unfair.”

There has been fierce debate about the causes of the problems as well as what the best solutions might be to address our arrested public school education system, which is almost universally recognized as being in crisis. Hundreds of organizations collectively spend more than $4 billion dollars working on education reform. In 2010, the documentary film Waiting for Superman helped achieve more widespread public awareness about the challenges in the education reform process itself. There has never been so much attention from politicians, celebrities, social entrepreneurs, and not-for-profits around education. Even in bitterly divided Washington, some politicians from both parties have been able to agree in principle on certain elements of reform plans.

Yet even with so much focus on education reform and so much support for taking urgent action to respond to the crisis, it often seems that very little is actually getting done. This is especially true at the level of the high school to college transition, since most of the focus on educational reform is on how to get students to graduate from primary and middle schools and to keep them in high school without dropping out. Comparatively little attention has been given to preparing students, especially the less privileged and less affluent, for the day that some of them actually begin their freshman year of college. For those students, the challenges remain daunting. Once this demographic enters college, the risk of dropping out is high. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 18% of students enroll in four-year universities and just 7% graduate from college by age 25.

Enter Jeff Nelson, a 30-year-old Chicago native who first saw the need for a focus on college persistence as a Teach for America Corps member, teaching sixth grade at O’Keeffe Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. It was there where he opened the newspaper and saw that alarming graduation statistic (at the time it was 6%). Nelson recalls thinking, “I had 32 students. I did the math and figured that about two of them would graduate with a four-year college degree. It was atrocious.”

So he got to work. “To be a true education reformer, you need a unique combination of incredible tenacious persistence and humble patience. You’re trying to solve a vast problem, and you have to do it in a way that maintains quality,” Nelson says. He started with excellent teachers. US Empowered recruits the right teachers to serve as mentors, coaches, and instructors to get high school kids prepared to think about college, understand their options for going to college, and what kind of academic work they have to accomplish to get there. These teachers are some of the best full-time teachers in their schools, and by leading US Empowered as an in-school, credit-bearing course, the college prep work is not an extra burden on teachers already over burdened with their day-to-day responsibilities. To find the teachers who will lead their program in a given school, US Empowered gets recommendations from their “human capital partners,” including Teach for America, Chicago Foundation for Education, Academy for Urban School Leadership, Chicago Teaching Fellows, and the Golden Apple Foundation.

The experienced teachers who implement the US Empowered program lead the effort to build college readiness into the academic curriculum, meeting with students 40 minutes every day. The course starts during the students’ junior year in high school and is focused on getting students to reach the academic standards necessary to have a high probability of getting into a college. The program is operating in high school environments that typically lack resources, including college-oriented advisors and guidance counselors, and have low rates of success in having their students go on to college. US Empowered also helps students understand how to make college a reality, how to get prepared, how to obtain financial aid, and other critical questions. But the program does not stop there: During their first year of college, the students in the program are required to continue participating in online support courses. US Empowered finds ways to continue to connect the college student to his or her US Empowered support network, so that they can get additional help if they need it. This attribute of the program is particularly important to keeping students in college once they have gone through the challenging obstacle course of getting to college in the first place.

Nelson believes college persistence is more important than ever. The economy has shifted aggressively towards higher value services and knowledge worker jobs. Ten years ago, increased high school graduation was viewed as a primary goal of the education reform movement. Today, while that goal remains, the shift in the economy means that a high school diploma alone is not much of a determinant for a bright future. “All of us in education want the same thing, we want the kids we teach or the kids we serve to have the choice to live a happy, healthy, productive life,” Nelson says. “It’s that simple.”

Part of what inspired Nelson to go into this particular aspect of education reform was a sense that the college persistence issue was solvable and measurable. Nelson says that US Empowered has tried to operate as entrepreneurially as possible starting from the organization’s inception: “We’ve been focused on outcomes from day one. We started with very clear measurable outcomes we wanted to achieve, then we built strategies to execute on those goals. I think that backwards planning really increases our effectiveness.” Although US Empowered only operates in 11 Chicago-area high schools, it can boast that 98% of its students have been admitted to four-year colleges, and 85% of their students are currently persisting in college. One of those who US Empowered helped to succeed was Kewauna Lerma. As a result of her work in the US Empowered program, her GPA improved by 41%. She was accepted at Western Illinois University, where she is currently studying pre-medicine.

US Empowered has been operating in Chicago since 2007, and has garnered high praise from the educators that they work with. Tony Pajakowski the Co-Principal at Perspectives-Calumet High School of Technology, describes the US Empowered program as a “huge win,” adding that “our kids are thriving with the individual attention the program provides, giving them a new perspective on what we mean by ‘college for certain.’”

With successes under US Empowered’s belt in Chicago, and after developing an extensive five-year strategic plan, this month US Empowered expanded outside of Chicago for the first time, launching a new program in Houston. Following Houston, US Empowered plans to continue expanding, with a goal of having programs in four to five cities in the country by 2017. This fall will be particularly busy for Nelson, as he will also become a father for the first time in August. Nelson says that this development made his work even more personal. “When I became an expectant father, I noticed how similar the goals we have for US Empowered students are to the goals I have for my child. It’s fundamental to who we are as people,” he says. He remains laser focused on meaningful and measurable education reform, especially now that he is contemplating the educational system his own children will find when they reach school age.

David D. Burstein is a young entrepreneur, having completed his first documentary 18 in ’08. He is also the founder & executive director of the youth voter engagement not for profit Generation18. His book about the millennial generation will be published by Beacon Press in early 2013.