Open up your mind and say, ahh...

UNITED STATES
OF INNOVATION

New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

All around the country, Americans are dreaming big. Their boldest ideas are changing their communities–and having a ripple effect throughout the world.

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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.

Like most cities that see snow, Boston has a lot of potholes, but not a lot of money to find and fix them. Luckily, they also have a lot of civic-minded software developers who helped them crowdsource an innovative solution to smoothing out city streets.

We first told you about Street Bump last year. Initially developed by a team in the office of Mayor Tom Menino, it’s a smartphone app that uses a phone’s accelerometer to collect data on the location and severity of potholes. The information is analyzed by the city and sent to public works crews, who can then prioritize repairs.

The app began testing and data gathering last year, but had two big problems: it couldn’t tell the difference between a pothole and a manhole, and the mayor’s office didn’t have nearly enough staff and time to fix it. So they partnered with InnoCentive, a company that helps organizations crowdsource their research and development, and challenged the public to develop an algorithm that could differentiate potholes from other road imperfections. The best solutions would share a $25,000 prize offered by a grant from insurance company Liberty Mutual.

“To get all of this data, the InnoCentive competition allowed us to accelerate development in a way that governments might not traditionally do,” said Chris Osgood. He’s the co-chair of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, an agency tasked with finding innovative solutions to the city’s problems. “Traditionally, we might have hired one researcher to come back with one algorithm. With our partnership with InnoCentive, we blasted it out to a global community of thinkers who came up with some broad solutions to this problem.”

Dozens of programmers signed up for the challenge and three groups emerged victorious, including a civic-minded hackerspace and a group whose results read like a peer-reviewed article for a scientific journal. “They were three very different ways of approaching the problem,” said Nigel Jacob, the office’s other co-chair. “We ended up taking elements of all three.”

According to Jacob, crowdsourcing the pothole detection algorithm allowed the mayor’s office to focus on the app itself. For example, different phones use entirely different accelerometers, and running the app constantly can kill a phone’s battery pretty quickly. Those are issues that the team hopes to have addressed before it’s released to the general public this spring.

The app is currently in beta release on the phones of employees who work for the city’s inspectional services department. Not only do they travel all the city’s streets on defined routes, but they also all use the same kind of smartphone, which allows the mayor’s office to troubleshoot while controlling for potential confounding variables. Running the app has become part of their job, but Jacob and Osgood hope that volunteering to use Street Bump will become a method of civic engagement for city residents.

“The public release of this is important because using stretbump is a new kind of volunteer opportunity for our residents,” Osgood said. “We want running Street Bump to be akin to volunteering at your local library or cleaning up your local park.”

Images: City of Boston

Mark Gorton is perhaps best known for founding the peer-to-peer service LimeWire. But his real passion is transportation — specifically bicycles, and making cities friendlier to them.

Gorton makes no bones about his disdain for the automobile and its impact on cities, and he’s used his passion, and money, to promote more-equitable transportation policies. He founded OpenPlans, a nonprofit focused on promoting transparent government and civic engagement, and he’s tried to bring an open source approach to urban planning. He also launched Streetsblog.

He believes the automobile plays an unnecessarily large role in urban transportation and says it does more harm than good. He stops short of calling for the outright eradication of cars in our cities, but wants to see policies that aggressively discourage them.

Many will consider his views radical, but his call to rethink the car’s place in our urban landscape is moving into the mainstream. A growing number of urban planners favor the “complete streets” model of multimodal transit that embraces walking, cycling and transit alongside automobiles.

The Obama administration has been promoting a similar approach through the federal Transportation, Housing and Health departments. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood essentially codified the idea when he said the needs of pedestrians and cyclists must be considered with those of motorists.

Gorton’s views are sure to inflame, but that’s the point. He wants to start a discussion and get people thinking …

Mark Gorton, founder of Lime Wire and bike transit advocate.  Photo courtesy Mark Gorton

Wired.com: How did you become a bike activist?

Mark Gorton: It started about 10 years ago. I just started riding my bike to work. After going through New York’s Central Park and almost getting hit, you start to think about how roads work and you realize how screwed up they are.

At some point I had the insight that our streets could function way better then they do today. Once you have a vision of a much better city and better world, it is hard to sit back and not do anything about it. A large part of what we’re doing is communication, just getting the idea out that there is a better way.

Wired.com: How so?

Gorton: About five years ago we started the NYC Streets Renaissance campaign. We focused on showing there are better policies out there in terms of how streets are being managed.

The ideas were set around bus rapid transit, congestion pricing, and bicycling. We made great progress, and now people can see these ideas being implemented. Now we are reaching a point in New York where there is a broad public debate about how we manage our streets. Some people are pushing back on the reforms we have been making, so now I am trying to articulate why the automobile is bad transportation technology in a dense city.

Wired.com: What are you advocating?

Gorton: A complete change of policy in terms of our society, particularly in how a big city deals with the automobile.

For the last 100 years the automobile was the favored technology, it was given dominance over the streets and preferred over light rail. New York City used to have 1,300 miles of light-rail track. It was the greatest streetcar network the world has ever known. It was completely ripped out because of this infatuation with the automobile. It killed an enormous amount of transportation capacity, making it harder to move around today than it was 50 to 70 years ago.

The fundamental problem with the automobile, beyond the social aspect, is that it does not fit in a city as dense as New York. It is physically impossible for all the people to drive who want to. The ultimate constraint is the amount of road space. That is not going to change in New York City.

Wired.com: How do you get a society that is inherently connected to the automobile to utilize something else?

Gorton: Step 1 is educate people that the automobile is a technology that should be discouraged. We should stop subsidizing it through things like free parking and priority road space. We should be promoting mass transit. We should be creating a safe bicycle network that makes cycling a viable option. In Amsterdam, you have 40 percent of the people making their daily trips by bicycle. The bicycle can be a serious transportation tool in a city.

Basically, the litmus test is this: If a policy makes it harder and more expensive to drive, chances are it’s a good policy. If it makes it easier to drive it is a bad policy.

Wired.com: People will argue that roads are designed for cars and more people drive than ride, so we shouldn’t yield space to bicycles.

Gorton: That has essentially been the policy for the last 100 years and it has worked out horribly. You can look at the places that have done the opposite of that and see if those places are happy. The places that have encouraged bicycling, which tend to be Northern European cities, are really happy with what they have and are trying to continue it. Look that the places that are the most auto-oriented, places like Atlanta and L.A. They know they have big problems. They are trying to deal with a disaster they have brought about themselves.

Wired.com: What about bike lanes? Good? Bad?

Gorton: I think it goes on a street-by-street basis. When you are in a big city and you want people to ride bikes, you cannot mix them with cars. It is unsafe. If you look at the cities with the most biking, they have a completely safe and dedicated bike network. Every street is safe for biking. Every major street has separated bike paths where bikes are separated from cars.

If we look at what other cities are doing around the world we can really do a lot without ever coming up with a new idea by just copying what has been successful.

Wired.com: So what are the major issues to work on?

Gorton: What I am trying to get people to understand is cars should be a disfavored technology. We should be consciously trying to minimize them and we should be making it harder — more expensive and more inconvenient — for people to drive. We should be rationing the ability for people to drive because it has so many negative social consequences. Most people don’t get that. Most people believe that driving is something that is protected in the Constitution and fundamental to being an American.

Wired.com: What is the world you envision?

Gorton: One with radically reduced automobile usage. I think you could have it done in a matter of a few years, if you just had a real dedicated effort. If there was a lot of societal consensus you could have automobile usage down by 50 percent, and with that you could make great strides in a making a city more livable. It is mostly policy changes, not a lot of expensive infrastructure. It doesn’t cost a lot to have a pleasant livable world.

Top photo: Cyclist in Amsterdam. (Ovejanegra/Flickr)

Say hello to Ness, a mobile app that can figure out which restaurants you’ll enjoy the most, based on your personal tastes.

The app, now available in the iOS App Store (U.S.-only), takes a different approach to restaurant recommendations than Yelp, UrbanSpoon and the regular tools people usually use to choose where they will dine. And Ness Computing, the company behind the app, hopes that its unique approach can also change how we shop, discover music and more.

Ness, at its core, is a recommendation engine. Users open the iOS app and quickly rate different restaurants nearby on a scale of one to five stars. After ten ratings, the app has enough data to deliver a set of nearby restaurants it believes you will like, based on your personal tastes and preferences.

The technology behind Ness is the key to the app’s functionality. Ness is powered by a proprietary technology called the Likeness Engine. It takes in information from a variety of sources, including Facebook, Foursquare, friend recommendations, restaurant popularity and personal tastes preferences to figure out whether you’re going to be interested in a restaurant on a scale of 0-100%.

Ness was developed over several years by a team backed by Khosla Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners, TomorrowVentures, Bullpen Capital and one of Palantir’s co-founders. The team utilized machine learning and natural language processing technology to create a recommendation engine that could cut through the noise of sifting through search results.

The app has come a long way since its previous incarnation (an app called Trumpet). We’ve played around with this app, and we’ve been impressed by the results so far. We’ve also heard stories of the technology being able to figure out your musical tastes just by looking at information in your Facebook profile.

If Ness can nail down restaurant recommendations, it has the opportunity to become a new type of mobile search engine that can be used for almost any decision.