Lyn Muldrow needed something in her life to change. She was a single mother living in Baltimore, eight months pregnant with her second child. After a long bought with unemployment, she found work as a customer support agent for a marketing company, but she wanted more for her family. That’s when Muldrow discovered General Assembly, where she was the recipient of the coding and design school’s Opportunity Fund fellowship.
Check out the video above to see how the scholarship enabled Muldrow to be successful in the technology field and to extend the same opportunities she received to a younger generation.
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Tag: Technology
The Game-Changing Way to Access Social Services
If you’re looking for a restaurant recommendation, you log onto Yelp. Need a ride? Request an Uber or Lyft. Want the highest-rated doctor in your health insurance network? Try Zocdoc.
It’s undeniable that technology has changed the way we identify and select services. But which app connects you with legal aid to fight an eviction notice, helps you locate someone to assist signing up your kid for preschool, or directs you to a food pantry that’s open late?
Founded in 2010 in Austin, Texas, the startup Aunt Bertha is an online database of human services, connecting governments, charities and churches with the 75 million Americans in all 50 states who need their services, says founder Erine Gray. Thus far, his company has helped more than 177,000 people.
“In the United States, we spend a lot of money attempting to fix social problems — poverty, housing, food, health and job training — the effectiveness of which can be argued. When you look at the 1.4 million nonprofits in the U.S., how do you know which ones are good and which ones are not?” asks Gray. “Most people are not professional social workers. For somebody in need, it’s very difficult to find out what’s available to you.”
The software company’s name refers to no one’s relative in particular — the domain name for Aunt Sue was taken, and Aunt Bertha sounded like an eccentric, matronly figure in contrast to Uncle Sam — but the idea for the company did come from Gray’s personal struggles. After his mother suffered from a stroke, he encountered difficulties locating adequate assistance (she had lost brain functionality and required around-the-clock care). Even though she qualified for help, Gray’s mother was rejected by more than 20 nursing homes, often with a baffling, one-sentence letter that said, “We are not able to meet your mother’s needs” and no other explanation.
“There are nonprofits that offer home healthcare visits if you have income that’s low enough, but I didn’t know about those services when I was navigating my mom’s care. People come up to me after talks and say, ‘My son had autism and I didn’t have anybody to talk to about it until I found a support group,’ or ‘I lost my job and didn’t know about worker re-entry programs,’” Gray says. “As a caretaker for someone who was disabled, in my experience, nobody is trained for when life throws you a curveball.”
That trying experience led Gray to ditch his career as a software developer (he says he wasn’t a very good programmer anyway), go back to school for a master’s degree and eventually take a lead role at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. Making software and operational fixes, he streamlined the application process for services, saving the agency $5 million annually. Soon after, he took those lessons and founded his own company.
With Aunt Bertha, a person in Gray’s situation should have an easier time determining if their dependent is eligible for a given program. Searches can be narrowed based on multiple categories, such as age group, citizen or immigrant, housed or homeless and how urgent the problem is.
“What we wanted was a simple way for a seeker — the term we use for a person in need or their relative or champion — to essentially raise their hand and let an agency know electronically they need help,” Gray, a GLG fellow, explains. “Part of the vision is being able to find and apply for services in seconds.”
Eventually, as more users enroll in programs, Aunt Bertha will be able to track whether the charity met the person’s needs. As soon as a seeker submits an application for rental assistance or hearing aids, say, through the online portal, the service will clock the nonprofit’s response time and follow up with a satisfaction survey, creating a granular picture that’s more detailed than what can be found on GuideStar or Charity Navigator. The assessment will direct users to sign up for more effective programs.
On a grand scale, the program is already helping governments and nonprofits (like the Robin Hood Foundation) assess needs and measure the results of their funding. “We can tell you what people are searching for, what they’re finding and also what they’re not,” says Gray. For instance, if the number of searches for soup kitchens in Lubbock, Texas, suddenly spikes, it could encourage city lawmakers to look at large-scale solutions.
“If we’re successful, the entire nation will be able to visualize, in real time, where the pain is in the United States and see the suffering in the underbelly that doesn’t really show. Policymakers and data scientists will be able to see hotspots far earlier than any set of economic forecasts,” Gray says. “To be able to unlock that data and get it in the right hands, would be an amazing experience. We’d be able, in real time, to alleviate that suffering.”
4 Startups Revolutionizing How Food Is Produced in the U.S.
Ask city dwellers what an American farmer looks like and it’s likely that they’ll describe an image reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting: a man sporting overalls and a John Deere hat, bouncing his daughter on his lap as he steers a combine through his corn fields. In truth, today’s agrarian ideal is much different. Instead of rusty tractors working the land, fields are hooked up with the same modern technology used in Silicon Valley.
As part of our continuing coverage of FarmNext’s nationwide listening tour on food and young farmers, NationSwell talked to a few tech-savvy individuals building systems that can more efficiently feed America.
Drones
Trevor Witt, a third-year student at Kansas State University in Salina, spends most of his days flying unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. He’s involved in a project in the school’s entomology department — with “the bug guys,” as he says — studying techniques for early detection of invasive species. Witt spent the summer mapping sorghum fields, looking for evidence of an aphid that can ruin an entire harvest in just a few weeks. “If you can detect that aphid early on, you can spray that specific area to get rid of it,” Witt explains. With a camera shooting in high-resolution visuals and near-infrared imagery, Witt’s drone flies over fields of crops, looking for a shiny, sugar-dense resin on the top of leaves and a black underside — the telltale sign of this aphid’s infestation.
Witt, who dates his interest in unmanned aircraft to his high school shop class, says the primary goal of his research at K-State is “dealing with information overload.” His team is “translating all this data that we can collect and make actionable solutions,” he says. “Earlier, using satellites, the data pixel had a 15-acre resolution; now data pixel resolution is sub-centimeter. It just gets significant amounts of data even in the smallest field.”
For now, the farmer must take action against the infestation himself. But eventually, perhaps a decade from now, a grower won’t have to do a thing: he’ll have another drone or self-driven tractor that can automatically spray the area. “That’s the end goal when it comes to mapping,” Witt says. Unmanned aircraft systems aren’t the end-all solution, he concedes, but it’s “an extra tool in the toolkit.”
Solar Power
To lay the optimal number of eggs, a hen needs a full 16 hours of light. That’s an impossibly high bar for small farmers to reach during the winter, when a December day at California’s Riverdog Farms, for example, only receives eight and a half hours of sunshine — causing production to drop anywhere from 30 to 60 percent. (During that time, chickens continue to consume the same amount of feed.) Most large farms employ artificial lighting to stimulate production, but the cost can be prohibitively high for small-scale farmers to invest in the technology.
Egg producers “take those seasonal changes pretty hard,” says Edward Silva, who developed a solar-powered supplemental lighting system called Henlight as an undergraduate at University of California, Davis. Programmed by software, the Henlight “comes on in the morning hours, a little before sunrise. The very darkest days, it comes on earlier,” he says. “It doesn’t wake [the chickens] up. Eventually they rustle up, but what’s happening is that laying hens receive the okay to reproduce through a gland on the top of their head.”
According to Silva, who grew up on a farm in the Central Valley, field data from one coop using the Henlight in Capay Valley, Calif. saw a 20 percent boost in egg production — laying an additional 2,253 eggs — compared to a control group. Sold at $3 a dozen, the farmer made $563, meaning that he got a return on the $450 investment in the first year.
“There’s this movement where tech in ag is becoming much more democratic,” says Silva. “Smaller farms can optimize their operations as well. With Uber, anyone can be a taxi driver; with Aribnb, anyone can open a hotel. In agriculture, with a lot of precision sensors, with smartphones and drones, the systems are allowing small-scale guys to be competitive with what’s existing on a bigger level.”
Genetics
Donald Gibson is trying to grow a better tomato. A graduate student at University of California, Davis is using cutting-edge biotech that would allow tomato plants to grow with far less phosphorous, a vital nutrient (along with nitrogen and potassium) that’s increasingly costly and environmentally damaging to extract for fertilizer. When lacking phosphorous, a tomato expends much of its energy expanding its root system. By identifying and switching off the gene that activates that response, the fruit could grow with much less of the nutrient.
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have earned the wrath from the organic crowd for altering a plant’s fundamentals, but Gibson argues his research will make agriculture sustainable. “Today we’re seeing a major shift in advances in plant breeding. There’s been a boom in the biotech field in the last 20 or 30 years, a technology revolution and also a biological revolution. Now finally, we’re using brand new technology and adapting that to select better and better plants,” he says. “When it comes to GMOs, it’s actually getting a lot better from the consumer perspective.” Most of the innovation in the field has benefited farmers, but the next generation will benefit consumers with products like a potato that doesn’t bruise or an apple that doesn’t brown as quickly.
Data Analytics
FarmLink is employing analytics to help farmers decipher big data and turn it into actionable items, moving agriculture from maps on paper that tracked annual yields to create more precise information. “There is plenty of data out there, and the data increases every day. It’s not that we need more data,” says Kevin Helkes, FarmLink’s director of operations. “Farmers are saying they need to know what to do with that data.”
Helkes compares the farmers’ fields to a front lawn. “There’s always that part of the yard that’s higher, where the grass grows taller. It’s the same thing in the field. Farmers know that year over year, this area is higher and this area is lower,” he says. What’s new, though, is that data analytics will be able to tell a farmer how productive those high and low areas could potentially be. Instead of a grower learning the hard way that he’s been wasting money on a fallow spot of land, FarmLink can communicate in advance how much he can expect from an area.
Agriculture’s first great revolution was switching from a donkey towing a plow to a tractor trailer. Now, agriculture has reinvented itself with new improvements in genetics and feed. This is called Ag 3.0.
(Homepage photograph: Courtesy of Gregory Urqiaga/University of California, Davis)
Tomorrow’s Energy-Saving Neighborhood Is Being Built Today in Texas
America’s most futuristic neighborhood is being built, perhaps surprisingly, in Texas.
Under construction in Austin, the Lone Star State’s liberal enclave, is a residential development boasting rooftop solar panels, electric vehicle charging stations and meters to measure the electricity usage of every appliance. Known as the Mueller neighborhood, the community is “smart grid experiment” where the Pecan Street research consortium brought together experts from universities and utilities alike to provide real-world data for one of the most important ecological questions of our time: How can we reduce our energy and water consumption?
“There was virtually no data available on appliance-level electric use. We were trying to determine if testing certain things out, like electric cars or home energy-management systems would affect people compared to how they used electricity before they got access to this stuff,” says Brewster McCracker, Pecan Street’s president and CEO. “There was not only no data on that but nothing on the market that would measure that. We spent a long time working with suppliers and configuring things to measure appliance use every minute 365 days a year.”
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Energy usage by homeowners and businesses fluctuates wildly, accounting for 41 percent of all consumption. To be more environmentally friendly, McCracken says, we need to think about reducing our use during peak times, as well as what will use less total energy. That’s why Pecan Street’s live data is so important for measuring exactly what appliances are putting heavy demands on the system. Its analytics can tell you that an electric vehicle charger puts the same load on the grid as a clothes dryer — both far less than an air conditioner. Previously, no one tested the kind of impact that a dozen electric vehicles on one block, let alone an entire neighborhood.
Through a mobile app, the research team informs customers of specific ways to reduce energy like, say, unplugging the microwave. Those suggestions have led to a 10 percent reduction in electricity use, McCracken, a former two-term member of the Austin city council, says. Overall, the Mueller neighborhood uses 38 percent less electricity on heating and cooling than their less green neighbors.
The stats help plan better infrastructure for an entire region. Conventional wisdom, for instance, holds that south-facing solar panels will absorb the most sunlight. Which is true generally, McCracken says, but energy companies should know that west-facing photovoltaic panels will absorb more energy during late summer afternoons when need is greatest, his team found.
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Additionally, Pecan Street can detect when something seems amiss on an individual home. “We found that people who have solar panels have minor maintenance issues, but they didn’t have any way to learn about them,” McCracken says. “By having that data, we were able to isolate the solar panels that are turned off. Other things could be more subtle. A single fuse that’s blown could produce at a reduced level. We have the data analytics running to detect that. It’s not something that you could stare at a rooftop or look at the electricity bill to see that happened, but better data helps.”
The research institute’s data collection has been so unique that other energy companies throughout the country have invited it to study their neighborhoods. Pecan Street now gathers stats from more than 1,200 homes, primarily clustered in Texas, Colorado and California, and ships the data out to 138 universities in 37 countries.
“We have strong reason to believe that access to better data and better information enhances our ability to solve problems,” McCracken says. “If we have better data on weather patterns, we can help people be safe in storms. If we have better data on car performance, we can make cars that work better.” With a hotter planet, drought in the West and superstorms along the East Coast, this Texan neighborhood couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time.
The Ingenious Way That Those with Traumatic Brain Injuries Are Getting Back on Their Feet
The news seemed like a death sentence: In 1998, Anne Dunlap, a pretty young woman in Delaware, suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash, severely impairing her daily functioning. Even with physical therapy, she struggled to juggle multiple basic tasks at one time. Walking while talking, for instance, had to be slowly relearned during 16 years of lessons at a clinic.
At least, that is, until Cole Galloway, a professor in the physical therapy department at the University of Delaware in Newark and the inventor of the Go Baby Go cars for disabled children, talked with Dunlap about what she wanted. “I was in a room with Anne and a bunch of other therapists,” Galloway tells NationSwell on a recent afternoon as he strolled the campus. “Someone asked her, ‘Hey, Anne, what would you like to do?’ She said immediately — she’s a very fashion-oriented kid — ‘Oh, I want to be in sales. I want to work at a mall.’”
Everybody in the room had heard this answer before and moved on, as it was just another routine blank to fill in. But Dunlap’s wish caused Galloway to wonder: Could physical therapy based in real-world actions — not exercises in an antiseptic rehab clinic — improve recovery time? To test his theory, he invented a harness system that could be rigged up on the ceiling of a small kiosk, giving Dunlap enough support to be fully mobile. Within a matter of weeks, the Go Baby Go Cafe opened. Dunlap’s new physical therapy regiment involved scooping ice cream, making coffee and taking cash at the pop-up store’s register.
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“We’ve spent hundreds of millions on rehabilitative robotics, but very few, if any, have ever jumped out of the lab and into the community. That’s how difficult it is to design rehab technology for the real world from within the traditional lab,” he declares. “We have to look at things that have never been considered: aesthetics or performance in the real world. We should be going to Starbucks and asking, ‘What do you need to work here?’ then build a design to allow someone to serve a latte while standing, work on their arm or hand function. That’s the new engineering feat: to build laboratory-grade change in the real world.”
At the Go Baby Go coffee stand, the aroma of freshly ground espresso beans hovers in the air as employees hand out single and double scoops of vanilla, butter pecan and black raspberry ice cream. The only thing setting it apart from java bars at other college campuses? Its harness system, which looks like a four-poster canopy and is built with aluminum and steel bars. Following Galloway’s past success with low-tech materials (purchased from Toys ’R ’Us), he aimed for a model that could be cheaply reproduced.
“We’re working really hard to build stuff that’s simple,” Galloway says. “We prototype lightly so we can get it into the community and make it commercially available.”
An added feature of this system, like Go Baby Go’s cars, is its full-range mobility. Rather than limiting a person’s movement to one straight line, Dunlap is free to go in any direction within the enclosed 50-square-foot space, held up by the bars overhead. And the whole setup is portable, meaning it can be taken down from the science building’s lobby and reassembled anywhere.
“It’s very easy to move around in. It doesn’t feel like there’s any kind of drag, and the harness feels light when I’m moving,” Dunlap tells the Newark (Del.) Post. “I feel comfortable and liberated because I’m secure and protected, and I don’t have to worry about falling.”
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Galloway, who got his start in physical therapy because he “loves movement” of all kinds — from the simple stuff like walking and sitting to ballet and gymnastics, hopes the harness system will have applications for people from all walks of life. Beyond physical therapy, the support system can assist anyone that needs extra support or balance, particularly children with developmental disabilities and the elderly. Serving as an interim device between relying on a walker and being confined to a wheelchair, the harnesses could be set up in school playgrounds, food trucks, family living rooms and workplaces.
Studies of Go Baby Go’s effectiveness are currently being funded by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. Yet Galloway describes himself as a “pretty reluctant researcher.” While his lab prefers to see his prototypes out in public, they know a device works when they hear both positive feedback from the people who need it and receive solid data from his lab.
“We see no reason to wait for years of research to tell you that [with this device] a person who can’t stand or walk on their own has the potential to actually work in a cafe,” Galloway says, “Especially when your grandma would say today, ‘That’s gonna work.'”
Dunlap will tell you the same thing. She’s confident in her progress, so much so that she recently went down to her favorite coffee shop — not for a latte, but to drop off a job application.
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How Old Computers Can Make a Lifelong Impact on Low-Income Kids
Between personal computers and the machines in computer labs, there are about as many computers on college campuses as students. But when these electronics become obsolete, what happens to them?
If tossed into landfills, they become a big environmental hazard. But the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) has figured out how to turn them into a solution that helps out low-income students.
The school’s program, Computers to Youth, runs camps for inner-city students, teaching them about life in college and how to refurbish old computers. At the conclusion of camp, each student takes home a computer.
Dave Newport, director of CU’s Environmental Center, tells KUSA that there are 10,000 computers on campus — all of which are regularly replaced. “We can’t give away enough of these,” he says. The program “helps protect the environment. It reduces cost. But the best part is, it empowers students.”
Basheer Mohamed, a sophomore engineering major at CU, can vouch for that. The immigrant from Sudan received a computer from Computers to Youth when he was in high school. Prior to that, his family couldn’t afford one. “Between us and more privileged kids, it was really hard to keep up with them,” he says. When he got his computer, he excelled in school, became interested in engineering and even researched and applied for the scholarships that now are funding his education.
What might he be doing if he never received that rehabbed computer? “If anything, I’d probably be going to a community college if not just working,” Mohamed says. “I don’t want to know where I would’ve been without it.”
Thanks to Computers to Youth, that’s one computer kept out of the landfill, and one mind sparked to great achievement by higher education.
MORE: How to Bridge the Digital Divide
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Forget Calculus and Gym Class. At This High School, Students Are Trained for Workplace Success
What is the purpose of high school?
At Camden County High School (CCHS) in Georgia, the school employs a “career technical” approach: using various academies aimed at different career fields to create a pre-professional, engaging environment for its almost 2,800 students.
All freshman are enrolled in the Freshman Academy, where they’re introduced to the curriculum and get acclimated to the school, as well as take most of the traditional academic core. From there, students pick one of the five career academies to enroll in, where they receive first-hand experience from people in that respective field, reports the Atlantic.
In the Government and Public Services Academy, students can follow the law and justice curriculum and take a class with Navy-Kings Bay NCIS official Rich Gamble. In Gamble’s class, students are trained in appropriate investigative procedures and court room preparation.
For those students looking for more technical work, there’s the Engineering and Industrial Technology Academy. This field includes a wide variety of careers, but CCHS covers many, including woodwork, welding, auto-repair, electrical work, computer-aided design and robotics program. Learning doesn’t just take place in the classroom; students actually sell products and perform services for the community, too.
Within the Health and Environmental Sciences Academy, students interested in the medical field can bring textbooks to life as they diagnose and care for dummies. The models are also used as test prep for certification exams.
There’s also a Fine Arts Academy (which covers all facets from theater to cooking) and one for Business and Marketing, where students learn the keys to success in the corporate world.
At CCHS, students are shown that there’s more to high school than just surviving class: a thriving career.
MORE: How Can a Mayor Enact Change Once He’s Left Office?
Want to Donate? All You Need to Do Is Tap Your Finger
People are constantly on their phones, but now, downloading an app might actually be justified.
With Cause Tap, every time you put a new app (free or paid) on your device, a donation goes towards a worthy organization. And while this may sound too good to be true, it’s not.
To participate, simply install the Cause Tap app, which is free to download from the Google Play store and choose a cause. Then anytime you download a new app, its manufacturer makes a donation on your behalf (at no cost to you), reports Cause Artist. You can then spread impact by connecting with friends and inviting them to support your cause.
The founders of Cause Tap refer to themselves as “marketing and technology industry veterans with a conscience” on their website. As a result, the group makes all of their processes transparent, so users can track exactly where money is being sent and how it is being used.
“We wanted to create an app that would be accessible to people who don’t necessarily have the time or financial means to support causes,” co-founder Andrea Nylund tells Cause Artist. “CauseTap empowers individuals while providing nonprofits with a new way to grow their support base and apps a new channel for engaging users.”
MORE: Download This App, Fight Global Warming. (And Transform Your Business, Too.)
This Unlikely City Is Cranking out IT Experts
In the Victorian building on State Street in Camden, N.J., computers are whirling as part of the IT training and consulting nonprofit Hopeworks N’ Camden that’s bringing education and help to the city’s residents — and rejuvenating the spirit of the city in the process.
Camden probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind when thinking about IT. After all, 43 percent of the population doesn’t have a high school diploma and 47. 8 percent are living in poverty, reports Next City. Hopeworks is working to do something about this and so far, the program has assisted more than 1,000 youth enter college, begin careers and achieve GEDs. It’s also provided training in web design, geographic information systems (GIS) and the global cloud computing platform Salesforce. Additionally, trainees can put their schooling into practice by working in the Hopeworks consulting firm, which services members of their community. The nonprofit has around 60 clients for whom they provide GIS services.
“We offer a service and people hire us to work for them, just like any other consulting firm,” GIS director Luis Olivieri tells Next City. “We just finished a project with the Merchantville-Pennsauken Water Commission to locate their fire hydrants using GPS technology.”
For the student-employees, the experience is rewarding and something they probably thought wasn’t possible. Theadie White attends Camden County Community College and works at Hopeworks as a web intern as well.
“Yeah, I like it. It pays me, so that’s awesome,” Theadie explains. “But it also gave me a lot of skills I didn’t expect that I needed improvement on. I’ve gotten a lot out of it and a lot of other people can get a lot out of it, as well.”
MORE: This City Gives Dropouts a Realistic Way to Earn Their Diplomas
The Surprising Thing That’s Giving Low-Income Students Internet Access
In the evening, when students are supposed to be at home toiling over their homework, the school buses that carry them to school usually sit idle in a lot. But one school district in Salton City, Calif., is putting these vehicles’ downtime to good use.
How so?
By installing Wi-Fi routers inside the school buses and parking them in neighborhoods where many low-income students lack Internet access. For as long as the battery on the bus lasts, the community can use the free Wi-Fi — something that could have huge outcomes, considering that about half of the low-income students in the U.S. lack home Internet access, according to Nichole Dobo of the Hechinger Report.
The only other choice for these kids is to stay at school and use the Wi-Fi there to complete their homework. Darryl Adams, superintendent of schools of the Coachella Valley Unified District, tells Dobo, “I had kids sitting outside my office yesterday because they want to connect to the Internet at, like, 6 o’clock at night.”
When low-income students stay after hours to hop online — missing the school bus home — it creates difficulties for the parents who must come fetch them, as many of them live an hour’s drive or more away.
Thirteen-year-old Jasmine Jimenez says that she’s looking forward to the day when the district might enable Wi-Fi on the bus during its route. “It won’t be a big bug to ask your parents to pick you up,” she said.
School district officials haven’t completely worked out the kinks of the system. So far they’ve only been able to install routers in two buses out of their fleet of 90. Drivers park the two buses on lots in trailer parks and must obtain permission from the owners to do so. But the biggest problem is that the battery tends to die after only one hour of use, an energy crunch which some have suggested might be solved by installing solar panels on the buses.
Still, the Coachella district is determined to try to make the program work. “Come on. We can do better than that as a nation, especially for our low-income families and our disadvantaged families,’’ superintendent Darryl Adams says.
MORE: Every Kid Needs An Internet Connection to Thrive In School. This District Has A Plan to Make it Happen