The Brief

How do you measure the rewards for the makers and sponsors of most of the several dozen floats set to roll down Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena on Jan. 1?

For some it’s a paycheck, public relations points, and civic pride as millions of people watch the broadcast. But for the makers of one, and only one float, the rewards are largely about learning by doing through collaboration.

“We are a student leadership development program that happens to have a float building problem,” said Quinn Akemon, a fifth year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and president of their campus’ float building program.

This will be the 75th year that students from the San Luis Obispo and the Cal Poly Pomona campuses team up to design and build a Rose Parade Float. Guided by one campus advisor, the students decide what the float will look like, how it will move, and what flowers and plants it will be decorated with.

Lesson 1: Show what you're capable of

Putting students at the center of the process can “show the world what Cal Poly students are capable of if you give them the opportunity to be autonomous and work hard and really show that learn-by-doing spirit that we're taught on our campuses,” Akemon said.

The two schools’ float programs stand as an example of how collaboration can be taught in college as employers bemoan that college graduates aren’t ready to work on teams in the workplace.

“I 100% believe that this program has altered the trajectory of my life in a more positive way than anything else could,” said Matthew Rodarte, a fourth year electrical engineering major at Cal Poly Pomona who’s president of his campus float program.

The Pasadena Tournament of Roses said it costs at least $275,000 to build “a high quality float” — and prices go up significantly with size and sophisticated animation.

Most of the roughly 45 parade floats are made by professional builders. Only six are “self built” floats, like the Cal Poly float. And the Cal Poly float is the only one entirely built and designed by students.

This year’s Cal Poly float is called “Shock and Roll: Powering the Musical Current,” keeping with the 2024 parade’s music theme. Roses, marigolds, chrysanthemums and other flowers and plants will decorate figures of sea life that include features an eel playing a Gibson Flying V guitar and a giant scallop DJing a record..

“Shock and Roll: Powering the Musical Current” is the 2024 Rose Parade float designed and built entirely by students at Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly San Luis Obispp

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Courtesy of Cal Poly Pomona

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A Cal Poly Pomona spokesperson didn’t give the price tag for the float but said costs are kept down through financial donations, and by re-using construction material, and growing some of the flowers and plants on campus that’ll be used to decorate the float.

And labor is free.

The students working on the float, including the 25 who are the core of the leadership team, do not receive academic credit or payment for their effort.

“I explicitly took a floral design class where I learned how to make floral arrangements on the Cal Poly SLO campus in order to know more so I could bring it to float building,” Akemon said. They’re a plant science major.

Lesson 2: Engineering is only a small part of building

Akemon and Rodarte say the program attracts engineers but there are also architecture and art students working on the float too — “people that just really have an understanding of this design, feedback, making-adjustments process that really follows us the entire year,” Akemon said.

Matthew Rodarte and Quinn Akemon on the 2024 Cal Poly Universities Rose Float, Shock and Roll at the Cal Poly Pomona Rose Float lab December 19, 2023.

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Tom Zasadzinski

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Akemon said some of the students are interested in using their design and project management experience working on the float to apply for jobs at entertainment companies like Disney.

Rodarte’s worked on the Cal Poly floats for three years now and has tried to do tasks outside his comfort zone, such as working to shape the float’s frame.

“We were working on our new animation system and we were unable to get a signal out of it. So we brought in the oscilloscope,” Rodarte said, and he stepped in to operate the device because the younger electrical engineering students hadn’t learned to use it yet.

(An oscilloscope is a device that measures electrical voltage and displays it as a wave form on a sandwich-bread sized screen.)

Rodarte is working on his senior project using sensor technology to power a home entertainment system. He’s emerged as one of the project’s leaders, he said, something he attributes to his multi-year experience in the float program.

“I'm a much better communicator. Every time I have to do a public speaking [in an] exam or a presentation in one of my engineering classes, my classmates always come up to me and be like, Whoa, how did you do that?,” he said.

There’s been some hand wringing in recent years about whether colleges and universities are doing enough to teach students collaboration and teamwork skills in classrooms. According to a 2021 survey conducted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, nearly two-thirds of employers said they value employees who work well in teams but fewer than half believed college graduates have those skills.

Lesson 3: When it’s time to relax, enjoy the fruits of your labor

Akemon, Rodarte and other students who worked on the float are set to watch the Rose Parade from complimentary seats in bleachers along the parade route.

“You can't even hear yourself think over the just absolute chaos that happens in our student section when our float comes past,” Akemon said.

That chaos, Akemon and Rodarte said, is students wanting the world to know how much love and care they put into this work of art.

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In the face of the nation's highest gas prices, California lawmakers approved a bill to ease restrictions on E85 conversion kits — devices that let conventional gasoline cars run on a cheaper, mostly ethanol fuel blend.

Assembly Bill 2046, dubbed the “Access to Affordable Gas Act” by its author, Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Stockton Democrat, advanced through the Assembly on a 59-0 vote with no debate or opposition.

The measure is the latest example of Sacramento lawmakers scrambling to respond to gas costs that have soared amid the Iran-Israel war, which has rattled global oil markets and pushed California pump prices above $6 a gallon. It now heads to the California state Senate and would need Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval before it becomes law.

“Californians consistently pay more at the pump than drivers from other states, and gas prices are once again climbing across the state,” Ransom said on the Assembly floor Thursday. “For commuters and working families, [the proposal] offers a practical way to save money.”

If approved in its current form, the measure would exempt manufacturers of E85 converter kits from an approval process by the state’s primary climate regulator, the California Air Resources Board, which requires companies to demonstrate the devices do not increase a vehicle's emissions. The bill would leave in place a separate federal certification process run by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Members in Sacramento are looking for ways to try to reduce costs — or appear to reduce costs of driving — and so this is a way to do that,” said Aaron Smith, a UC Berkeley economist and fuels expert.

The converter kits, which cost between $800 to $1,250, according to a legislative analysis of the bill, would let drivers convert their cars to run on both gasoline and E85 fuel.

E85 is a blend of up to 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline; the share of ethanol typically is between 55% and 85%, said Smith, the Berkeley expert.

Jeff Wilkerson, government affairs manager for Pearson Fuels, the largest E85 fuel provider in the state and a bill supporter, said E85 — much of which is made from Midwest corn — is largely insulated from overseas oil shocks that drive California gas prices. The ethanol blend has sold for $2 or more less per gallon than gasoline during recent price spikes.

While E85 is typically priced lower than gasoline and can reduce petroleum dependence and carbon emissions, it delivers 20% to 30% fewer miles per gallon, according to the air board, meaning drivers only save money when E85 is priced at least 20% to 30% below gasoline.

About 1.3 million vehicles in California can currently use the fuel, which is sold at about 640 stations statewide — just 3% of the state’s more than 15,000 fuel pumps, according to the bill analysis.

Ransom said more E85 pumps would be built if the state loosened restrictions and encouraged demand for the fuel blend. She stressed that her bill would present E85 as an alternative.

“For some people, it may not be a wise choice, but at least now it’s going to be a choice,” she said.

Environmentally, the fuel is rated cleaner than regular gasoline by California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard. But that rating has critics. Smith, the Berkeley economist, said the benefits of ethanol are likely overstated. Official numbers likely understate emissions from land use as rising corn demand for ethanol pushes farmers to clear forested land.

The state’s own certification record offers a cautionary tale. Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the board, said the agency has received only five applications from companies for E85 conversion kits since 2008 and that none has cleared the certification process, which is designed to ensure modified vehicles still meet their original emissions standards. Supporters of the proposal argue the board moves slowly and its regulations are burdensome.

But loosening that standard carries its own risk, cautioned Aaron Kurz, senior consultant on the Assembly Transportation Committee, especially now.

As the federal government has stripped scientific expertise from regulatory decisions, he wrote in his analysis, “this committee should consider if the state should cede authority over an inherently scientific process and set a precedent for transferring approval authority to the federal government.”

MOUNTAIN VIEW – Google is changing what it means to Google.

The company this week announced significant changes to its search box — that austere, single-line input field on its homepage that has been the world's most popular entry point into the web for around two-and-a-half decades.

The new version looks similar to the old one-line text box, but it's dynamic, expanding with longer queries. Users can also drop videos, pictures and files into it for what Google calls "multimodal" search.

Behind the scenes, a bigger shift is under way. Google is merging artificial intelligence and traditional web search in a move that Liz Reid, who oversees search at Google, said brings "the best of web and the best of AI together."

Critics say folding AI deeper into search risks further muddying the waters around the provenance of information gleaned from the web and could take agency away from users. A chatbot is likely to return a summary with only a few links to further information, unlike a web search that returns many pages of links.

But the shift is, in some ways, not surprising, given Silicon Valley's hard pivot toward AI, with Google and others investing billions in the technology and refocusing corporate strategies around it.

For about a year, Google has put "AI Overviews" — short summaries — at the top of some search results. "What we've seen with AI Overviews is that people don't want either just an AI or the web. They want a mix of both," said Reid.

She said she's noticed that users have started to ask longer questions, with more natural language, rather than fragments or key words. "They're asking the question that they really have," Reid said.

For Google, that potentially unlocks new understandings of user intentions. "If you start using more natural language, if you're having a conversation, when you've shifted from researching into buying, you've sort of indicated that. And so we can put better ads because we understand what that is," Reid said.

Google is also introducing agentic functionality to search, so that users can ask it to do tasks over time — like search for theater tickets at regular intervals or send shoppers a notification when something goes on sale or conduct a weekly scan of the internet for local events.

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click.

"Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said.

Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from.

"If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and, therefore, came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

Sarah T. Roberts, director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA, said the algorithmic underpinnings of Google's web search results have long been "by design, inscrutable to end users," and there's more to it than simply the best of the web floating to the top of any given search. Adding AI will only make the system more opaque, she said.

"What's happening now with AI is that that complexity that already existed will be further obfuscated and even more difficult to unpack," she said.

She noted episodes where Google's AI has provided bad results, including advising putting glue in pizza and eating rocks. "Those gaffes shouldn't be forgotten as Google makes this transition," she said.

And critics say that driving more Google users from web searches to interacting with AI will exacerbate the risks of the so-called "Google Zero" scenario, where the growth of AI queries kills off web search and suffocates the internet click economy as we know it. That includes online shops, web advertisers and news organizations that all depend on referred traffic from Google.

While the redesigned box will be the same for all Google users, there are various tricks and tips online for people who want to disable or avoid some AI functions when using Google.

Google is a financial supporter of NPR.

Early every Saturday for the last three and a half years, William Campbell, 61, leaves his Silver Lake home to be at the Angels Flight station for the first ride at 6:45 a.m.

Campbell is one of a team of operators behind the proverbial wheel of the two near-identical funiculars — named Olivet and Sinai — that go up and down a 33% angle slope from Hill Street to Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles.

“You’re a part of living history,” said Campbell, who is dressed in an orange and black waistcoat and bow tie, and wears a bowler hat with a monarch butterfly on top. There’s a reason for that, he said mysteriously.

Angels Flight on Bunker Hill.

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Today, I am the first rider. Soon after, I am joined by a family visiting from Texas.

“I was just looking at a local tourist place, and I just saw this small, cute railway,” said Michael Nguyen, who was alongside his mother and sister. “I was like, oh, this looks interesting. And I saw that you can actually go on it. I was like, OK, that’s pretty dope.”

Masterminded by lawyer, politician and engineer Col. James Ward Eddy, the Angels Flight “hillevator” opened on New Year’s Eve 1901 as a way for people to travel up and down Bunker Hill, which was then the place where the city’s wealthy population lived.

The journey took them down to the streets and stores below and from 1917, Grand Central Market, with the first passengers paying just a penny fare for what was billed as the “shortest railway in America,” traveling just 298 feet.

When he’s not working his weekday full-time day job investigating animal cruelty and abuse, Campbell spends his spare time looking through online newspaper archives for any information about Angels Flight.

Angels Flight Railway.

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Angels Flight Railway.

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James Bartlett

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Originally located by the 3rd Street Tunnel — at the end of the block from where it is now — the train has been through several changes, as has Bunker Hill itself.

“All the wealthy people moved to Beverly Hills, and Brentwood, and Bel Air, and beyond. And all their wonderful Victorian mansions were turned into boarding houses, and it attracted a lower income, more diverse population, which resulted in blight and crime — at least according to the city,” Campbell said of Bunker Hill's transformation.

City officials authorized Bunker Hill to be all but razed in the 1950s and '60s, and Angels Flight was put into what was promised to be temporary storage for a year or two, despite protests from singer Peggy Lee and others.

The year was 1969. And it took nearly three decades for its return. Angels Flight welcomed passengers again in 1996 to its current location after test runs were made with cases of beer and soft drinks weighing 9,000 pounds. The cable cars were rebuilt exactly as before, but with modern safety requirements, such as Sinai having wheelchair space.

A 2001 accident in which one person died and seven were injured saw another long closure until 2010, and there was a derailment in 2014, which saw another short shuttering. But Angels Flight has been running ever since 2017, save the odd mechanical problem.

William Campbell.

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James Bartlett

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Angels Flight keepsakes made by William Campbell for riders to take.

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Campbell describes himself as a cheerleader for Angels Flight, and you can easily see why. During his shift he pins up a 1904 photo of the city’s landscape taken from an 80-foot-high observation tower at the original location, so people can compare it to the skyscraper skyline of today.

“At one time you could see all the way to Catalina,” he noted.

There is also a display about near-forgotten Bunker Hill folk artist Marcel Cavalla, and Campbell gives away Angels Flight bookmarks, stickers and maps, all of which he researches, designs and prints out of his own pocket.

One of his projects, old advertisements from 1901 to the 1940s, is displayed in the panels above the seats, and was installed a couple of months ago.

Interior of Angels Flight, showcasing old advertisements from 1901 to the 1940s that Campbell installed.

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One of the vintage ads for Catalina Carrier-Pigeon Service.

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There's everything from old Market Basket supermarket ads, to Barbara Stanwyck shilling for Lux toilet soap, to a standard power mower from John Bean manufacturing, to one for the Catalina Carrier Pigeon Service, which operated from 1894 to 1902, taking messages from Avalon to Bunker Hill.

And the monarch butterfly on his hat? That’s related to his Angels Flight “holy grail,” the one question he can’t definitively answer: why were they painted orange and black?

With that, Campbell grabs his binoculars and sees there are passengers waiting for a ride up, so I get into Olivet and wave goodbye as I travel down to Hill Street.

A group called Neighbors Helping Neighbors has been clearing overgrown weeds for free on fire survivors' empty lots in Altadena.

They’ve finished 10 with many more to go. They’re keeping at it not just to keep things tidy, but to avert another disaster as the region enters fire season — and their efforts are spreading. More than 200 homeowners have signed up, after hearing about the group from its Facebook page and through word of mouth.

“I'm 5 feet 2 inches tall, but there were weeds 6 and 8 feet tall,” said Antoinette “Toni” Bailey-Raines, the ringleader. She is also a co-founder of Altadena Talks Foundation, a nonprofit started in the wake of the Eaton Fire.

Bailey-Raines lives in San Dimas but grew up in Altadena. Her parents and sister all lost their homes in the Eaton Fire.

“I went to my parents' lot one day,” she said. “I loaded up the back of my car with my lawnmower, my blower, my rake, because I wanted to make sure their lot was cleaned up.”

It took seven hours, but she figured all that overgrown vegetation can't be good for Altadena with the fire season just around the corner.

And just like that, the idea for Neighbors Helping Neighbors was born.

Preventing another disaster

Antoinette “Toni” Bailey-Raines, founder of Neighbors Helping Neighbors.

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Fiona Ng

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Antoinette “Toni” Bailey-Raines at one of the cleared lots.

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Fiona Ng

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The very first lot, just south in Pasadena, was cleared in mid-April. Bailey-Raines said the property was getting notices from the city to clear the lot or face escalating fines. Pasadena conducts brush clearance inspections every spring and summer.

Toni said the family had moved to Mississippi after the Eaton Fire.

“You lost everything, and then somebody's gonna tell you they're gonna give you a fine because you have weeds on your lot and you're not even here to see that?” Bailey-Raines said.

That day, she rounded up a group of nine people, including her son and his friend. A neighbor across the street was suspicious at first, but eventually told her, "You have me for about an hour." He stayed for two.

The job took less than four hours.

A growing movement

On May 13, dozens of volunteers showed up in Altadena to clear seven lots in one morning.

One of them — a 14,000-square-foot lot — belongs to Sarkis Aleksanian and his family. He had reached out to Bailey-Raines in late April, after learning about the group from a neighborhood WhatsApp chat.

“I was looking into cleaning up the lot and really daunted by the prospect,” he said. “I was worried that the lawn would dry up and be a problem.”

Aleksanian and his wife were on hand to help out. It’s the one thing that Bailey-Raines requires — for the homeowners to be there.

“I've asked them that if they're able-bodied to be here and help,” she said. “You're here. You're encouraging people, and you're helping on your lot. [Sarkis] was doing everything from weed-eater, to chainsaw, to whatever, and that's what it's about.”

This 14,000-square-foot lot in Altadena was cleaned up in less than two hours on a recently Saturday.

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“It was just remarkable, I tell you,” Aleksanian said. He said he recognized some of the volunteers that morning — folks he sees in the community.

And he did encounter someone he knew — a high school acquaintance from years back. “It's neighbors helping neighbors, just like she called it, you know?” Aleksanian said.

His lot was finished in 90 minutes.

More is needed

With a growing waitlist, what is needed are people and equipment — from gloves and trash bags to the hardware.

“I have six brush cutters and two chainsaws and a couple trimmers, but I need, like, triple that at least,” she said.

Same goes for rechargeable batteries that power these tools — which Bailey-Raines juices up with generators they bring on-site.

A number of organizations — including Neighborhood Survants, Altagether, Project Passion, My Tribe Rise, Dena Heals — have granted money and donated equipment and manpower. Bailey-Raines has also put in her own money.

“My dream is one Saturday morning to have 500 people and that we clear a whole street, a whole block — so that this list of 200 can go down, and as others hear about it, they get on it, and we as a community do this as neighbors to help one another,” she said.