Public Lab community newsletter 6.22.12

[Shannon Dosemagen]

Exciting news this week in the Public Lab community as more aerial mapping items become available for sale, workshops on building kites and solar balloons occur and the first Public Lab version of a test for hydrogen sulfide is completed! Half the U.S. is in an unusual heatwave and many of you will be getting this late Friday evening, so I thought that for this weeks updates we'd keep news as short, sweet and chill as possible:

1. Extra balloons, reels, and t-shirts available in the PLOTS store. You now have the option to purchase either a kit or individual pieces of the kit as well as cool blue ballooning t-shirts!

2. Aerial mapping workshop in Providence, RI. Come learn how to make balloon maps! AS220 Labs, Sunday June 24rd. 1-4 pm. Email ja...@as220.org, AS220 Labs Manager to register.

3. One week away! Brooklyn’s “Build a Tyvek Kite and Solar Balloon” workshop.

4. Knight News Challenge: Data submission. Members of the Public Lab community submitted an application to the Knight News Challenge data competition for a project called the Public Archive.

5. Triple Helix and Waag Society Citizen Science conferences. Shannon Dosemagen, Mathew Lippincott and Sara Wylie will be giving a keynote at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Triple Helix: Technoscience as Activism conference this upcoming Thursday. Jeff will be giving a keynote at a citizen science conference at the Waag Society in Amsterdam next week as well as a running a balloon workshop or two.

6. H2S testing in Bayou Savage. Here in Louisiana we're really excited to do the first pilot test of hydrogen sulfide sensing tomorrow morning in a wetlands area called Bayou Savage. To learn more, read about the development of this tool thus far or check out the rough notes on protocol for tomorrow. 

7. Public Lab in Anthropology News and on PBS IdeaLab. Public Lab board member, Christine Walley, wrote a great article on the relevance Public Lab work has to anthropology and Sara Wylie wrote this weeks PBS IdeaLab post on the Public Lab tool development process.

8. Finally, a couple of great research notes from the past week!

Analytics on aerial images-- using filesize (posted by warren)

Trash can rig in action (posted by MicheleTobias)

Keeping it easy, making it awesome: open source documentation (posted by warren)

As always, if something was missed, please send it out to the list, post a research note or email sha...@publiclaboratory.org for inclusion in the newsletter next week. Have a great weekend everyone! Shannon

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Shannon Dosemagen
Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science
publiclaboratory.org

@PublicLab