Public Lab community newsletter 9.16.12

[Shannon Dosemagen]

A quick Sunday morning update from the Public Lab community for everyone! Event announcements for Vermont, New York, California and Louisiana, new maps in the archive and introductions to new sites and projects. 

1. Barn Raising open invite. We sent out a "formal" invite to the Public Lab barn raising in November. If you missed the email, find information here. 

2. LEAFFEST is next weekend! For those of you in Vermont (or who want to travel there), please let Chris Fastie know ASAP if you plan on attending by registering on the Google Form.

3. Grassroots Mapping Forum on Breadpig. If you didn't get the most current issue of the Grassroots Mapping Forum, it is now available for sale on Breadpig.

4. Wrap-up of the UMass Amherst open science hardware workshop. Don Blair sent an email earlier this week with a wrap-up, photos and information about the newly formed Pioneer Valley Open Science organization (congrats!).

5. 150 maps in the archive! I was planning on posting the links for new maps in this email, but then realized that there are twenty-six new ones, so I suggest taking a browse through the Public Lab archive instead. Great to see maps from new places in Canada, the United States, Scotland, the Netherlands, Colombia, Slovenia, Greece, Australia and Spain.

6. Kickstarter Update. Check out the assembly pictures of a prototype "counter" spectrometer posted this past week.

5. Balloon mapping workshop in Los Angeles. Stewart Long will be leading a workshop on September 23rd at Machine Project.

6. New sites and projects. Two new place pages have been started for groups that are developing chapters of Public Lab, a big welcome to Vermont and Skane, Sweden! Public Lab is also helping Groundwork New Orleans with a project in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, mapping a corridor called the Green Slice. 

7. Upcoming events in New York City. A couple of workshops will be taking place, one about dance and ecology on September 23rd and a workshop on the basics of balloon photography and map stitching at Parsons the New School for Design on September 28 and 29. Both are free to attend, but you need to register (information on the pages).
8. New Orleans Water Challenge. If you are in New Orleans, check out the call for applications for the 2012 Water Challenge (figuring out innovative solutions for how we live with water) from The Idea Village and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

9. Public Lab media. A PBS MediaShift Idea Lab blog post on spectrometry and a great case study on the origins of the Public Lab project from Kickstarter were published this past week.

10. Public Lab fall cleaning. Server cleaning that is. Here's an update on the new server racks for long-term Public Lab data archiving. 

11. Research notes

Designing a spectrometer in the 1nm range for <10$ (posted by ToF)

Cuvette/test-tube holder possibilities (posted by beckman)

Remote temperature sensing (posted by fastie)

Call it Delta, maybe (posted by astoicof)

If anything was missed, please email the list, post a research note or send information for inclusion in the next newsletter to sha...@publiclaboratory.org. Have a great Sunday, Shannon

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

@PublicLab

[Liz Barry]

The new Grassroots Mapping Forum is great -- I just got mine and I'm excited to see that it's expanded to two full pages! One neat way to participate is to use the scale bar printed on the back as a background for photographing your own camera. Why, you may wonder? Excerpting the GMF: 

"Together we're building a database of camera and phone sizes so that our community can build add-ons that transform everyday cameras and phones into science equipment."

The collection is just beginning to amass here (only four pics at time of writing): http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/plotscameracollection/

Pick up a GMF and add your camera!

Liz

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@lizbarry