Public Lab community newsletter 8.4.12

[Shannon Dosemagen]

I'd like to start by wishing everyone a nice Saturday, but also apologizing for the Public Lab community newsletter being a day late and a bit longer than usual, its been a busy week! Check out new maps, get updates on projects in London, New Orleans and NYC and read research notes ranging from H2S sensing to solar balloon heat seaming. Enjoy!

1. Public Lab staff changes. Congratulations are in order for Sara Wylie, one of Public Lab's co-founders and the Director of Toxics and Health Research. She is moving to a position at Northeastern University where she will be helping to start a new program between Health Sciences and Sociology in Environmental Health. This exciting new program will continue to work closely with Public Lab and our partners in the Northeast to build transformative tools and methods for community based environmental health research. Sara will continue working with Public Lab as a contractor and will retain her current PLOTS email address.

2. Public Lab at Public Participation in Scientific Research conference and the Open Hardware Summit. This weekend, Mathew Lippincott and I are spending the weekend in Portland at the PPSR conference with others who are thinking about citizen science, if anyone else is here, please find us! On September 27th, Liz Barry and I will be giving a talk at the Open Hardware Summit in NYC. Tickets just went on sale yesterday, hope to see folks there!

3. Salisbury Swamp NDVI and Shadow Cliffs Park maps. The maps from this project are now online. To see them together in overlay, expand the open layers layer toolbar that is on the right hand side of the map viewer. Visible light imagery is here and the NDVI version is here. A map created by Pat Coyle and Nile Runge of Shadow Cliffs in Pleasanton, CA is also now online.

4. Grassroots Mapping Forum issue #2 update. The GMF that features a map of the Chandeleur Islands, a conversation on UAS (unoccupied aerial systems) ethics and an interview with wetlands scientist, Scott Eustis, is going to print on Monday! You can subscribe to the quarterly forum on Breadpig.

5. New Gulf Coast list. A list was just started for organizing Gulf Coast (Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and Florida) events and sending out local announcements. If you're in the area or interested in hearing whats going on in this region, please join!

6. Creating local Public Lab mailing lists. If you want to make a list for your area, here are some simple steps to follow. A number of lists already exist, please make sure to check first on this page and add the list that you create so others can join.

7. Spectrometer Kickstarter. Public Lab is getting ready to launch a Kickstarter for the Spectrometer in the next couple of months. A script for the video was posted this past week and your thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated!

8. Community updates from London to NYC. Cindy Regalado from the University College London ExCiteS program posted a number of updates on the work that is being done in the Mildmay Community of London through the Science has no Borders initiative: Initiative summary, aims of initiative, Update May-June-July, Update June-July (web development), preparing for the touch, learn, play mini-expo and first reading from the temp and humidity sensor. There is also a new initiative underway to kite map Newtown Creek in NYC. 

9. Bayou Sauvage photo strip test #2. We're currently in the middle of the second Louisiana field test of photo strips that sense hydrogen sulfide. To follow the test (the last tubes are coming out of the marsh on Monday), follow the incoming research notes such as the test protocol and removing Draeger tubes after 8 hours.

10. Spectrometer kits now available on Breadpig. Join the active community working on developing this tool! The kit costs $30 and you'll be able to get in on all the fun that comes along with looking at wine, oil and coral reefs through the view of spectrometry.  

11. Last, but never least, research notes from the past week:

Alternate design for H2S canister (posted by deepwinter)

Solar balloon heat seaming process (posted by elainechoi89)

Homemade pole photography rig (from Jayur Mehta)

"It's a map!" @ Beam Camp, NH (posted by Oscar Brett)

H2S strips batch 2: New Mexico (posted by sara)

Bayou Bienvenue mapping: out of focus (posted by eustatic)

Carabiner kite line attachment (posted by MicheleTobias)

Thermal imaging tests with Android AP (posted by sara)

As always, if anything was missed, please email to the list, post a research note or email me (sha...@publiclaboratory.org) for inclusion in the newsletter next week. 

Best, Shannon

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

@PublicLab

[sara wylie]

Hi All,

Just wanted to say a quick thanks to Public Lab's fantastic staff and my fellow founders for making this such an amazing year! I'm sad to be leaving a staff role in our organization but very excited about the bright future for Public Lab and our continued collaboration. I'm looking forward to continuing to contribute to growing this forum for engaged public scientific investigation into our shared environmental health questions in my new position at Northeastern. Continuing to collaborate with Public Lab, I hope the new Environmental Health Program at Northeastern can help innovate new kinds of relationships between universities, non-profits and community organizations that support the development of innovative open source, accessible research tools and thriving community based environmental health research.

Thanks, in no particularly order, Shannon, Stewart, Jeff, Liz, Adam and Matt, working with you all has been a great honor. And finally and perhaps most importantly thanks to all of the Public Lab members and contributors: you've breathed life into the spark of our idea and created a transformative new public forum for research. I hope we can continue aspiring as a community to change how we think about and practice science, create new ways to make and share knowledge about our environments and most importantly innovate new avenues to redress and remediate pressing environmental health and justice questions.

Best Wishes and Bright Futures!

Sara

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