This week in the Public Lab community newsletter, check out the first “State of the Science” video, join Open Hour Monday evening for a session on thermal imaging and catch up on all the great work being done from balloon mapping workshops in Chicago to ongoing development of tools for water monitoring and oil testing. Enjoy!

Announcements

Mathew Lippincott is working on a series of “State of the Science” videos about Public Lab tools. Check out the first one on the Oil Testing Kit and contact mathew@publiclab.org if you’re interested in working on other tool related videos.

Upcoming events

Join Public Lab for OpenHour Monday, August 4th at 8pm est for a session on thermal imaging.

Save the date! Barnraising 2014: Thursday, November 13 - Sunday, November 16 Organizers, plan ahead to come a day early for the Organizers Summit, Wednesday, November 12.

New and ongoing projects

Check out updates on the Riffle (OpenWater) project including a note on the first Riffle deployment: http://publiclab.org/tag/riffle

Kicking off oil testing in New Orleans, several notes were posted from last weeks event including hardware design for the kit and comments on making spectrometer instructions clearer.

Several new notes have been posted from work with Green Garden in Newark, NJ on pole mapping a community garden: http://publiclab.org/tag/elp

Notes from the ongoing mapping project at Staten Island in New York with the NY/NJ Baykeepers: http://publiclab.org/tag/staten-island

Youth Balloon Mapping Workshop in Chicago: http://publiclab.org/notes/mjain26/07-28-2014/youth-balloon-mapping-workshop-complete

Updates from Google Summer of Code projects as they enter the final few weeks of the program: http://publiclab.org/tag/gsoc-2014

Research Note highlights

• Phragmites landfill invasion (posted by nicholas)
• Is our fridge too warm? A Fido now sends us text message alerts (posted by rjstatic)
• South of France Forest monitoring (posted DroneGo)
• Landsat image analysis over New York (posted by nicholas)
• Can open source beat this? (posted by cfastie)
• Water quality instrumentation quality gottchas (posted by neilh20)
• Detection of added sugar in red wine using visual light spectroscopy (posted by ygzstc)
• Can documenting our work be fun? (posted by Liz. This note presents a question about documentation and wiki gardening. Can you help answer it?)
• Can Infragrams provide useful measurement of how thirsty my lawn is? (posted by WhiteRabbit)
• Grassroots underwater photography?! (posted by code4maine)
• Spectrometer on a chip (posted by WhiteRabbit)
• Stockton Harbor overflown, EPA starts preliminary Superfund review (posted by RonHuber. This note presents a question about providing data to the EPA. Can you help answer it?)
• Louisiana Master Naturalist map for Elmer’s Island Spr 2014 (posted by eustatic)
• Can the Public Lab spectrometer analyze light from a patch of grass? (posted by WhiteRabbit. This note presents a question about spectrometry. Can you help answer it?)
• Equalizing area of spectral graphs for comparison (posted by warren)
• Android Smartphone/Python script to capture images from a balloon (LummiGIS)

If anything was missed, please post a research note or email the list. Have a great week everyone! Shannon

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