This week in the Public Lab community newsletter, read an article from ProPublica on mapping land loss in Louisiana, take a look at the new foldable spectrometer design and check out the MultispeQ beta, coming soon. Enjoy!

Announcements

The Public Lab Cambridge/Somerville holiday party was a big success! We had 30+ people attend for a combined open shop and tool intros plus 15-20 who stayed for festivities. Coqui and spectrometer demos, intro to local mapping initiatives, plus lots of tasty food, good company and general hanging out and merriment, made for a great gathering!

Become a sustaining member of Public Lab and snag one of the limited edition t-shirts!

New and ongoing projects

Revisions on the paper spectrometer design from mathew: http://publiclab.org/notes/mathew/12-06-2014/a-paper-spectrometer-design-pt-2

RonHuber reports in on the cleanup plan for Stockton Harbor: http://publiclab.org/notes/RonHuber/12-06-2014/gac-chemical-submits-its-cleanup-plan-for-its-stockton-harbor-eroding-acid-waste-site-good-enough

Sara shared reports released this past week from the Center for Public Integrity on Industry Behavior on Toxic Chemicals.

Updates on the MultispeQ beta release: http://publiclab.org/notes/gbathree/12-12-2014/measurements-on-the-multispeq-beta-soon-to-be-released

Research Note highlights

Fire hazard vulnerability of buildings based on their proximity to fuel and gas stations (posted by christad92) Accessible vegetation indices (posted by gpenzo) Adulteration Detection of distilled spirits using UV-Vis Spectroscopy (posted by ygzstc)

Public Lab in the media

Check out articles from ProPublica and The Lens on Louisiana’s land loss. Jordan Macha and Scott Eustis aerial mapped in Lake Hermitage with developers from ProPublica to capture imagery for the articles: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/reporting-from-the-youngest-land-in-the-world and http://projects.propublica.org/larestoration/

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

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