Public Lab community newsletter 12.7.12

Tons of work happening in the Public Lab community this past week-- check out a new tool page for a portable energy kit, pick up the latest issue of Popular Mechanics with an article on the Public Lab spectrometer and join the newly re-formed education working group. Enjoy!

1. Public Lab in Popular Mechanics. Pick up the January 2013 copy of Popular Mechanics and check out the article "Seeing the Light" on the Public Lab DIY spectrometer! If you missed the spectrometer Kickstarter, you can now pre-order your own desktop version or purchase the mini fold-up version (hint-- for $10 this makes a great gift!).

2. Mapping historic streams. Mappers at the Gowanus Canal Superfund site in Brooklyn recently pooled resources to locate streams that can, "help improve the water quality of a heavily polluted industrial waterway." The excellent post on this project is well worth a read!

3. WinterCamp 2013. A group of Public Labbers are getting together from January 7-18, 2013 in Louisiana to build out the Oil Spill Toolkit. If you're interested in attending for a couple of days or the entire time, sign up on this form.

4. Portable energy kit. Check out the new tool page for a "lightweight, low-cost kit for collecting, storing and providing energy-- off-the-grid," that Don Blair recently pitched as a tool he will be working on. We'll be hearing more from Don soon, but in the meantime, take a look at the tool page.

5. K-12+ education/curriculum group meeting. This Public Lab working group will be meeting at 6:30pm EST on Tuesday, November 11th. If you're interested in participating in this working group or want to know more about what this group is up to, please ask to become a contact of Public.Lab on Skype and list your name on this document.

6. NYC Public Lab mapping and Winter Party. New York City has a big day coming up on Saturday December 15th. At 9:00am, join the GLAM project and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy in Brooklyn (2nd Avenue and 5th Street) to map the entire 2 mile length of the canal. At 4pm, the group will move to the Lab space at the Pfizer building (630 Flushing Ave, 8th floor) for our Winter Party. Check the PLOTS-NYC list for more details or contact liz@publiclaboratory.org.

7. Spectrometers in production! As I write, people in Boston and Portland are working on getting the mini-foldable and desktop spectrometers from the Fall Kickstarter ready to send out. Check out production updates and images here.

8. Civic Ecology online course. The Cornell Civic Ecology Lab is offering an online course in the Spring of 2013, taught by a friend of Public Lab, Phil Silva. If you're interested in this topic, you can read more about the course and apply here.

9. Last, but certainly not least, a couple of research notes:
   Preliminary sample (posted by livioguerrero)
   Spectrometer testing (posted by cfastie)

Have a great weekend everyone! As always, if anything was missed, please email the list, post a research note or email shannon@publiclaboratory.org for inclusion in the newsletter next week.