Happy New Year! We hope that everyone had a great holiday season and is ringing in 2015 refreshed. This week in the Public Lab community newsletter, meet the two new Public Lab nonprofit staff members, get ready for a couple winter mapping and water quality events and catch up on progress made on your favorite DIY community science project. Enjoy!

Announcements

We’re happy to welcome to the Public Lab nonprofit staff Gretchen Gehrke, Data Ambassador, and Micheal Crumpler, Administrative Coordinator. Micheal will work from New Orleans and Gretchen from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Read their bios here: http://publiclab.org/wiki/plots-staff

Check out February Open Hour here, covering the topic of tool lending libraries.

Upcoming events

Water Quality Meetup: Saturday, January 24th, 1:00pm in New Orleans. Meet us at Propeller at 1:00pm. We’ll visit Bayou St. John’s Scenic Waterway, collect samples, do some pole mapping and work with the DIY water quality tools.

Mapping Training: Saturday February 21st, 11:00-4:30pm in New Orleans at the Rosa F. Keller Library 4300 South Broad Street. Want to learn how to do DIY aerial photography? Build maps with your own photos? Work with the Infragram for near-infrared photography? Join Public Lab for this free workshop!

New and ongoing projects

2015 Web Working Group Report: http://publiclab.org/notes/warren/01-14-2015/2015-web-working-group-report

Building a syringe pump: http://publiclab.org/notes/JSummers/12-30-2014/syringe-pump-mechanicals

Using spectrometer as a tool for color perception: http://publiclab.org/notes/Joeri2/12-31-2014/color-perception-influence-of-an-different-colored-object

Images from the November Barnraising posted by Chris Fastie: http://publiclab.org/tag/barnraising2014

Development plan (in sketches) for the Riffle and Coqui: http://publiclab.org/notes/donblair/01-14-2015/riffle-coqui-development-plan

Research Note highlights

• Orange is the new red (posted by cfastie)
• Shallow note on depth (posted by donblair)
• Valve automation for laboratory liquid handeling (posted by JSummers)
• Preparing a DVD-R to act as a diffraction grating (posted by MrBumper)
• DIY kit design strategies for participation (posted by liz and mathew)
• Revisions to the Riffle & Coqui design (posted by donblair)
• How can I test by tap water for BPA? (posted by Sali. This post asks a question about water quality, can you help answer it?)

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

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