Featured image: an Infragram-converted Mobius Action Cam false-color image, by Mathew Lippincott

Happy Sunday, folks -- read on to find out about a couple big events coming up this month and next, and a big announcement about the Infragram project. And have a great day!

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Announcements

The Infragram Point & Shoot has been announced; Mathew Lippincott and Chris Fastie have worked together to make the excellent Mobius Action Cam a working plant analysis camera.

Upcoming events

The inaugural 2014 Northeast Barnraising, a more tech-centric event to be held near Plymouth, MA, was announced this week. Miss out on the annual Louisiana Barnraisings? Check out the details

IFARM 2014: The third annual IFARM meetup for open source agricultural science with Public Lab/Farm Hack/Green Start in New Hampshire is scheduled for the weekend of May 17-18th -- more details to be posted shortly, as well as rideshares from Boston; look out for more at http://publiclab.org/tag/ifarm this week.

A weekly virtual meet-up on different contaminants is kicking off this Wed May 7th at 7pm ET -- this one will be an open hour; details here: http://publiclab.org/wiki/openhour

Stevie Lewis, PL's new Outreach Manager, has invited folks from the Gulf Coast chapter (/wiki/gulf-coast) for a Barataria Meetup at 6:30 this Thursday at Propeller in New Orleans to talk about the ongoing mapping work in Barataria Bay: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/plots-gulfcoast/NCn1hV51KDQ

Carmel from the Empire Dragon Boat Team, posted about a Friends and Family cleanup day at Flushing Bay, which is heavily impacted by combined sewage outflows: http://publiclab.org/notes/carmelfromson/04-25-2014/invitation-to-friends-and-family-day-flushing-bay-may-10

Ariel Levi Simons of the Los Angeles Public Lab chapter is hosting a Citizen Science meetup at the Pico Pico library on May 10th: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/publiclaboratory/M8yxcacCBEo

New and ongoing projects

Folks leading the Open Water initiative have begun researching and listing a variety of common contaminants here -- pitch in! http://publiclab.org/wiki/common-water-contaminants

Pablo Rey has put out a call (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/laboratoriopublico/3H-fIHj1vYo) on the spanish-language Public Lab list for stories and projects to be featured in an upcoming International edition of the Grassroots Mapping Forum, Public Lab's community research print quarterly.

New features on PublicLab.org: A research note is forthcoming, but you may notice lots of small changes and tweaks -- as well as some brief trouble posting research notes on Friday night (thankfully resolved!). Changes include a new tags page and a new overall contributors page.

The plots-dev list -- for programmers interested in Public Lab software projects -- has been growing enormously, and is now close to 50 members. Contributions from new folks on this list has been key to the ongoing progress on our various websites! http://publiclab.org/wiki/developers

Research Note highlights

With all the recent activity on air pollution monitoring, Don Blair posted a series of questions and ideas about how particulate air pollution is actually measured, including some illustrations and kicking off a great discussion: http://publiclab.org/notes/donblair/05-03-2014/preliminary-pcbs-for-particulates

Pat Coyle has posted on calculating the volume of a waste pile from kite photos.

Yagiz responded to Liz Barry's call for spectrometric testing of edible oil adulteration, kicking off a great discussion: http://publiclab.org/notes/ygzstc/04-30-2014/detection-of-olive-oil-adulteration-with-peanut-oil-using-visual-light-spectroscopy

Scott Eustis posted about documenting a river restoration project with kite photography: http://publiclab.org/notes/eustatic/04-30-2014/west-bay-river-restoration-diversion-strategy-in-action

Hot topics on the mailing lists

Kite and balloon mappers have been trying to find an easier-to-open alternative to the fishing swivels included in Balloon Mapping Kits: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/grassrootsmapping/YQsLR1G_tYE