Gaia Desert

The citizen science trend is growing as groups are able to now use inexpensive sensors such as those listed on the SEEED wiki  (China) or the sparkfun website (USA) or many others.  These are all plug-n-play sensors that anyone can spend a weekend setting up and monitoring their outdoor environment. One of my citizen science goals is to use Unmanned Aerial Surveillance for environmental monitoring. This can be used for Environmental justice, or for documenting natural phenomena.  There was a recent use of a drone to monitor a meat packing industry's waste to a river. A benefit of UAS (drone) use is that they are not allowed to be used for commercial uses. That means that industry can't use them to collect data on private citizens. Drone operators are forbidden by the FAA to operate them for a profit. The converse of this is that citizens can use them to monitor industry. The UAS are great for environmental justice. A couple of groups using them for environmental purposes ar

I am looking for a particulate sensor that we can use with the Eastern Coachella valley Environmental Justice community. The community member hosting the device will benefit from the technology by understanding their air quality, their health and how it compares to the rest of the world. Its an exercise in public health education and empowerment. When a family hosts a device, it could potentially inform and educate them about the air quality parameters that are used; how their community ranks with the rest of the country and localize some of the air quality warnings. The ideal outdoor air quality senso r should have the following abilities: CRITERIA: Be robust, small, portable and weather resistant for an outdoor site. Be unobtrusive in its appearance to detract from vandalism Have AC and DC power options where it could be run from a battery and/or plugged in Require none or very simple zeroing and calibrations that can be run by a citizen with a high school education.  Be net

Thinking of publishing in an open access journal? Will your tenure track committee notice if the journal has an obscure name? Why don't you publish in the Journal of Applied Public Health Research? Sounds too good to be true? If you are interested, please read about this sting operation: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full I receive many emails per day inviting me to publish in reputable open access journals. My favorite quote is this: "We are ardent to promote erudite, pragmatic, and contemporaneous research" This is from a journal supposedly based in San Diego. . There are more interesting guidelines for selecting a reputable journal here: http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/02/list-of-predatory-publishers-2014/