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Chatting with Obama @White House Maker Faire

  • Nancy DuVergne Smith
  • slice.mit.edu

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Sara Ann Wylie of Public Lab shows the do to yourself Balloon Mapping Kit, during the first ever White House Maker Faire, which brings together students, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens who are using new tools and techniques to launch new businesses, learn vital skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and fuel the renaissance in American manufacturing, at the White House, Wednesday, June 18, 2014 in Washington. The Balloon Mapping Kit enables you to take your own aerial photos from 1000 ft or higher. The President announced new steps the Administration and its partners are taking to support the ability of more Americans, young and old, to have to access to these tools and techniques and brings their ideas to life. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Sara Ann Wylie of Public Lab holds an aerial mapping kit at the White House Maker Faire. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

“There’s a giant red weather balloon in the Rose Garden,” POTUS tweeted to Sara Ann Wylie PhD ’11 before the first White House Maker Faire June 18. The event brought together scientists and civic activists to advocate for public-spirited science, and Public Lab, co-founded by Wylie and other MITers, was among the faire’s “Six Wonders,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

What’s with the weather balloon? One of the Public Lab’s many citizen science projects is a low-cost aerial mapping system using a large red balloon and a digital camera to document pollution and logging operations.

Wylie, a Public Lab organizer and formerly its director of toxics and health research, is now an assistant professor of health sciences and sociology/anthropology at Northeastern University. She earned her MIT degree in SHASS’s Science, Technology, and Society program. Her Institute connections continue as she works with Christine Walley, associate professor of anthropology, on a project documenting the environmental hazards of petroleum coke or petcoke in the Chicago area. She’s also working on a book in a Duke Press series co-edited with Professor Mike Fischer.

“I got to tell the President about communities in Chicago that Chris Walley and I have been working with to map petcoke piles from Tar Sands refining,” Wylie wrote in her blog. “I was accompanied by Eymund Diegel, an organizer from New York who used balloon mapping to improve the clean up of the Gowanus Superfund site and to discover the lost burial ground of the first US soldiers to die in the revolutionary war, which it turns out is in Brooklyn, underneath a vacant lot.”

Want to know more? Get involved with Public Lab, formally called the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, by visiting this civic science community online. Watch a 12-minute Public Lab video, Kitemappers Documentary, on do-it-yourself aerial photography as a tool for documenting and responding to changing environments.

Public Lab was not the only MIT group at the White House Maker Faire. Learn about MIT’s Mobile Fab Lab, a trailer containing digital fabrication, design, and manufacturing tools, along with an electronics workbench ready to create new things.

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