Columbia's Tow Center is brainstorming sensor journalism prospects in workshop

In a little over a week, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University will be organizing experts across multiple disciplines, from around the country, to come up with low-cost, widely-distributable solutions for sensor journalism.

For their Sensor Journalism Weekend (June 1-2), the Tow Center will host discussions on the "pre-history, current practice and opportunities for sensors in journalism," in anticipation of a pilot sensor journalism project to be conducted over the summer.

According to Tow's calendar, there will be "technical, ethical, theoretical and practical resources available, demonstrations of current sensing equipment and opportunities to expand links throughout the community of people working in the field." Folks from the Spatial Information Design Laboratory in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University will be in attendance.

Making mental munition: from bits to atoms to understanding

The author and his wife in front of the augmented reality Alma Mater statue at UIUC. Some of the digital statue's production was led by community fab lab organizers, which has been instrumental in producing "bits-to-atoms" outreach.

When the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign needed to remove its 13-foot, 10,000 pound statute in August, 2012, due to a botched waterproofing treatment, the administration was under the impression that the statute would be back in time for the 2013 commencement.

As these things sometimes go, the effort is taking longer than expected, and is costing much more money. The previous effort at waterproofing the statute had trapped moisture inside the statute and caused much more damage. The budget has swelled from $100,000 to $360,000, with the Alma Mater now scheduled to return to its granite plinth sometime in the 2013-2014 academic year.

Posing in front of the Alma for pictures has been a longtime tradition of UIUC newly-grads. A multi-department collaboration brought back the statute in the nick of time for graduation, which drew expertise and equipment from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science (I-CHASS).

Instrumental to the restoration effort were two members from the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab (CUCFL), Robert McGrath and Andrew Knight. McGrath, a retired computer scientist from NCSA, provided software integration, while Knight fabbed up a custom computer mounting solution. More on their lab in a minute.

Life-saving rescue could be game changer for drone adoption

Search and rescue often is touted as one of the areas where unmanned aircraft, commonly called drones, can do the most good with existing technology.

SAR, as it's called in the business, will only make up a small part of the economic pie for the unmanned aircraft industry, according to an economic report by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). But out of all of the potential applications, due to the personal impact and high news visibility of missing persons, it has the potential to be the greatest asset in public acceptance of drones.

If a positive public perception translates into acceptance, history might show that Thursday was a game-changer in terms of domestic drone adoption.

You can't always get the the drone you want, but if you try a laser you'll get what you need

 The "perfect" small unmanned aircraft, commonly called a drone, might still be several generations away. But like Moore's law, those generational cycles are getting shorter and shorter.

Chris Anderson of 3DRobotics suspects we're closing in on the drone equivalent of the Mac: a relatively affordable, accessible, and most importantly, practical piece of technology that can be deployed every day.

Tremendous headway has been made with multirotor technology (the heicopters, quadrotors, hexcopters, octocopters, and what have you). The market is quickly becoming flush with a variety of these aircraft, to the point where several options are available for each price bracket.

There's everything from $300 hobbyist rigs from big-name RC and electronics manufacturers, to $1,000 semipro setups from DJI and 3DRobotics, to $10,000 rigs that can loft, pan and tilt a DSLR or DV camera. The differences between each step may be as simple as stronger frames, larger motors and higher-capacity batteries.

A drone of your very own, from novice to pro. Sometimes no assembly required.

For the time being, however, it's still useful to have the technical know-how to put one together. It's even more useful to know how to fabricate a drone, or fabricate parts to suit your specific application.

Using social network analysis to find the impact of teacher turnover

This painting from a Washington D.C. tapas restaurant is not social network analysis, but social network analysis can help us unwind some mysteries about how the world is arranged.

Much has been made about the fact that America is coming up short when teaching children core concepts in STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

How does America perform, exactly? In 2009, the country's students came in 23rd place in science the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). That's below Belgium and Hungary. The top three performers, from first to third, were China, Finland and Hong Kong (tested separately than the rest of China).

When the results came out, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called it "an absolute wake-up call for America." The only country to land people on the moon was now in the middle of the pack for teaching children about science.

It made the news. Town hall meetings sprung up. Companies like Exxon Mobil developed marketing and outreach campaigns. And so the public became aware of the STEM crisis.

There's another crisis schools are faced with, and it's much less publicized: the turnover crisis. To some degree, these two problems are related.

On engaging the public on privacy, journalism, and drones.

Journalists might be familiar with the quote by US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who once wrote "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants."

Journalists seeking to use unmanned aircraft would be wise not to just apply that concept of uncovering the truth about others, but also to make the public aware of how they intend to use "drones."

While the response journalists get from the public might be unexpected, the answer is not to become defensive or rely on ad-hominem arguments. Whatever your station in journalism, you are as much a servant to the public as any of the officials you interview.

The following is copied from the post I wrote for sUASNews.com.

Seven more reasons why journalists should learn to fly unmanned aircraft

Felix Gillette at Bloomberg Businessweek has come up with a list of seven reasons why journalists, and not just "cubs reporters," should be learning to use unmanned aircraft systems -- usually called "drones" in the media.

Here's seven more reasons why journalists should consider UAS.

1) They give all news outlets and journalists the freedom to cover important events from the sky.

Traffic snarls? Done. Spot news? Got it. Weather reports? Sure thing. Aerial view of Nasa’s latest space telescope at South By Southwest? Absolutely.

These are all events that could be covered before by large, expensive news helicopters. Of course, only stations in the largest of markets could afford such a luxury. But thanks to inexpensive, small unmanned aircraft, that is no longer the case.

Ted Pretty, a meteorologist for a Fox station in Las Vegas, was one of our first members at DroneJournalism.org. While his station couldn't buy a helicopter, it did have the wherewithal and foresight to send him to an online UAV school. He's now experimenting with a multirotor system, and uploaded some of the results on YouTube.