This just in off the Machine Project news service: PuffTron boxes will be placed "around Echo Park in discreet locations." The sensor boxes measure air quality. As the communique below explains, Manual Arts High School students are involved. They are part of the Black Cloud Scientist League and will present their data Saturday evening at Machine Project.

Dear Friends,

There are 12 adorable sensor boxes called, adorably, PuffTrons, that are arriving at Machine Project sometime this week. Said PuffTrons are going to be placed around Echo Park in discreet locations. Once activated, they will transmit data about local air quality over the web to create a pollution map of the city.

A team of UC Berkeley mad scientist-types and a group of precocious student-types from Manual Arts High School in South Central LA will be presenting the PuffTrons' data alongside their own fieldwork in a series of events at Machine Project this coming week. Operating as the Black Cloud Scientist League, they invite YOU to participate in this project.

There will be three separate events.

Details for the events at Machine Project's website.

Meanwhile, I have my own extremely low-tech air-quality measurement devices all over my house. They are called windowsills -- and they also serve that latter purpose. The degree to which they get covered in black dust in a given period of time never fails to give a graphic and disturbing picture. Admittedly, that's not science; it's just life (in a society that needs to work on emissions).

Copyeditor's note: It looks as though the forward-looking and usually highly informed Machine didn't get the memos about South Los Angeles, which has been officially declared the preferred respectful name of the neighborhoods that used to be called South Central.

Photo: Machine Project, 2008