Carnevalentime days...

It's been more than a month since I last blogged.  Valentine's day and Martedì Grasso have come and gone.  Being Valentineless and removed from Carnival festivities, these were just two ordinary days for me, while I am sure they were special to many people out there.  I only noticed that I missed "Fat Tuesday" today when I saw students with ashes in the middle of their foreheads. 
I have been busier than I expected, as I transitioned from the end of the Venice projects to the start of the two Santa Fe projects for this spring.  This is the second and last interim year before the onslaught of 24 students (!) when the first official Santa Fe Project Center term starts in the Spring of 2011...
I have to get better at switching hats.

The Doge toque stuck around too long as I reviewed the final submissions and graded the 7 projects that took place in Venice last fall.

Since my last blog entry, a lot has happened:

• I traveled to Santa Fe for 10 days in January to arrange for the project topics and find accommodations for the 8 students who are going to be there in less than a month (March 13-May 2).  We will be working with the City of Santa Fe on the planning and re-design of Saint Michael's Drive and we will also help the City decide whether it wants to purchase the Municipal Power Infrastructure from the local utility company PNM.  The students will be staying at two very convenient and comfortable homes near the Santa Fe Complex.
• While in Santa Fe I had to administer the last rites to my beloved black Subaru Forester, which was broken beyond reasonable repair after serving our family for almost 300,000 miles of hockey practices and games, school drop-offs and pick-ups, MIT classes, family outings, work commutes, chauffering Nick around well past his "driving permit age" and countless errands and journeys, including the mythical cross-country trek Nick and I took last year to drive it down and leave it in Santa Fe. RIP Black Forester! You have served us well.  The silver lining is that Nick and I will have to repeat the cross-country escapade again this year, as we plan to drive the Northern Route to Santa Fe March 4-13 and back again in May on route 66?
• Steve Guerin and I had a series of intensive brainstorming sessions (the famous "Tesuque rounds") on non-wireless mobile cryogenic gradient landscapes, the fruits of which will only manifest themselves in 10 years or so...  Our paper abstract to the Forest Fires 2010 conference in Kos, Greece was accepted.  The full paper is due in a week. Among other things, we also managed to give a successful presentation to a number of City Officials, where we made the pitch for the creation of the Santa Fe Urban Platform.
• Meanwhile, Chris Murray and I have surreptitiously migrated the Venice 2.0 web site and Gallery to Bluehost.  Our development server will remain in Venice, but our production server is being outsourced. I have begun to toy around with WordPress templates to try to design a personal web site at www.fabiocarrera.com, which will become my central blogging platform.  This blog will be fed only news related to Venice once we have automated the RSS feeds, probably using Yahoo Pipes.  My personal life and my many other projects will all be featured in my new site and their respective blogs will be updated accordingly.
• I got back from Santa Fe just in time to be there when Nick turned 19.  It didn't seem too different from his turning 18.  He is still trying to find a direction through work or school into independent adulthood, as he gets more and more into playing guitar and chillin' with his buddies.  Jackie, Nick and I celebrated his birthday together as a family, a bittersweet reminder of the bygone days.  Jackie, meanwhile, has decided to move back to the U.S. and take up abode in Northampton, one of the most charming and lively little towns in Massachusetts.  There, she will also make strides towards independence, as she gets trained to become a Bikram Yoga instructor and pursues personal growth and self-expression through other endeavors.  I hope we can maintain harmonious family relations and get together as a family on a regular basis as we all adjust to our new lives apart.
• Once I returned, the Venice IQPs were mostly completed and graded, with only one team choosing to extend the project another term to put the finishing touches on it.  Overall, we had a good group of students, though no project stands out as truly outstanding.  Another dry year for the IQP Awards?  We have 28 more students already lined up for next year.  Seven new potential IQP winners... 
• This month, I have been occupied with the preparation for the two SFe teams.  We meet twice a week and we're making good progress toward the project proposals.  You can read the team blogs here and here.
• Just yesterday, my mardi gras celebration consisted in getting off a Letter of Intent for a major NOAA grant ($1.2M), based on CitizenPipe and PicturePost.  The three main institutions involved in the research will be WPI (City Lab), UNH - EOS -CSRC, and the Santa Fe Complex.  We will work with Budburst, CoCoRHas, the Santa Fe Indian School and the Institute of American Indian Arts.  Let's keep our fingers crossed.  Full proposal due April 6th.
• Luckily, through all this, I have returned to my WPI yoga routine and I have begun to cross-country ski on my frozen lake, to make up for the lack of adequate snow coverage for snowshoeing.  Nature is my gym... Exercise and nature are really a tonic that I cannot do without...

I am sure there's more to say that I forgot, but I have to get up early tomorrow to drive to NYC to meet a wealthy Turkish-Italian entrepreneur who is interested in our solar photovoltaic research in Santa Fe...

Let's see if I can keep up with blogging in the next couple of weeks...

Happy Carnevalentime days to all!

Present through Past and Future

True to my Italian origins, I took a nice long break from blogging over the Feste (Christmas Holidays).  Nick and I spent Christmas with the nonni and the nipotini at Pampo's.  Cino turned 75 right before Christmas and survived a serious ladder-related accident which resulted in 8 stitches on his right eyebrow. Nick and I flew back to the U.S. on the 27th, and Jackie and I spent New Year's eve alone discussing our future as a family, which we will indeed be forever, no matter what.
Since Steve was in Cuba last week, I postponed my trip to Santa Fe, which in turn -- thanks to some fresh snowfall over the holidays -- gave me a chance to rest, relax and enjoy some serious snowshoeing, every single day.  I also found a great way to hydrate using Fire Water (a.k.a. Sassy Water).   It's all part of a regimen aimed at strengthening my left knee, so I can enjoy the upcoming ski season.  To me, the start of the new year is a very restorative and contemplative time, especially while surrounded by snow.
It's a new year, a new decade and it's a time to be present and grateful.
At the start of the last decade, I was 38 years old, and at the end of this new one, I will be 58.  During the naughties, a lot happened.  Ten years' worth of life went by, but what do I remember?  Certainly not every minute. Nor every hour.  Nor every day.  Every month? Nah!  Every year? Kind of.  Not really... only in flashes.  This google pie chart is probably an overestimation of what remains in my memory banks out of the last ten years of my life.  Wow.
Is it an indication of how present I was?  Maybe.
It was a busy decade, I was completing my Ph.D., bought two houses (the castle in Spencer and the penthouse in Venice), had to grow Forma Urbis to support my family, as Jackie dealt with Nick's teen years in a new school system, and  a lot more!  Too much on my mind and not a lot of presence -- both physical and mental -- for the people in my life.  Not even for my loved ones.
Inevitable? Perhaps.
It was what it was.
I am grateful for all the achievements and happy moments, and I think I learnt something (I hope) from all my failures. What else can one hope to do?
Now, things are truly changing in my life. Jackie will probably stay in Montreal and Nick is about to leave the nest, however gradually.  I am no longer the director of the WPI Boston Project Center as I start the new one in Santa Fe.  The Venice Project Center's 20-year anniversary is over and I am wondering if I should change the name of this blog (or at least the subtitle) and perhaps even the Venice 2.0 website.  I do plan to work on my personal web site, which is boooring... and I plan to keep on blogging, which I do enjoy very much. I am expecting the presence-o-meter to move drastically to the right in the ensuing decade, and I intend to pay a lot more attention to the people in my life as I focus on the things that truly matter to me the most.

Do I know what these things are?  Not really.

Will I figure it out?  Hopefully.

How will the next decade be?  Different.

Should our purpose be to live a balanced life?  Sure, whatever that means... Or should our purpose be to unify the three marriages and blend them into an integrated whole?  I like that better.  It sounds more real to me.
I wholly subscribe to David Whyte's concept, which would have the three circles in the Venn Diagram overlap almost entirely.  I also think that the three circles need not be the same size.  Having just read Luigi Pirandello's Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, which contains a profound analysis of our ego vs. our image, with echoes of Buddha (佛 = no man) spirituality and Meister Eckhart's medieval teachings, reaffirmed more recently by the eponymous Tolle's "power of now", I think a good "New Decade Resolution" might be to move towards a merged, rebalanced, egoless, present existence, looking more like this...

Anyway, time to start the future 10 years by being present to "my Work", so I can finish grading the final submissions of the last group of Venice students from the past decade!  And, while I do that, let me be selflessly grateful for how "my Relationships" have grown thus far, thanks to "my Work", as well as to "my Self"...
As Nick would say: "It's all good"!

I wish everyone a "most serene" decade...

Festina Lente!  


(top 3 charts produced with Google Charts API -- via a useful blog post)
(last one, composed manually with excel bubble charts)

The (messy) end of a recalcitrant era

Another term has ended and the reports have been (mostly) turned in and boxed away.  We're running out of shelf space...  Next year we won't be in this office any more as our rental contract is ending this summer.
It's the end of an era.
We'll vacate the (dare I say "legendary"?) Veepeesee at Cannaregio 4400... We've really grown into this space in the dozen years since we relocated here from our home in Via Dardanelli, on the Lido.  We are bursting at the seams with at least 150 boxes containing our 20 years of research.
The original VPC office was in the magazzino on the ground floor of my parents' (Cino and Wilma's) house, where I had lived until I left for the U.S. for (what was supposed to be) a single year spent at an American High School.  The year stretched into a full decade spent in the U.S. (getting my degrees from WPI, among other things), before I returned and founded the Venice Project Center in 1988.  After the S.Elena beginnnings, the VPC migrated with Jackie, Nick and me, wherever our family was living at the time.  Only when we moved to Cannargio 4400 -- for the first time -- the VPC was not co-located at my domicile.  We've come a long way... The protracted 20th anniversary is over.  We have turned 21!
The VPC is no longer a minor...
The earth seemed to resist this coming of age... It was as if Venice didn't want the era to end!  An improbable "perfect storm" combination of Acqua Alta and SNOW(!) tried to prevent the students from reaching the airport on Saturday, when the 21st contingent of WPI students was leaving the city, like the grown child who is leaving the parental nest upon reaching the maggioretà.
With a valiant effort -- braving through flooded streets in the midst of a blowing blizzard -- everybody somehow made it miraculously to the airport in time...
...only to be faced with canceled flights and delayed departures to unpredictable destinations, determined with etch-a-sketch "precision" by frazzled airline personnel dealing with thousands of stranded visitors during one of the busiest weekends of the year...
The majority of the students made it home only today, after a four-day ordeal compounded by the snow that simultaneously blanketed the eastern United States, where everyone was headed...  What a way to turn 21!
I personally spent the same four days braving similar weather to and from the U.K., where Adrian and I mediated the re-emergence of energence...
I am back in Venice now, where there is still snow on the ground and it's bitter cold.  And, of course, we have a major predicted acqua alta coming at 4:00am tomorrow, so every table at the VPC is covered with boxes and other materials that were moved out of the "danger zone" in preparation for the likelihood of water entering our office overnight.
It's a sign that it's really time to move on and enter adulthood.  Youth was fun while it lasted.
It's time to get out into the world...

It's the most wonderful time...

...of the year                                     (sing along...)


Merry Christmas!
(may your days henceforth grow ever longer...)

Photo Credit: Nicolò Zuane Carrera

2 days left: 4 down, 3 to go

Today, the Postmortems team completed the fourth of the seven presentations the current WPI students are delivering to complete their projects at the tail end of our Venice Project Center Anniversary. It was a highly entertaining combination of powerpoint, video clips and live demonstrations of their interactive street installation that will highlight some of Venice's most pressing issues.  I particularly liked the little movies displaying animated schematic explanations with handwritten labels on ruled paper...

Origins, Ships and Mobility went the day before at the Spazio Eventi Mondadori (courtesy of Giovanni Pellizzato of the 40xVenezia).
Tomorrow we will have the final three and then the students will have one more day to get everything together and turn it in by Friday before we all go out to the final dinner at Pampo's...  Wow!

Cruising into final week

We are entering the final week of the term here in Venice. This is when miracles begin to happen as time compresses and the days lengthen.
The final presentations are set and the final results are rolling in.
It's going to be a busy week, but I think we're in for some very nice rewards by the time we have our final dinner on Friday.
Meanwhile, enjoy this preview of some of the work the Ships team did using the timelapse camera...



Not bad for a first cut!  Can't wait for the final Kovenysqatsi video!

Thanksgiving Interview-a-thon

I just got back to Venice from a whirlwind trip to the U.S. where I interviewed candidates for the Venice and Santa Fe Project Centers.  The interviews are part of the process that the WPI Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division has honed over the past two decades, to recruit and select students who will participate in our Global Perspecive Program, by completing either their Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) in their junior year, or their Major Qualifying Project (MQP) in their senior year, at one of our global centers.

As a testament to our popularity, Venice had the highest number of applicants (58) of all WPI centers.  Santa Fe also had a lot of candidates (14), despite being a brand new domestic center (the next highest non-international center was Washington with 4...).  Since we only take 28 students per center, it's too bad only half of the Venice candidates made the cut!  I hope some of them will end up in Santa Fe...
Unfortunately, I paid the price of success by having to interview a total of 72 students in two and a half days.  It was a grueling schedule from 7am to 10:30pm, non-stop, with a new student every half hour...  On Wednesday, I interviewed for a half day from 7am until noon, then went home, packed up and drove myself to the airport, bound for Oxford, UK, where I had a British/Canadian thanksgiving dinner at the "chapel of rest" (Anchor pub) with Adrian, Kseniya, Kyle and Ori.  The next day, we treated ourselves to a late night viewing of an interesting Steampunk exhibit, in the midst of a typically British pub crawl.  Oxford is such a stimulating little city!
Being away from the States on Thanksgiving day was a bittersweet way for me to avoid the memories of our traditional family gatherings in Connecticut, which ended very sadly last year after two decades of ritual turkey feasts...  It was my favorite holiday.  Not commercial at all, very down to earth and simple.  Very warm.  As I told many of my friends, in true escapist fashion, I am switching my allegiance to another set of holidays from now on.  I am thinking of "Flag Day" as a definite candidate, plus perhaps something like "Patriots Day" or "the Ascension" (in Venice, the Sensa).  Enough of these sentimental, heart-wrenching, family-oriented celebrations!  Too painful!
Yet, we do have a lot to be thankful for, despite the life-changing events of this past year.  We are all alive and in good health.  Still enjoying the richness that our life has to offer.  Still learning something new every day.  Still experiencing the love of our friends and families.

So... a big THANK YOU to all the friends who met and connected with me during this whirlwind of a trip.  It's amazing how many of you showed up in such a short time!  Thank you for being there for me this past year and for being a continuing supportive presence in my life.  Thanks...

Grazie Mille!

Death (and rebirth) in Venice

Right after President Berkey left Venice after his momentous visit, the Venice Project Center was at the center of a worldwide media whirlwind connected to an initiative entitled "The Funeral of Venice".
Through our friends in the 40xVenezia, we connected with venessia.com, yet another grassroots organization (heretofore unbeknown to me) that is actively working to make a difference in Venice, through self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek, disruptive activities, such as this mock funeral to mourn the death of Venice, marking the fact that the city's population has dipped below the 60,000 mark, continuing its steep descent into oblivion from its peak around 175,000 after WWII.  Despite its macabre tone, the event was intended more as a wake-up call than a last rite.  In fact, on this occasion, venessiapuntocom unveiled a parallel initiative to gather signatures from "potential Venetians" who aspire to live in our city and would gladly move to Venice if they could.
After hearing of our project on the Origins of Venice, which - among other things - entails collecting DNA samples from individuals from the Triveneto area in the Northeast of Italy, to contribute to a National Geographic worldwide research project called The Genographic Project, the venessianipuntocom offered us the opportunity to join in the event to help expedite our data collection, whose goals were in line with the theme of death/rebirth that permeated the culminating performance by comic actor Cesare Colonnese during the funeral oration. Our participation became controversial when some misinformed (or perhaps disingenuous) national and local commentators interpreted our study as an attempt to identify "true Venetians" as part of some sort of eugenic plot to purify our race and possibly even reproduce ourselves by cloning our collected DNA...  hard to believe indeed...
I was forced to issue a clarification on the local Gazzettino newspaper to explain that the tests were simply a regional contribution of 350 samples to an worldwide genealogical study (with over 100,000 samples) aimed at producing an atlas of the ancient genetic pathways - evinced from haplogroups based on statistical haplotypes - of the original human migrations across the continents over 10,000 years ago, long before the Venetian republic even existed.  Luckily, on the day of the event, the students and I were all interviewed by a number of TV networks and members of the press, which by and large corrected the misconceived notions that were broadcast beforehand.

The high density of ideal candidates for our tests (unrelated adult males with both maternal and paternal grandparents from the Northeast of Italy) who could volunteer for the test, and the publicity received by our effort enabled us to collect 40 DNA swabs in just a couple of hours, while we had only collected a total of 80 since we started our project exactly a year ago.  On the wake of the event, we managed to quickly collect several more samples, which are being shipped to Barcelona to join last year's set, which has now crossed the threshold of 100 needed to begin the analyses, so that all past participants will be able to finally review, using their secret codes, their personal ascendants in the big haplofamilies of our ancestors.
Like their predecessors, this year's team is traveling to Barcelona to meet Dr. Comas at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
As we get closer to completing our initial 350 samples, the students will be discussing a joint research effort between the WPI Venice Project Center and the experts at the Unitat de Biologia Evolutiva to confirm/refute the various hypotheses concerning the origins of the ancient Veneti, by duplicating a prior study in the ancient Phoenicians.  There are two main theories regarding the Veneti’s origins:

1. The Paphlagonian theory, which places their origins in Northern Turkey, with subsequent migrations up the Balcans and into today’s Veneto region in NE Italy.
2. The Lusatian theory, which places their origins in central Europe (after a migration from the East) settling into modern-day Lusatia, a region at the intersection between Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany (East Germany).

There are also well-known historical mentions of the Veneti (possibly an unrelated Celtic people) in other parts of Europe, especially in Britanny (Vannes).
We hope that The Genographic Project and the National Geographic Society will sponsor this follow up study which, while it won't contribute to the rebirth of today's city of Venice, should shed some light on the long-dead ancestors of the inhabitants of the lagoons.

Orate pro nobis. 
("O meio do go?")

The Eagle, the Lion, the Arm and the Hammer

WPI's President Berkey, his wife Dr. Cathy Berkey, and the VP for Development and Alumni Relations, Dexter Bailey spent three days in Venice this week. It was a great pleasure for me to host the first WPI president to visit Venice in the 20 years of existence of the Venice Project Center (VPC).
It also gave me a chance to get to know the distinguished visitors on a personal level and to share with them the successes of the VPC, as well as my dreams for the next 20 years of the center.  It was a really enjoyable and fruitful experience.
The visit started with a relaxing dinner at the Corte Sconta restaurant, near the Arsenale and a short walk from the hotel where they were staying.  At dinner, we discussed some of the main highlights about the work that WPI students have done for Venice since 1988 with the goal of "leaving Venice better than we found it".  I was positively struck by the keen interest President Berkey showed for our program, and for its impact on our students and on the City itself.  As dinner progressed, I had a chance to put forth to the president an idea that I had previously discussed with WPI trustee Stephen Rubin.  How great would it be to offer a full scholarship to a young Venetian to go to college at WPI for free?  What if we did the same at all of our global project centers?  The repercussions would be immense!  These alumni would create a permanent bond  between WPI and our project sites, which over time would foster a thriving alumni network in all the countries where we operate, with exponentially positive consequences for all.  President Berkey really liked the idea and I plan to spell it out in full detail in a memo to him after I return to the US at the end of the year.
Since they brought the sunshine with them, our esteemed visitors had a chance to see the city in its glory on the following day.  During a leisurely walk from the Arsenale to the Frari church, I showed them some of the highlights of the city and introduced them to the great work completed by the 500+ WPI students who have traveled to Venice over the past two decades.  It was a beautiful walk on a beautiful day.  They even had a chance to walk on the acqua alta planks since St. Mark's square was slightly flooded...
As a crowning climax to the walk we were treated to a backstage tour of the Venice State Archives, with its 70Km of shelves containing the history of Venice's Republic in the form of government records handwritten on parchments dating from before the year 1000 AD to 1797, when the Serenissima fell to Napoleon.  Readers of this blog may recall reading about our long-term efforts to develop an online application called uScript that would allow the cumulative transcription of ancient manuscripts, thus allowing historians to tap into the wealth of knowledge contained in the Venice archives.  We still have a $350,000 grant application pending with the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring the effort to fruition and a team of WPI students is continuing to make progress on this endeavor this term in Venice.
Following a meeting with the archive's director, who pledged full collaboration in this joint effort, the highlight of our visit was when we were shown original handwritten letters sent by none other than Benjamin Franklin, one of the most famous founding fathers, and John Adams, the second president, of the United States of America.
These most prominent of all Americans, were writing to the Doge to request a commercial treaty between the ancient Venetian republic and the newly independent colonies across the ocean.  It was enlightening to read the letter from Venice's ambassador to Paris that accompanied the American request, who begged for permission to communicate to the letter writers (who were utterly unknown to the Doge) that "at least the letter had been received and read"...  Apparently the republic had better things to do that to pay heed to these rebels from across the pond... Funny how the tides of power have turned in just 200 years!  Who knows what the balance of power will be in 2209?!
After another great meal at the Zucca, we enjoyed a complimentary taxi ride, thanks to our former project sponsors Consorzio Venezia Motoscafi, who later picked us up for the gala dinner at the Stucky Hilton Hotel.

The dinner was attended by all 27 of the current Venice Project Center students, plus a number of distinguished Venetian guests, including Dr. Pierpaolo Campostrini of Co.Ri.La., Dr. Franco Fiorin, director of the Mobility office for the City of Venice, Prof. Vincent Corruble, of Paris VI University, Dr. Emanuele Dal Carlo, founder of the 40xVenice movement, and Tyler White of the Santa Fe Complex.  One former Venice alumnus, Douglas Leenhouts, who worked on the Sounds of Venice project in the summer of 2003 was also in attendance.  The dinner was excellent and President Berkey's speech, praising the work of the students who have attended the Venice Project Center over the past two decades, was an outstanding conclusion to this very successful visit.
We all look forward to many more official (or personal) visits from WPI notables in the years to come...
Let the Eagle and the Lion be united by the Arm & Hammer!

the President visits Venice!

It's official!

The President is coming to Venice this fall on an official visit! He will be bringing a message of Hope and Progress for our beleaguered city that this week has seen its population drop below the 60,000 mark.

Could this visit inspire us to look for real alternatives to the mass tourism economy that monopolizes our lives? Could Venice really become the new capital for "immaterial production" as was once again discussed at "Venezia Camp 2009" this past weekend? Or are Venetians doomed to extinction as many fear? Are we going to become mere amusement park entertainers hired by Disney to give visitors a verisimilitude of authenticity?

Are we expecting too much of our president?

We shall see.

President Berkey of WPI will be hosting an alumni event in Venice on Thursday November 12, 2009, to mark the end of our 20th anniversary celebrations. He will be in attendance, together with his wife Cathy and Dexter Bailey, WPI's Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations.

This is the first time a WPI president visits the Venice Project Center, so it will be an honor for us to have a chance to show him, and all alumni who will attend the event, what we have accomplished in our twenty-one years of operation since the distant 1988, when we humbly started our quest to "leave Venice better than we found it". I think we can confidently say "Yes we did!" and, with his influence and stature, we also hope that he can help ignite the next phase of our pursuit for a lasting legacy in my hometown: Venice 3.0. A new era of applied research for Venice, based on the solid foundation of knowledge that we have established thus far. A legacy that will hopefully outlive me... and the president.

Can we inspire a radical new direction of progress in this gem of human artistry and engineering and inject new hope in its dwindling population?

Yes we can! (and we will...)

(Obamicon of Pres. Berkey courtesy of Kyle Miller)

All prepped and ready to blog

Today marked the arrival in Venice of 27 WPI students who will be here until December 19. It is the final group to officially mark the end of our protracted, multi-year 20th anniversary celebrations. As indicated in my blog entry at the beginning of the preparation term, these teams are tasked with completing some long-standing project themes, as well as with breaking some new grounds to set the stage for the next 20 years of projects in Venice.

The students have moved into their apartments, which are located in the more "Venetian" sestieri of Castello and Cannaregio and they have probably already had their first gelato and panino... (and who know what else?). Having learnt our lesson from last year's flood, we did not rent any apartments on the ground floor this year...

It is always fun to see the wide-eyed students, finally setting foot in the city they have been reading and studying about for the past two months. Venice is such a surreal place... even for me.

Tomorrow, we'll have our first group meeting at the Settemari club, and then the projects will begin in earnest. We have an exciting array of topics this year, all of which have been blogged about by the respective teams as they prepared their project proposals back in Worcester.

I will dedicate a new blog entry to each project in the days to come, as the teams zero in on the full spectrum of activities to accomplish their respective missions.