Redemption in Venice

Nicolò and I will be spending the rest of July in Venice, enjoying some time with my parents (Nick's nonni: Wilma and Cino) and relatives, until August 3rd. Kyle has been here since June 11, producing excellent work and enjoying himself tremendously, as one can read in his Navigamus blog. We've also had a Tuscan intern from Florence, Andrea Tassinari, who has helped reorganize our office and helped clean up the Forma Urbis's web site.

Over the next few weeks, we have an ambitious set of goals:

1. Complete and submit grants to the National Science Foundation (ISE, ULTRA-Ex, INTEROP, STCI, IIS, SoCS), NASA (GCCE), the National Endowment for the Humanities (HCRR), the Mellon Foundation and the City of Santa Fe. In total, we're planning to submit for over 5 million dollars in grants, for projects ranging from uScript, the the Ambient Interactive Platform, to the SimTable for the management of water resources in Santa Fe, to CitizenPipe... This is our primary goal for the summer.
2. Plan the WPI projects for term B09, when the 20th Anniversary will officially end. We are exploring the following topics: (1) Informal Economies; (2) Retail Stores; (3) Shipping and Cruising; (4) Tourism economics; (5) Cost of floods; (6) DNA - origins of Venetians; (7) Postmodern Postmortems. We're pretty much all set with the apartments too.
3. Arrange for a variety of initiatives connected with the final celebrations of the anniversary, including: an alumni event, Venice 2.0 merchandise (t-shirts, bags, mugs, clocks, etc.), reconnecting with our sponsors, reaching out to more of our Venice alumni, exploring the Venice Trust to make the VPC free to future students, and more...
4. Promote our new collaborations with Ideagroup and others to make more of our projects operational in the management of the City of Venice, including the plateatici project, UNESCO, etc.
5. Have fun and relax!

Gotta go row my caorlina for the Redentore festival right now... Major fireworks!

It's the celebration of the end of the plague of 1576… Obviously people remember BAD things much longer than the good stuff… but look at how much fun people have had in the 400+ years since that plague, celebrating its end year after year! Good and bad intertwined.

One redeeming the other.

The Ying and Yang of life.