The Social Society of...Worms...

Science Cafe Woo

Posted on Jan. 16, 2016 in “Faculty”

Professor Jagan Srinivasan to explain nematode research at Science Cafe Woo

We unearth them when we’re gardening. We use them to bait fish. We mark the arrival of spring – what is that, again? – with the robins that appear and begin plucking them from the recently thawed soil.

But what most people don’t realize is that humans share very distinct characteristics with certain worms when it comes to vital social processes such as mating and bonding.

Yes, you read that right.

Worms.

“People say to me, “What, wait… this is such a tiny, microscopic, 1-millimeter-long worm – how can that tell us something about human communication?” says Jagan Srinivasan, assistant professor in WPI’s Department of Biology and Biotechnology, who has devoted significant research to understanding the social language of the nematode worm – and what its behaviors can tell us about our own. “The worm is not too different from humans.”

Srinivasan, who runs the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Chemical Biology at Gateway Park, will speak about his ongoing research and findings in “The Underground Social Network: Studying Communication in Worms,” a discussion at 6:30 Monday evening (Jan. 18) at Science Café Woo (NU Café, 335 Chandler St.).

As he explains, the specific nematode worm he analyzes, C. elegans, has been found to have a genome that is 30 percent similar to that of humans, although they are essentially simple creatures – they have 1,000 total cells, compared with our estimated 37.2 trillion. A major portion of the cellular architecture of worms is dedicated to their nervous system, approximately 302 are neurons – they apply a complex array of processes to attract, find, and identify mates.

Particularly, as they grow, they secrete distinct chemical compounds into the environment to connect with other worms. Using what Srinivasan calls a “very intricate chemical alphabet,” they secrete different chemicals at different stages, with their “chemical repertoire” changing throughout their short life cycle.

Surviving on E. coli, the nematode population is dominantly hermaphroditic – meaning that the majority of specimens contain both female and male reproductive organs – and lives for a maximum of 20 to 22 days, with just four of those days focused on reproduction.

“Even though the worm is simplistic, what it is trying to do is put a chemical alphabet together to communicate,” says Srinivasan.

And although it lacks in sight, the nematode shows strengths when it comes to other senses. “The worm cannot see like humans, but it can smell better than humans,” he said.

So what similarities do we share with the simple-celled creatures?

The goal throughout his studies has been to determine just how much chemical signals play a role in human communication. And ultimately, further research could potentially lead to a better understanding of – as well as cures for – various social disorders, such as autism, he says.

“We are tuned to certain concentrations of chemicals,” he explains, using the metaphor of finding just the right amount of cologne or perfume to apply to be attractive to a potential mate – without coming off overpowering, or, conversely, underwhelming. In the end, it comes down to the question of “What is the right concentration for me to act?”

Srinivasan, in turn, notes that he has to find his own unique balance.

“People who have absolutely no scientific background will be listening to why it’s important to be studying worms,” he says. “I’m going to try and make it as simplistic as possible for the general public, yet maintain the big scientific questions.”

Interested in learning more? Catch his talk Monday night at NU Café — or visit the Srinivasan Lab website: http://users.wpi.edu/~jsrinivasan/index.html.

– BY TARYN PLUMB

Original story link. 

Reliving tween awkwardness onstage

Vox Spelling Bee
Posted on Jan 14, 2016 in "Arts"

VOX Presents The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

One is a gruff outsider who nearly saw victory in a previous year—but had to be knocked out of the competition due to a nasty nut allergy.

Another is recovering from a hiatus after an “unfortunate incident,” and feels like the only sane one in the bunch.

Then there’s the overzealous former champion who’s never quite moved on from her victory—and thus lives vicariously through each year’s competitors.

These are just a few of the compelling, quirky, and endearing characters in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a one-act musical comedy being showcased in a production this weekend by VOX Musical Theatre, WPI’s student musical theatre company.

“There’s something in the show for everybody, as the different kinds of humor come from many different kinds of characters,” says aerospace engineering major Timothy Jones ’18, who plays vice principal Douglas Panch. “You’ll be laughing one minute at the show’s jokes—some of which change every night—then you’ll see how these characters are all surprisingly human, and you’ll really feel for them and their problems.”

The show will be performed in Alden Memorial tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m., and on Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are free.

Based on a book by Rachel Sheinkin, with music and lyrics by William Finn, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee follows six tween-age spelling aficionados—and those on the proverbial sidelines cheering and jeering for them—attempting to spell their way to victory in an annual competition. Along the way, they sing, dance, share their aspirations and goals—and, in a unique aspect of the show, welcome audience members onstage to fumble their way through words right along with them.

“It provides a really fun challenge for the actors who have to channel their inner awkward tween,” says director Douglas Davis ’16, an interactive media and game development major. “Everyone remembers how awkward their middle school years were, and this show capitalizes on that.”

And at least four audience members at each performance will get to relive that prepubescent squeamishness. Just prior to each of the three shows, a quartet of viewers will be randomly picked and screened to participate as “ridiculous characters,” Davis explains.

Given that, “anything can—and probably will—happen,” said Matthew Zielonko ’17, a computer science major who plays 12-year-old William Barfee (the one whose aversion to peanuts forced him to bow out of the 24th annual Bee). “It’s going to be a new show every single time we go on stage—not just for the audience, but for the cast, pit, and tech, as well, which is going to be a lot of fun.”

His character has a secret spelling trick: A “magic foot,” as Zielonko explains, with which he traces out words on the floor prior to saying them aloud. A veteran of musical theatre—he’s been performing since he was 5—Zielonko described Barfee as not equipped with a large cachet of friends, and a little hard to get to know at first—but once people do, he has them laughing with his witty sense of humor.

“I’ve never had to play a villian-ish character before, so it’s a lot of fun to get to be mean,” he says, also noting that Barfee is quite the dancer. Calling the overall experience a “challenge,” he said “it puts me out of my comfort zone.”

Meanwhile, Sonya Maria Douglas ’16, an independently designed major in biopsychology also minoring in musical performance, portrays Rona Lisa Peretti, who won the Bee 22 years prior, and considers her role hosting the bee the highlight of her year. She reminds everyone of her own personal winning word, syzygy—as defined: when the moon aligns with the earth and sun—and is, as Douglas put it, wacky but sincere, and “a little over the top about everything.”

She watches the Bee “with the intensity and awe of some sports fanatics,” says Douglas, who has been involved in musical theatre since the third grade and described an “extra energy and passion” in it that she hasn’t found with other types of theatre. “Being that over the moon about a spelling bee is pretty silly,” she adds, but “it makes for some very entertaining moments.”

Overall, “it’s a fantastically witty musical comedy,” she says. “It’s engaging, it’s hysterical, there’s audience participation, there’s improv, and it’s a different experience every night.”

Emphasizing that the VOX show is free, she encourages people to come see the production more than once. “If you have time, you have no excuse—unless you are just allergic to fun,” she jokes.

– BY TARYN PLUMB

Original story link. 

From the Archives: Talk Amongst Yourselves

Talk amongst yourselves

While teens still 'marinate,' slang travels faster these days with help of the Internet

By Taryn Plumb, Globe Correspondent | October 4, 2007

Much like a condiment, "gnar" can punch up almost any sentence.

Eighteen-year-old Casey Aylward employs the throaty derivative of "gnarly" in instances where everyday adjectives can't quite describe his shock, distaste, amazement, or admiration.

Example? The Groveland teen referred to a stylized skateboarding trick he witnessed recently with "That was gnar!"

"Gnar is its own entity," mused Aylward, standing on the Hampton Beach strip, shaggy thicket of brown hair corralled by a backwards baseball cap.

Other colorful expressions in his cache include "bunk," for disgust, "dank" in cases where "awesome" might normally apply, and "smash" for contentment.

"It's more or less just coming up with your own stuff," he said from behind mirrored sunglasses reflecting hordes of pedestrians, right hand flicking a half-smoked cigarette. He and his friends "take expressions that have been around for a while and make them our own."

Walk up to anybody anywhere - whether it's Hampton Beach's main boulevard, a swarming city street, or even a white-collar office building - and you'll get a notebook-full of slang. Everyone, the teen crowd especially, has a reservoir of witty, inventive, and sometimes crude sayings - so much so that it might seem like lingo has overrun formal American English. In some cases, it has, with terms such as "dis" and "phat" finding their places in modern dictionaries.

But while it's tough to quantify whether slang is, in fact, more prevalent these days, it's clear there's a growing effort to create, share, catalog, and foster it.

A Web search of "slang," for instance, yields an ecosystem of sites, covering anything from 1960s flower child lingo to Japanese jargon. The giant of those is urbandictionary.com, a wellspring of slang that contains more than a million entries - with at least 2,000 new ones a day - and allows users to vote on and contribute their own unique phrases. Since its launch in 2001, the site's popularity has skyrocketed, according to Alexa.com, a company that tracks Internet trends; site traffic has grown 7 percent in the past three months.

In addition, there are the traditional and continuing drivers of slang: hip-hop, linguistically creative TV shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and hundreds of books, such as "Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang."

Noting its prevalence, some scholars and philologists - thought to be the traditional defenders of proper English - even call slang an essential component of speech.

"It enriches language," said Rod Kessler, a professor of English at Salem State College who pointed out that Geoffrey Chaucer used some risque slang in his landmark work, "The Canterbury Tales."

"You show creativity when you use slang. It's colorful, picturesque, imaginative, and shocking."

Poetic, too, says Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the book,

"Slang: The People's Poetry." For instance, slang is inherently metaphorical, he explains - take the perennial favorites "what's up" and "cool," which ultimately have nothing to do with gravity or temperature. Also, "it allows people to be inventive," he said. "Everybody has the capacity to make it up."

Madeleine Revill and her friends certainly do.

Their unusual way of speaking involves playfully clipping the endings from words - a technique they call "abbrevs."

The abbrevs most frequently peppering the Middleton 16-year-old's speech include "presh," "essench," "whatev," "ridic," "awk," "totes," and "obvi." To decode: precious, essentially, whatever, ridiculous, awkward, totally, and obvious.

As for using them in a sentence: Someone with "ish" ("issues") might create an "awk" (awkward) situation because they're acting like "a sketch."

"Why do I abbreve? It's just fun. People laugh at it," said Revill. "It sets me and my friends apart from other people. It's our own language."

Aylward and his crowd have similarly improvised their own dialect.

If they want to get going, for instance, they say "let's hit it" or "let's get hustlin'."

If they see a good-looking girl, she's "slammin" or "brutal." (Those with less luck in the beauty lingo department get hit with "haggard.")

If they're talking amongst themselves, they use "son" or "bro."

They occasionally pull out some retro terms, too, including "rad," "solid," "tubular," and "peace out."

"We try to keep it real sick," said Aylward, taking a cigarette break from his job emptying quarters from arcade games and loading piles of candy into claw machines at Hampton's Funarama.

Alyward's "bro," 19-year-old Ryan Jackson of Merrimack, N.H., agreed, "We try to bring West Coast back, with a lot of vintage slang."

Stratham, N.H., 16-year-old Ellie Willis's supply of maxims is also of the Cali persuasion.

"The cheese" refers to money, and "emo" is a qualifier for overly sensitive people, she explained as she prepared slushies and sugar-sprinkled gobs of batter at Blink's Fry Doe on the Hampton strip. And if she's bored? "I'm gonna commit."

Given that expanse of tastes - and the fact that slang comes and goes rather quickly - it's difficult to pinpoint trends or determine which phrases are ragingly popular and which are stale. "Cool can't be universal," noted Adams. "That's against the whole purpose of slang." Which is, he explained, to test social limits. "Slang is an instrument of rebellion."

While most teens didn't put it so bluntly, many did defend their freedom to speak as they choose.

"I don't want people telling me I can't say what I want," Kelly Sunderland, 18, who lives in Pepperell but "chills in Bedford."

"The way people talk shows how different they are."

Her most flavorful phrasings have to do with coming and going: For the former, she'll "post up"; for the latter, she "dips."

She admitted - none too regrettably - that her mother often responds to the way she talks with quizzical looks.

Naturally, though, not all adults are flummoxed by today's barrage of sometimes-indecipherable teen lingo.

John Walsh, a 41-year-old from Hampton, for instance, said it's important for each generation to have their own idiom. He compared language to branded clothing, noting, "It gives teenagers a way to be part of a group."

In some cases, adults, too. Greg Revill of Salem, for his part, found his daughter's pruned manner of speaking so catchy that he adopted a few phrases, including "whatev," "awk," and, for extreme instances of weirdness, "awk city."

"Color in any language is good," he said.

Madeleine shares that mindset. "If everyone talked the same way," she said, "everyone would be the same."

And that, as Aylward might say, would be gnar.

Original story link. 

From the Archives: Skateboard Canvases

G COVER

Skateboards are their canvas

Skateboards (some without the wheels) are more than just wooden planks — they are canvases for artistic expression

By Taryn Plumb GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Close your eyes and imagine you’re meandering through an art museum. Maybe there’s a Warhol nearby, an iconic Pop Art soup can. In another gallery, a Degas, his elegant ballerinas in their frothy tutus. Elsewhere, ancient statues, their details dulled by millennia.

And then, amid all that, hanging bottoms-up, sans wheels, covered with abstracts and geometrics and landscapes and portraits - a collection of skateboards?

“It’s a medium, not just a wooden plank,’’ said Vanessa Ly, of Malden, a 27-year-old artist who exhibits and sells boards with conceptual designs. “There’s form to it, there’s texture. It’s a fun medium to work with, an interesting medium to work with.’’

Decks have long been a means of artistic expression and individuality among skateboarders. But now these functional works of art are beginning to ride the rim between the cultural periphery and the mainstream.

Influenced by Frank Miller or Jackson Pollock or Picasso, artists are exhibiting boards in fine art (and not-so-fine art) galleries. They hang in cafes, bars, and tattoo parlors. They’re amassed in the homes of private collectors and celebrity skaters.

Classically trained artists are lured by their form and their edge. Public art projects like Duxbury Art Association’s annual Skateboard Art Challenge encourage them as a medium. Local skate shops have even opened their own gallery spaces.

Skateboard art “is crossing the line into more of a legitimacy,’’ acknowledged Evan Kanarakis, 36, founder of Devil Street Decks in Portland, Maine, whose roughly 10 freelance artists based around the world (including in and around Boston) create and sell original artwork boards.

But, he added, “it’s still on the fringe of what art is. First and foremost, it’s a skateboard.’’

Meaning that, no matter how creative the designs that decorate its underside, it’s meant to be ridden - and not just hang on the wall.

Many skateboard artists like to see the scratches, gouges, hunks ripped out by curbs, and “truck bites’’ (when spinning wheels take a slice out of the board’s edge) that come with attempting and mastering tricks. It means their art is alive, that it’s appreciated. (Still, some do prefer that their hand-designed prototypes not be subjected to the rough treatment of the street.)

“It is introducing something usable, it is an interactive art form,’’ said James A. Fox of Peabody, who designs for Devil Street Decks. “This is art that people will see every single day.’’

And when someone wants to ride your art?

“That’s pretty sick,’’ said Fox, dressed in black, multiple piercings on his ears.

Many boards have a graffiti, graphic arts, graphic novel, or comic book feel, while others are clearly more influenced by high art. A few artists even refashion used or broken boards into various forms of sculpture.

Typically, designs cover the bottom of the board, because that’s what’s visible when skaters go airborne, but also, because the top is covered with grip tape and often gets the most wear. Fittingly, though, some artists defy even this convention, especially in the case of longboards, which are used more for traveling than tricks.

“There are no rules on style,’’ Kanarakis explained.

That’s obvious in the work of Devil Street’s menagerie of artists: Some boards feature homages to Pollock, with drips and dribbles and splotches and scratches. Others boast geometric designs and are heavy with patterns of distorted flowers and sunbursts. Still others are irreverent - cans of spray paint (or, at least, what look like it) come to life, with beaks and arms; weird cylindrical houses with trees growing out of them.

Ly, who works in an architecture firm and doesn’t skateboard (although, she freely admits with a laugh, she’s “attempted’’), creates stencil-and-spray paint designs with a touch of whimsy and mysterious juxtaposition: A flower phonograph; gnarled trees; a dark, rambling tree house.

Fox, meanwhile, uses spray paint and acrylics to create graffiti-esque takes on Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam’’; graphic-styled angels; and a series of long-legged femme fatales with capes of red hair, cigarettes, and smoking guns.

A blank skateboard is “raw and interesting,’’ said Fox, a cook by profession who holds an art education degree and looks younger than his 45 years. He added that he finds absolutely “no excitement’’ in a plain canvas.

Mykim Dang also finds traditional canvas quite bland. She hasn’t worked with anything but skateboards for several years.

A 24-year-old Boston-based video producer, who goes by “M’’ for short, Dang started riding and designing in high school, and now exhibits regularly and sells custom and manufactured pieces through her company, Dichotomy Skateboards, which she founded with a childhood friend.

Almost exclusively portraiture, her pieces are inspired from seconds-long interactions with strangers or people she sees on the street. They are ethereal and shadowed images of men, women, children. They may be close up, distant, silhouetted, partially hidden, stoic, praying, biting their nails, smoking cigarettes.

She’s intrigued by a board’s restricted space, the format and the wood itself. Ultimately, she said, “I really want to challenge the norms of what is considered art.’’

Others do this by basing designs around a board’s former, mostly airborne, existence.

Ben MacAdam, for instance, has crafted abstract shapes out of the lacerations, exposed wood, missing chunks, and chewed-up surfaces of used boards.

“It was part of the life they lived,’’ MacAdam said as he stood in #5 Gallery on Rocky Neck, two of his pieces hanging nearby.

“You can see people had fun with these boards,’’ agreed Joe Brancaleone, a 24-year-old longboarder who runs the custom design enterprise Hemoglobin Boarding Co. of Gloucester and plans to exhibit at #5 Gallery.

His shop’s designs? Coiled cobras, an awakening Frankenstein, a menacing Grim Reaper (is there any other kind?), sexy sailor girls - all hand-painted by a handful of artists.

MacAdam stepped back to examine several displayed on the wall. “You don’t have to be a hardcore skateboarder to appreciate it,’’ he said, shrugging. “These could be in somebody’s house or . . .’’

Brancaleone finished: “Underneath someone.’’

See more photos here. Original story link here. 

WPI Daily Herd: Winter social for Worcester chapter of Association for Women in Science

AWIS Holiday Social
Posted Dec. 7, 2015 in "Events"

Worcester chapter of Association for Women in Science to hold holiday social today

Networking in any profession is crucial – not only to connect peers within the same industries and with the same interests, but to spread knowledge and awareness about the newest achievements, advancements, and career opportunities in their respective disciplines.

I, personally, really underestimated the power of networking,” says Natalie Farny, an assistant teaching professor in biology and technology at WPI. One of the most critical aspects of the process, she says, is “meeting people who you didn’t even know whose help you needed. It will really come back to you later.”

To that end, last winter, WPI launched a Worcester affiliate group of the national Association for Women in Science (AWIS). Farny serves as chair for the group, which has since amassed a mailing list of 120 local female professionals, and has also hosted various events on different topics over the last 12 months.

The chapter will celebrate its anniversary with a holiday social from 4 to 6 p.m. today at Higgins House. The goal is to introduce the group, talk about its successes and goals, and solicit help from the larger community.

So far, “response has been great,” says Farny. “Attendance at events has been really strong.”

The organization has a state-affiliated chapter in Boston, but female WPI faculty, under the direction of Peterson Family Dean of Arts and Sciences Karen Kashmanian Oates, launched in the hopes of having more local representation.

So far, the group has held career workshops based around work-life balance and leveraging STEM skills to manage personal issues, and has also offered webinars on topics such as gender bias in the STEM industries.

The group’s next event, “New Year, New Plan,” will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. On Jan. 20 in the Hagglund Room of the Rubin Campus Center. Farny will offer an informal presentation with Patricia Stapleton, director of WPI’s Society, Technology, and Policy Program and assistant teaching professor in social science and policy studies, on the importance of developing a five-year career plan.

Although so far many of the participants have been professional women from WPI and UMass, overall, Farny explains, “the target is not just academia, but professional women in science and engineering at all career stages. We’re hoping to include as many people as we can from the area.”

Looking ahead, one goal is to offer more scientifically focused events, such as a seminar series, symposiums, and data clubs—in addition to continuing with career development programming. Another goal is to ascend to the status of a full-fledged chapter, which would incorporate a charter, dues collection, and a more formal overall organization structure.

“For that we need a lot of help,” says Farny, stressing the importance of volunteers to take up leadership roles within the group. “There’s a lot of interest in it, but we just really need people to make it happen.”

To learn more, contact Farny at nfarny@wpi.edu. Visit the national AWIS website at awis.site-ym.com.

– BY TARYN PLUMB

Original story link. 

WPI Daily Herd: The Barefoot Spirit

Foisie Series

Nov. 11, 2015 in “Events”

Entrepreneurship speakers to share lessons learned in Foisie Business School series

It all began in the cramped space of a laundry room in a rented California farmhouse.

Like many entrepreneurs, Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey started out with just a little bit of money and a dream.

Thirty years later, their kernel of an idea – tweaked, tinkered with, and fostered over the days and decades – has blossomed into one of the country’s most successful wine labels, Barefoot.

The industrious couple came into the wine market with barely any prior industry experience – so for them, entrepreneurship has been about evolving, giving back, and constantly learning from (often constant) mistakes.

Today, since selling their brand to California-headquartered E&J Gallo Winery, they share their compelling story through speaking engagements, training, and consulting.

This week, they will talk about their entrepreneurial successes and failures at WPI as part of the Robert A. Foisie School of Business’ Entrepreneurship Speaker series.

The events are made possible through an ongoing grant from the Coleman Foundation catering to faculty member entrepreneurship fellows.

The goal is to “just trigger ideas for these faculty members who are not in business, but who recognize that their students are going to go on to become entrepreneurs or innovators,” said Frank Hoy, Paul Beswick professor of entrepreneurship and director of the Collaborative for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. “Innovation and entrepreneurship is one of President Laurie Leshin’s initiatives. This is all part of WPI’s mission.”

Houlihan and Harvey will offer three programs spanning Thursday and Friday that will focus on branding, marketing and innovation, management, and taking a brand global.

According to Hoy, the Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows Program is aimed at faculty members whose main disciplines are outside the business school. Currently there are 14 fellows, he said, whose areas of expertise range from arts and humanities, to chemical engineering, to robotics.

Although the event is prioritized for fellows, the public is welcome to attend, Hoy said.

Previous speakers in the series have included Miroslav Pivoda, innovation consultant from the Czech Republic; Benyamin Lichtenstein of UMass Boston; and German economist Alexander Koeberle-Schmid. Future planned speakers will include Candida Brush, vice provost of Global Entrepreneurial Leadership at Babson College, and Nitin Sanghavi, a professor of retail marketing and strategy at Manchester Business School in England.

This week’s event with Houlihan and Harvey, meanwhile, came about when Hoy met the couple and heard them speak at the annual conference of the United States Association for Small business and Entrepreneurship.

“I was fascinated by their story, I was fascinated by them personally,” Hoy said, describing them as having “great personalities,” and being “really open, wanting to share, wanting to help other people.”

“Their venture from the beginning was designed not just to be a moneymaker, but to have a social impact,” he said.

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey will offer three events this week

–“Branding, Marketing and Innovation,” 6 to 7 p.m., Thursday, Salisbury Laboratories room 411.

–“Going Global,” 10 to 11 a.m., Friday, Salisbury Laboratories room 011.

–“Management: The 3 Core Competencies,” Noon to 1 p.m., Friday, Washburn Shops and Stoddard Laboratories room 229.

Visit their website at http://thebarefootspirit.com.

According to their bio, the couple started the Barefoot label in 1986, nearly going bankrupt in their first few years of business. But by learning to adapt and employ various innovative methods, they worked through obstacles and established new markets for their brand. Along the way, they also emphasized performance-based compensation and what they call “worthy cause marketing,” or supporting nonprofits that represent equal rights and environmental causes.

Since selling their brand to E&J Gallo in 2005, they have spoken across the country, received numerous entrepreneurship awards, and authored the bestselling books, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand, and The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways to Engage and Empower Your People.

“They got into a business and industry that they didn’t know,” said Hoy. “They made every mistake that an entrepreneur could make. But they didn’t make the same mistake twice. They went on, recovered, and persevered.”

Ultimately, he stressed, their story offers numerous examples of how entrepreneurs in all areas can mess up along the way, but in the end “still survive, still succeed, still accomplish goals.”

– BY TARYN PLUMB

November/December Artscope: Naoe Suzuki at UMass Lowell

Water, Water, Everywhere?

Nov/Dec 2015

Naoe Suzuki’s Thirst For Awareness

by Taryn Plumb

Especially in first-world countries, water is a resource that’s very often taken for granted – it comes out of the tap, streams out of the shower, is poured into plastic bottles and driven in by the pallet-full on the back of diesel- belching trucks.

In her latest body of work, Tokyo-born artist Naoe Suzuki strives for viewers to reassess and deeply contemplate their relationship with water – in all its forms. Her works – rendered on equally fragile paper – incorporate tracings of various water bodies alongside symbolic cutouts and whimsical collage.

“Most of us never think about it, because water is always here,” said the Waltham-based artist, who came to the states more than 30 years ago as an exchange student. Quoting the Emily Dickinson poem, “Water, is Taught by Thirst,” she stressed that there is no such thing as “always,” and that water is not free or in the condition that some of us assume it to be. “We only think of things after they’re gone,” she said.

Suzuki’s ruminations on the status of water will be displayed in the exhibit, “In Solidarity” through November 25 at UMass Lowell’s University Gallery. The show features 17 pieces, both paper works and installations, focusing on the themes of water supply and scarcity, contamination and pollution.

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Original story link.