Bill Cockayne was one of the guest speakers at our regular event for sponsors on Cape Cod. Bill has an arsenal of simple diagrams for helping organizations look further out into the future. What does Bill foresee for the future? He wouldn’t tell us, but based upon the excitement around Bill’s visual language for the future his upcoming book is likely to be a best seller.

Saéko Tezuka of leading Japanese kitchen manufacturer Cleanup Corporation spoke to the Media Lab about food consumption trends in Japan. My favorite takeaway from her talk was a caption from a Japanese newspaper article depicting a family at the dinner table, “Chopsticks in their right hands, reading email on their mobile phones with their left hands. Nobody’s talking to each other at the table.” Saéko’s point is that as a society, we’ve become detached from the pleasure of eating (and cooking) because we’re so fixated about making our lives more efficient. Why do one thing, when you can do three at the same time? Her talk made me feel a bit guilty about my own ritual of eating my Cheerios at the breakfast table with “spoon in my right hand, while blackberrying with the left hand.”

The Media Lab is abuzz tonight with activity around our 4th annual “prototype-a-thon” on the theme of food entitled, Eat Your Media. MIT students are working around the clock to create working prototypes of cool ideas within the span of an evening’s worth of extremely intense, hard work.

Usually for this event we have our sponsors participating in the prototype-a-thon, and some of them make it to the 9PM time point. But at the Eat Your Media event I am proud to announce a new world record by Johnson & Johnson’s CP Robinson for officially breaking the 10PM barrier. The teamwork with our sponsors is a truly incredible thing here at the Media Lab.

In-depth info on the results of this event will be published here shortly.

Jun Sato, Visiting Researcher in from Toshiba, has launched an experiment in the OPENSTUDIO community using Creative Commons licenses. In a short information video, Jun has managed to demystify the many variations in CC licenses.

We are interested in simplifying and deepening the licensing process for user-generated content because ultimately the best copy protection is informed protection.

Adrienne has posted the realtime results to her media usage survey. I am particularly drawn to the average number of hours spent online per week statistic of 35.6039 hours per week. The results are skewed towards computer users by virtue of an online survey, but I think it captures my own reality fairly well.

Undergrad researchers Lihua Bai and Adrienne Bolger present their electronic publishing project to Robin Domeniconi, President of TIME Inc. Media.

MIT EECS PhD Candidate Ben Adida gave a stunning talk at the Media Lab about the implications of privacy in an always online world. He cited a study by Prof. Sweeney at CMU that with just a zipcode, gender information, and birthdate you could be identified with 87% accuracy. And no, those three datapoints displayed are not Ben’s actual data …

Undergrad researchers Adrienne Bolger and Lihua Bai are doing a quick online study of digital media usage. If you have a moment please take their survey! You’ll get this nice little badge for doing so. Thank you.

TIME’s digital media production guru Peter Meirs presented to the SIMPLICITY community about the XML-based PRISM standard that is currently gaining momentum in the electronic publishing industry. Peter avoided the normal cluttered-style PowerPoint presentation by adopting true simplicity with a set of 9 haiku slides that he introduced with:

Many magazines publish
but sharing content
with ASCII is hard.

and closed with:

We now do many things
with our content
that others dream about.

What an elegant use of electronic media through a completely traditional means of expression. That’s real simplicity.