Here are a few photos and links from last Thursday, my second day at the Media Lab. This day consisted of three workshops put on for the small group that sponsors John Maeda's Simplicity research consortium. Sponsors and guests split up into groups, each going to two of the repeated sessions of three workshops. 1-3) My first workshop was with Mitch Resnick of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group (where LEGO Mindstorms originated) to play with Scratch, a NSF grant-funded visual programming toolkit for kids. Mitch also showed the prototype of the Playful Inventions Company'a (PICO) PicoCrickets. Mitch says it is like LEGO Mindstorms, but for adding intelligence to crafts and art projects. The ten or so workshop participants were each given a plastic baggie with the Scratch software installer and the serial interface board (2). My second workshop was in the Physical Language Workshop where John Maeda's team, along with research scientist Henry Holtzman, were ready to deliver a breifing and two demos of ZigBee technology. ZigBee is essentially a lower cost, less complex and more flexible version of Bluetooth with a focus on applications in automation and data sensing. Using the Tagsense ZigBee Evaluation Kit (4), our group of workshop participants each used unique battery-powered ZigBee tags to wirelessly activate musical instruments. The volume of each instrument was increased by holding a temperature sensor on each tag. We used another set of tags to register to bid in a real-time art auction on PLW's Openstudio (5) platform. Not on my tour was a hands-on with Hyperscore, a drawing/gesture-based music composition system, but I had seen that the day before. After lunch at Legal Seafoods, my colleagues from work and I walked over to Akamai corporate headquarters to tour their network operations center. Akamai's global network of 15,000 servers handles something like 95% of the streaming media traffic, moving 860 terabytes of data daily between 13 million unique IP addresses. You really feel the pulse and enormity of the Internet in front of all those status displays.

- mike lee - wheaton, md