Really, it’s titled “The Social Beaver,” though I can’t imagine campus life ever looking like that. Aside: MIT’s TechTV is powered by Viddler’s white-label solutions.

Richard Stallman’s Soulja Boy dance, MIT style (via).

Ryan Eby and MAKE magazine alerted me to MIT’s student origami exhibit, in which Jason Ku’s ringwraith won the Best Original Model prize, and Brian Chan’s beaver — the MIT mascot — got special attention from the MIT News Office.

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MIT has DSpace, their solution to save, share, and search the collected work of their faculty and students (in use by 115 public sites). Now Royce just shared with me this presentation by Bill Hubbard, the SHERPA project manager at University of Nottingham.

What’s SHERPA? The name is an acronym for Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access, but it’s a project intended to archive the pre and post publication papers and other research products.

They’ve got some advice for those interested in these things. Including some help with dealing with publishers. Bill reported some analysis in his presentation that found that 93% of the publishers they deal with at Nottingham allow authors to self-archive their work in publicly available repositories.

Related to this, I previously reported on arXiv.org. The intent there is slightly different, as Henry Farrell explains:

[I]ts effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important — but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience.

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I’ve been doing a lot of talking about the coming information age and how it depends on access technology that is as cheap and easy to use as our cell phones (and applications of it that are as appealing as people find their cell phones). But I’ve been slow to mention the MIT Media Lab’s One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop plan.

The truth is that I just don’t know that much about it. That’s why I was interested to find Andy Carvin’s video interview with Mary Lou Jepsen, the CTO of the project. Jepsen answers Carvin’s questions about what’s what and how it works. I was especially intrigued by how the screen works (it’s brighter because there are no color filters).

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