Cambridge, Massachusetts has come up with a creative way to support its increasingly bike-loving populace and to encourage people to opt for green transport. The city has installed three bicycle repair stations around town. Cyclists can drop by the spots in Harvard Square and make minor repairs or inflate their tires. Cambridge’s transportation manager says the city was inspired by MIT, which already had bike repair stations.

Boston.com:

The stands provide tire gauges and pumps, Allen wrenches and a few other tools that enable cyclists to make minor repairs, such as adjusting seats or handlebars.

Each station cost the city about $1,000 and Seiderman said the city got the idea from MIT which has already installed repair stations around its campus.

The installation of the repair stations comes as the city has seen a growing number of people riding bikes through Cambridge. A study conducted by the city estimates that the number of people bicycling in Cambridge more than doubled between 2002 and 2008, based on a study of the number of cyclists counted traveling through 17 different intersections. Seiderman said the number has continued to rise since 2008.

Some city residents are sore about that $1000 price tag: A Boston.com commenter writes, “oh c’mon people, can’t you carry your own tools? this is an eyesore and an embarrassment.” But local bikers unsurprisingly love the idea.

(Boston.com via Boston Biker)

Chip and PIN is a credit security system which consists of an embedded microchip in a credit or debit card for payment authentication; while it’s had a hard time catching on in the United States, where magnetic stripes on cards remain the norm, chip and PIN is a major presence in the UK and Europe, and it recently gained a major toehold in Canada with Visa’s adoption of the system.

While chip and PIN is meant to correct security weaknesses inherent in the magnetic stripe system, it has flaws. A Cambridge computer science graduate student named Omar Choudary documented several of these flaws in an MPhil thesis and suggested improvements to the system. The response of the UK Cards Association, which describes itself as “the leading trade association for the cards industry in the UK”: Asking Cambridge to censor Choudary’s work on the grounds that it “breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure.” In the words of the Cards Association, “Our key concern … is that this type of research was ever considered suitable for publication by the University. It gives us cause to worry that future research, which may potentially be more damaging, may also be published in this level of detail.”

Cambridge professor and security theorist Ross Anderson didn’t see it that way: In a withering letter back to the trade group, he defended the publication of the thesis, saying that “Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values.”

Soon, students at Cambridge University will be getting a new supplement to their educations: books from Stephanie Meyer‘s Twilight series.

According to BBC News, a newly-opened Cambridge center for the study of children’s literature (they call it a “centre,” naturally) will cover, among other things, Twilight, the Harry Potter series, and video games as works of literature.

In an interview, the soon-to-be director of the center/centre dismissed suggestions that Twilight and other contemporary series are “trash,” and even said that academics had something to learn about ethics from the series: