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The Most Literate American Cities Are College Towns

Amazon's ranked its top 20 most well-read cities according to book sales, and college towns are winning.

Do you live in a college town? If so, chances are you're a big reader. Retail giant Amazon has announced its list of the "Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America." They tracked purchases of magazines, newspapers, books, and e-books since January 1 for cities with more than 100,000 residents. While Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is number one, the rest of the list is dominated by big college towns.

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Could the Days of Wikipedia Being a Banned Research Source Be Over?

A collaborative effort could bring the online encyclopedia out of academic purgatory.


Remember all those times your teachers and professors told you that you could not, under any circumstances, use Wikipedia as a source for a research paper? It's generally good advice. Despite the site's best efforts, inaccuracies always crop up. But most students go ahead and use the online encyclopedia anyway, even if they don't cite it. Now a group of professors and students at Imperial College London hope to start legitimizing Wikipedia as a research source by joining forces to improve the content on the pages.

The effort makes sense given the massive size of the site. With over 18 million articles and 365 million visitors each month, Wikipedia is the connected world's go-to reference source. The president of the campus group Wikipedians at Imperial College, medical student Vinesh Patel, told BBC News that "Wikipedia is here to stay—it's a question of whether we come up to speed with it or try to ignore it."

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Cambridge Parking Tickets Get Yogic Redesign

Tickets don't have to be stressful. In Cambridge, they feature illustrations of yoga poses you can do with your parking enforcement officer.

Getting a parking ticket usually just stresses you out. But maybe it doesn't have to. Maybe it's even an opportunity for some existential reflection.

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